The Elusive Zamorano 80 Captured Again: The Volkmann Zamorano 80 under the Hammer in February
Item 73. Views of San Francisco in 1848 and 1849, from Bayard Taylor’s Eldorado.
Sloan, who became a Zamorano Club member after the group began to admit women in the early 1990s, established her rare book business in 1984, after serving an apprenticeship with Warren Howell at John Howell--Books in San Francisco and managing the Latin Americana Department at The Jenkins Company in Austin, Texas. She handles books, manuscripts, and maps in all areas but specializes in Americana. In recent years, she has moved into the auction business and away from the more traditional bookseller format of a retail-based dealer who issues catalogues. Her tenth auction, Cartography and Views, with an Emphasis on Texas and the West, Including the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Stuart B. Gleichenhaus (2001), reflected her interest and expertise in those subjects. Her eleventh sale, Rarities: Books, Manuscripts, Broadsides, Photography, and Ephemera, with an Emphasis on Texas and the West (2001), was a general catalogue of 372 lots, including a copy of the extremely rare 1835 Declaration of the People of Texas in General Convention Assembled.
Sloan will no doubt be remembered in book history as the only person ever to sell two complete sets of The Zamorano 80 titles. She also accomplished this feat in two different centuries. Her second auction sale, the Henry H. Clifford collection, took place in 1994 and realized $608,856 (including buyer’s premiums) for The Zamorano 80 titles, which were listed in the first of a three-part catalogue printed by W. Thomas Taylor. Because of her expertise with the subject, she was asked to dispose of Volkmann’s collection, as well. After all, it was Sloan who located for him the last book needed to complete his Zamorano 80 collection.
On 5 February 2003 in San Francisco at the Society of California Pioneers his collection will be auctioned by Dorothy Sloan. The entire rare book and collecting community, from the extremely dedicated to the idly curious, will wait in great expectation for this sale. For information about the sale, Sloan may be contacted at