The Deer-Dance at Taos
Tucson: The Peccary Press, 198.
Limited Edition. Hardcover.
Limited Edition of 200 copies, 100 for the friends of The Peccary Press and 100 offered for sale Summer 1983. Designed by Mark Sanders. Composed in Linotype Times Roman with display lines in handset Libra Light. Printed letterpress on Rives Lightweight in an edition.
From the introduction: "Erna Fergusson wrote several books between 1934 and her death in 1966. None of them rivalled her first, Dancing Gods (1931). Into it went the enthusiasm she felt for the native Americans of the Southwest, enthusiasm refined by years of work for the American Red Cross in small New Mexican villages and made deep by her interaction with them when she founded and conducted, with Ethel Hickey, Koshare Tours, predecessor of Fred Harvey's internationally known Indian Detours arranged for the Santa Fe Railroad. In the dormancy of winter there is life, the will to survive; in the dreadful cold of a biting wind blowing stinging flecks of snow from Sacred Mountain there is hope, the promise of spring. Anyone who has stood in the chill of a February day at Taos Pueblo and watched the Deer Dance will recall its vitality reborn in Fergusson's words."
Fergusson tells the tale of a Deer Dance at Taos Pueblo in early January. Long ago, according to the legend, men and animals lived together and understood each other. They spoke the same language, and the animals knew that they must be sacrificed so that their human brothers might live. This dance is an appeal to that old understanding. It is said that in hunting, the Taos Indians do not worry if they are seen by the game, for they know that if the dance has been properly performed, they will be permitted to kill what they need.
Item #9025095-5/8 x 3-3/4", beige paper decorated with leaping male deer in brown over boards, brown endpapers, unpaginated (20pp total), printed in brown and orange with orange deer on title-page and orange peccary logo on colophon.
Clean, tight, fine.
Price: $50.00