An unlikely bookseller in New York City became the leading dealer in rare Western Americana for most of the twentieth century. After working in western-U.S. and South American gold mines at the turn of the twentieth century, Edward Eberstadt (1883–1958) returned to his home in New York City in 1907. Through luck and happenstance, he purchased an old book for fifty cents that turned out to be a rare sixteenth-century Mexican imprint. From this bit of serendipity, Eberstadt quickly became one of the leading western Americana rare book dealers. In this book Michael Vinson tells the story of how Edward Eberstadt & Sons developed its legendary book collection, which formed the backbone of many of today’s top western Americana archives. Although the firm’s business records have not survived, Edward and his sons, Charles and Lindley, were all prodigious letter writers, and nearly every collector kept his or her correspondence. Drawing upon these letters and on his own extensive experience in the rare book trade, Vinson gives the reader a vivid sense of how the commerce in rare books and manuscripts unfolded during the era of the Eberstadts, particularly in the relationships between dealers and customers. He explores the backstory that scholars of art history and museology have pursued in recent decades: the assembling of cultural treasures, their organization for use, and the establishment of institutions to support that use. His work describes the important role this key bookselling firm played in the western Americana trade from the early 1900s to Eberstadt & Sons’ dissolution in 1975. From Yale University and the American Antiquarian Society to the Newberry Library and the Huntington Library, the firm of Edward Eberstadt & Sons has left its mark in western Americana repositories across the nation. Told here for the first time, the Eberstadt story reveals how one family’s business and legacy have shaped the study of the American West.

This book offers the first comprehensive survey of the art of Richard Stankiewicz (1922-1983) and reassesses its place in the art of his time. Stankiewicz's welded sculpture of rusted iron and cast-off steel played an important role in the redefinition of art in New York during the 1950s. Yet, as is the case of several artists who figured significantly in that heady decade when the New York School came to international prominence, the full range of Stankiewicz's art has not been fully appreciated. sculpture of the 1950s within the context of the artist's 30 year career. Although Stankiewicz has been included in important group exhibitions of Assemblage, Neo-Dada, and Abstract Expressionist sculpture, his art has eluded conclusive critical identification. This elusiveness may be attributed to the artist's persistently and subtly subversive stance toward the dominant artistic vocabularies of a partisan era in which the character of art and its audience changed radically. sculpture in relation to the aesthetic attitudes and critical concerns of post-World War II American art. Following an Introduction by Addison Gallery Director Adam D. Weinberg, is an extended critical look at Stankiewicz, his life, and his achievement by Emmie Donadio. The artist is placed within the 20th-century European avant-garde tradition in an essay by Jon Wood. Martin Friedman's Putting It All Together positions Stankiewicz's work in relation to that of his contemporaries in 1950s New York. The book also includes a narrative chronology, a bibliography, and generous illustrations of key sculptures by the artist. illustrated with his own art and that of his Euro-American contemporaries and predecessors. It is must reading for collectors, scholars, and anyone wishing to enlarge their conception of a pivotal period in modern art - and the unique achievement of a sculptor who can be classic, iconoclastic, and witty all at the same time.