Old Forty-Four: A Historical and Geological Excursion Over New Mexico's Old Route 44

Old Forty-Four is a road book in the best New Mexico sense, a mile-by-mile excursion along what was once State Highway 44, the corridor now folded into US-550 that runs from the Rio Grande Valley out to the San Juan country in the northwest. Dirk Van Hart, a petroleum geologist who settled in Albuquerque, reads the landscape on two registers at once, the human history of the towns and the deep geological history of the rocks, and aims the whole thing squarely at the non-geologist.

Published by Sunstone Press of Santa Fe, the book uses the highway as a thread on which to hang both stories, with abundant illustrations and a locator map running from Bloomfield down through Bernalillo. This copy is warmly inscribed in the author's hand, "To Will, with best wishes," and signed Dirk Van Hart on the half-title. A friendly, genuinely useful guide to a stretch of road most travelers pass without a second look, here personalized by the author himself.