The Pima and His Basket by J. F. Breazeale, first issued in 1923 by Acme Printing Company of Tucson, is an early study of the basketry of the Pima, the Akimel O'odham or River People of southern Arizona. Breazeale attends closely to materials and meaning, the willow and devil's-claw worked into the coiled forms, and the book's own design embodies its subject: the cover sets a black Greek-fret border and a central whirling-log motif against desert-yellow, framed, as a printer's note explains, by "coyote tracks," the pan-di-co of the Pima.
This is the Fur Press reprint out of Chadron, Nebraska, which has kept this small, hard-to-find ethnographic title in circulation for later readers. A clean copy preserves both the distinctive cover scheme and Breazeale's text, a modest but genuine document of a basketry tradition and of how early-twentieth-century Arizona writers tried to record the crafts of their O'odham neighbors.
Fur Press reprint of the 1923 original
Copyright 1923 by J. F. Breazeale (Acme Printing, Tucson); this copy is the later Fur Press (Chadron, Nebraska) reprint.
| Author | J. F. Breazeale |
| Publisher | Fur Press (reprint) |
| Edition | Fur Press reprint of the 1923 original |
| Condition | Slim softcover, decorative border. |
| Topic | Pima (Akimel O'odham) basketry |
Photographs © New Mexico Literacy Project, licensed CC BY 4.0 — reuse with attribution. This is an identification and provenance record of a real donation; no appraisal or valuation is offered.
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