Click here for our 22-page FINDING AID of the Dorothy Sloan Collection of "Women in the West" (1826-1996)

This extraordinary collection "Women in the West" was assembled over many years by Dorothy Sloan (1943-2021), one of the preeminent booksellers of Western Americana, Texana and Latin Americana. The collection contains works by women about the American West, and books about women in the American West, as subjects of historical and literary narratives.

The collection had been carefully preserved in storage for the last twenty-eight years, awaiting cataloguing and eventual sale. We are pleased to offer the collection of 280 titles en bloc for the price of $2,800 which includes free shipping anywhere in the Continental United States. 

 Of the 280 titles in the collection, nearly 25% are more than a century old; to these are added scores of scarce narratives and monographs that are now very difficult to procure. 

The physical size of the collection is considerable; it is currently housed in our climate-controlled storage unit. Sloan's definition of "Women in the West" is very broad indeed; there are plays by women authors concerning the California Gold Rush, memoirs and captivity narratives, travelogues, autobiographies, Western novels, pamphlets, private press material, journals, exhibition catalogues, magazines, photographs, and interesting ephemera. The collection is the product of years of patient searching, spanning all genres in the Western Americana tradition. The collection represents women’s voices of a myriad of ethnicities, including various Native American tribes, African and African-American women, Hispanic women, prostitutes, madams, cowgirls, ranchers, pioneers, and others. Herein are documented their struggles in the face of physical, social, and cultural adversity.