I tell the taxi driver to floor it, the rare-book appraiser’s voice still burning in my ears. “There’s a copy in Mexico,” Rodrigo Agüero had said. His tone was firm, almost smug. Besides, he had specifics. “In the Fondo Reservado,” he added, naming one of the country’s most guarded literary vaults, which are home to treasures like a Mayan codex, letters from conquistadores, and, if his lead was right—a Yellow Bird.
My Yellow Bird! If a first edition of the novel is at the Fondo Reservado, then I’m about to lay eyes on the rarest book ever published in California. The lost cornerstone of the Zamorano 80. The Holy Grail of Western Americana. And I’ll be the one who finds it. According to Agüero, no slouch working at Morton Subastas, a leading auction house in Mexico, an 1854 edition of Yellow Bird might fetch a small fortune.
The sun is high over Mexico City, and the smog stretches like gauze across the sky. I point the driver toward the Central Library at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. We enter the campus and pass Diego Rivera murals, blooming jacarandas, students cruising down paths and sprawled across lawns.
I exit the taxi, bolt through the library parking lot, race up the front steps—and find the place dead. Empty. A ghost town.
“Closed for Teacher’s Day,” a janitor tells me.
Of course.
This article appears in Issue 35 of Alta Journal.
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Turns out I’m at the wrong fondo reservado anyway. A few turns later, I find the one I’m looking for, at the prestigious Biblioteca Nacional.
Inside, the air is different—cool, quiet, still. Yes, this is a place where treasures lie. The security guard points me toward the librarian on duty. Alejandro wears thin-rimmed glasses, a plaid shirt, and a rumpled sweater.
“I’m looking for an old book,” I say in Spanish.
He raises an eyebrow. “How old?”
I show him a photo of the book on my phone. “1854.”
He shrugs. “That’s not old,” he says. We sit down in front of his computer. “What’s the title?” he asks.
He pulls up the online catalog and taps his fingers softly on his desk. The screen blinks, and the browser begins to load. I close my eyes, cross my fingers, and think of the headlines about my discovery.
MEMBERS ONLY
The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit goes by many names. Some call it the Murieta. Others call it Z64. The “Z” stands for the Zamorano Club, California’s preeminent group of rare-book collectors. Founded in Los Angeles in 1928, the club later published a list of 80 titles essential to understanding California history. The “64” refers to the book’s position on the list. But to the most ardent collectors, it’s Yellow Bird—a nod to the English translation of Cheesquatalawny, the birth name of the book’s Cherokee author, the first Native American novelist, who later went by John Rollin Ridge.
Book collecting is a hobby for many, a calling for the truly devoted. For them, the practice borders on spiritual obsession—a way of communing with the past. Walter Benjamin, the German philosopher and critic, once wrote that “to a true collector the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth” and noted “the childlike element which in a collector mingles with the element of old age.” The emotional drive is a paradox: to feel both young and ancient, to touch something that outlives you.
The nature of collectors—documented in Nicholas Basbanes’s A Gentle Madness, a classic treatise on these enthusiasts—is complex. Basbanes quotes Robert H. Taylor, a connoisseur of English and American literature who describes his fellow collectors as “sentimental, illogical, selfish, romantic, extravagant, capricious” and consistent in their eccentricities. There’s a thin line between an innocent bibliophile (someone who loves books) and a full-on bibliomaniac (someone who cannot live without them). According to lore, hardcore collectors often choose to be buried with their favorite books. There are also tales of audacious thieves breaching highly secure special collections—sometimes through air ducts.
Competition comes with the territory. The best personal libraries take a lifetime to build, so the pursuit of titles can span years if not decades and make or break a collection. A.S.W. Rosenbach, an early-20th-century dealer from Philadelphia dubbed “the Napoleon of Books,” once described clients as “buzzards who stretch their wings in anticipation” of a colleague dying and “swoop down and ghoulishly grab some long-coveted treasure from the dear departed’s trove.”
Dealers and collectors have long gathered in clubs. New York has the Grolier, founded in 1884; Chicago, the Caxton, from 1895. Los Angeles has the Zamorano Club. The group named itself after Agustín V. Zamorano, who brought the first printing press to California.
“It started out as a typical white-male, invitation-only kind of club,” Jim Tranquada, a former president, tells me. “We came to our senses and started admitting women,” he adds.
