How different Native American communities lived, in accounts gathered in 1922

The title page says the book is by “several of its students”: scholars who had studied Native American life, each contributing an account, gathered and edited by the anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons. A. L. Kroeber wrote the introduction, and B. W. Huebsch published it in New York in 1922.

The pieces are narratives and descriptions, arranged region by region across North America, so the reader moves from one way of life to the next. C. Grant La Farge’s colour plates and a map go with them across 419 numbered pages. It is also a document of its own moment: the language and assumptions belong to the anthropology of 1922, and the voices are the scholars’, not those of the communities they describe.

This large copy, 29 centimetres tall, spent part of its life in the Langsdale Library of the University of Baltimore and still carries that library’s marks. The tan boards and dark cloth spine are rubbed and frayed, the corners heavily worn, and a white strip along the inside front hinge shows an earlier repair or reinforcement of unknown date. The plates and map have not been collated.