The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths

John Adair's The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths is the cornerstone study of its subject. First published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1944, it remains the work that scholars, traders, and collectors still reach for when tracing how silverwork arrived among the Navajo in the late nineteenth century and spread to Zuni and the Rio Grande pueblos. Adair did his fieldwork directly with the smiths, recording techniques, tools, and the social world of the craft, and his account has never been fully superseded.

This is the tenth printing of 1975, its copyright page laying out the full lineage of impressions from 1944 onward, a testament to how steadily the book has stayed in demand. The striking dust jacket wraps a close photographic study of a silversmith's hands at the forge, and the rear panel advertises the Press's celebrated "Oklahoma Books on Indian Art and Culture" list. A well-kept jacketed copy of a genuine reference classic, worth documenting for any Southwestern or Native American art shelf.