This was the first bibliography and guide to the American mass market paperback book, and it remains one of the most definitive. The major index is by author, and lists: author, title, publisher, book number, year of publication, and cover price. The title index lists titles and authors only. The publisher index provides a history of that imprint, with addresses, number ranges, and general physical description of the books issued. This is the place that all study of the American paperback must begin.

A desperate man is caught in a range war in Oklahoma cattle country in this tale from a Western Heritage Trustees Award–winning author. Giff Dixon doesn’t remember how he got to the town of Corazon. All he knows is that some cowboys found him way off the beaten path in Oklahoma cattle country, barely alive and carrying a belly full of buckshot. Now, he’s broke, friendless, and at the end of his rope. Everything changes when, out of the blue, he’s offered a job guiding a government expedition to investigate reports of homesteaders being forced off their land by the all-powerful Torreon Cattle Company. It seems an easy enough ride until Grady Sebree, the iron-fisted boss of Torreon, approaches Dixon. Sebree has a proposition: Keep him informed of what the government men are up to, and get a prime job after the dust settles. But Dixon isn’t the kind to betray the men who gave him a chance for redemption. And soon enough, he finds himself caught in a brutal range war he never wanted—and has no choice but to finish . . . A winner of the Levi Strauss Golden Saddleman Award from the Western Writers of America, Luke Short was a master of the frontier epic. Play a Lone Hand is one of his most dramatic and engrossing tales.

WATRIAMA AND CO (the title echoes Kipling's STALKY AND CO!) is a collection of biographical essays about people associated with the Pacific Islands. It covers a period of almost a century and a half. However, the individual stories of first-hand experience converge to some extent in various ways so as to present a broadly coherent picture of 'Pacific History'. In this, politics, economics and religion overlap. So, too, do indigenous cultures and concerns; together with the activities and interests of the Europeans who ventured into the Pacific and who had a profound, widespread and enduring impact there from the nineteenth century, and who also prompted reactions from the Island peoples. Not least significant in this process is the fact that the Europeans generated a 'paper trail' through which their stories and those of the Islanders (who also contributed to their written record) can be known. Thus, not only are the subjects of the essays to be encountered personally, and within a contextual kinship, but the way in which the past has shaped the future is clearly discernible. Watriama himself features in various historical narratives. So, too, certain of his confreres in this collection, which is the product of several decades of exploring the Pacific past in archives, by sea, and on foot through most of Oceania.