GUEST: This is a book I, I purchased online a few months ago.

Apparently, it was published by the Tesuque Pueblo Indian School back in the 1930s.

The teacher and the students put the book together.

They, uh, students drew and colored the maps.

APPRAISER: Right.

GUEST: And, um, they didn't have enough money to publish it, so they used their food money, from what I understand, for the month... APPRAISER: Uh-huh.

GUEST:...to buy a mimeograph machine.

APPRAISER: Amazing.

GUEST: And then they printed 30 copies of it to sell for a dollar apiece to pay for the machine.

APPRAISER: Incredible-- so it's a book that was produced in 1936 by the third-grade students at the Santa Fe Indian School at the Tesuque Pueblo.

And Mabel Parsons, who is the author here, provided the text...

GUEST: Mm-hmm.

APPRAISER: ...with Anna Nolan Clark, who was another teacher at the school.

And their hope was, as I understand it, to help these students learn English and, uh, overcome their fear of books.

GUEST: Correct.

APPRAISER: And they came upon this tremendously interesting idea of having them make a book...

GUEST: Correct.

APPRAISER: ...and use the text.

Now, as you mentioned, they, um, in the process of creating this book created mimeographed pages, including a series of ten maps, which the children themselves would hand-color using colored pencil on mimeographed paper.

They would hang the mimeographed sheets to dry out.

And what I think is so fascinating about this is, they're using their own knowledge of the geography and where they are to get them interested in reading.

These Native American schools, the Indian schools, were very controversial, are controversial, for trying to indoctrinate these children into Western ways and give up their Native American heritage.

But at least in this instance, there was some effort to approach them with a sensitivity to their geography and their place of home.

GUEST: Correct.

APPRAISER: So you have things like this map, uh, this, this, this rose compass that would be on a map, and it has a Zuni symbol on it.

It's really phenomenally interesting.

We'll look at another map in here that they created, and it has a similar layout with lots of hand illustrations by the children.

It's really a, a, an unusual object.

There was a, an article written about this book recently in, in a Santa Fe newspaper, right?

GUEST: Correct.

APPRAISER: It's an extraordinarily rare object.

You kind of stumped us a little bit, because you normally, when we try to evaluate something, have comparables, other objects similar to it, even if we don't have the same edition.

There really have been no copies of this book sold, at least at auction, in, as far back as I can see.

But even in the context of, you know, frontier literature, you might have a small printing press on the, on the frontier in Wyoming and so forth, but that would be run and managed by, obviously, Western settlers.

This is a book printed on the Tesuque Pueblo in 1936 by children in the third grade.

And I can't think of another example like it.

GUEST: Yeah.

APPRAISER: It's really an amazing thing.

GUEST: Pretty amazing.

APPRAISER: So will you please tell me possibly what you paid for the book, and possibly why you bought the book in the first place?

GUEST: I paid about $300 for it.

APPRAISER: All right.

GUEST: Which, for me, was a lot to spend on a book.

APPRAISER: Yeah.

GUEST: But, uh, I, I'm an archaeologist, I like history.

Uh, my mom used to work with the pueblos heading up, uh, Head Start programs.

APPRAISER: Oh, right!

GUEST: So, uh... APPRAISER: Amazing.

GUEST: I had that, kind of a connection that just kind of spoke to me.

APPRAISER: There has been at least one copy that might have been offered by a private dealer in recent years, but that appeared to have been incompleted.

Probably only had five maps, according to what I understand.

In a situation like this, I would say, for, uh, valuation purposes, we would want to be conservative and to see how much interest institutions and others would have in it.

But in an auction context, I would say it'd probably have an estimate of $3,000 to $5,000.

GUEST: Oh, wow.

APPRAISER: We know that nine institutions had one, leaving about 20 in private circulation.

GUEST: Yeah.