The Zamoranos originally met in L.A.’s landmark Bradbury Building, moved to the Alexandria Hotel, then settled in at the University Club, until it was razed. Without a home, the club made the difficult decision to sell its library at auction in 1999. (It contained no first-edition copies of Yellow Bird.) Today, the club’s 110 members keep their traditions alive by gathering monthly for sherry, dinner, and discussion at various sites in the Pasadena area. Prospective members are often surprised that such a club exists in Southern California.
“L.A. has always had this reputation as a cultural wasteland,” Tranquada says. The Zamoranos were trying to change that and “create a safe space to talk about collecting without seeming insane.”
In the early 1940s, the club embarked on an ambitious project to identify the 100 most important books about California. Members argued over criteria: Should a title have historical value, rarity, or literary merit?
Each member fought for their favorites. The list narrowed to 80 titles. One of the most influential voices belonged to Henry Raup Wagner, a retired mining executive who had amassed one of the largest private libraries of Western Americana in the country. Wagner lobbied hard for Yellow Bird.
In 1945, the list of 80 books was published: the Zamorano 80. Yellow Bird appeared on it just after A Tour of Duty in California (1849), by Joseph Warren Revere, grandson of Paul Revere, and just before Life in California (1846), by Alfred Robinson.
Unlike some of the other titles, Yellow Bird isn’t scholarly. It’s a short, violent work of fiction. But it was almost impossibly rare, and Wagner had a reason for pushing so hard to add it to the list: He was the only known collector to own a copy. It was basically an inside job, a power move by the club members to ensure that one of them became the first person to assemble first editions of all 80 titles—a complete Zamorano 80.
“Excuse the expression, but they wanted to create a ‘fuck you’ moment,” Michael Dawson, a Zamorano member whose family has dealt in books for over a century, says. “It’s like, you’re never going to find this. Fuck you. You’re never going to complete the Zamorano 80.”
Yet such difficulty is what inspires the most impassioned collectors. “This is a classic example of taking collecting to the extreme,” Dawson says. “Even if you’re wealthy, you’re never going to find that book.”
CAPED CRUSADERS
The origins of this priceless book and the life of its author—John Rollin Ridge, Yellow Bird himself—read like their own Wild West tale. Ridge was born into a prominent Cherokee family in what is now Georgia in the late 1820s. His father and grandfather signed the controversial Treaty of New Echota, which led to the forced removal of the Cherokee people along the Trail of Tears. For their cooperation with the U.S. government, the two were labeled traitors and assassinated by their own tribespeople. Ridge was 12 when he witnessed his father’s murder. Later, he shot and killed one of the alleged conspirators in his father’s death and went on the lam. He took refuge in gold rush California.
Ridge arrived in San Francisco and found work as a journalist. He wrote and edited for newspapers like the San Francisco Herald and the Daily Alta California. The Mexican-American War had ended, and prospectors were flooding west. Boomtowns emerged, and law enforcement was weak. The headlines were about mother lodes, disease outbreaks, and rampant crime, including murder—perfect ingredients for a novel.
To some readers, Yellow Bird’s protagonist, Joaquín Murieta, was a despicable reminder of the war: a bandit, a ruthless killer and thief. To others, he was a heroic vigilante. A young Mexican immigrant from Sonora, Murieta moves to California with his young companion, Rosita. He strikes a few lodes, and things are going well for the family. But a group of miners come upon his camp, beat him, tie him up, and then rape Rosita in front of him. He moves on, only to be accused of riding a stolen horse that his half brother has lent him. His brother is lynched, and Murieta is tied to the tree that his brother hangs from and lashed.
Out of this cruel injustice, a 19-year-old superhero emerges. Murieta organizes a group of fellow Mexicans. They cut a swath of terror through the Sierra foothills, ambushing stagecoaches, robbing miners, and killing whoever gets in their way. To hide his identity, Murieta adopts disguises, which enable him to hide in plain sight and, when needed, to disappear without a trace.
Murieta embodies a noble spirit, often buoyed by a sense of humor. When he spots a wanted poster offering a $5,000 bounty for his death or capture, he scribbles on it, “I will give $10,000. Joaquín.”
For his crimes, Murieta is pursued by a lawman named Harry Love and his company of rangers. Love and his men track Murieta to Arroyo Cantoova, southwest of Fresno. A frenzied shoot-out ensues. Murieta’s horse is killed, and he is chased on foot by rangers on horseback. Riddled with bullets, Murieta utters his last words: “Don’t shoot any more—the work is done!”
To prove his death, Love has Murieta’s head cut off, then races it 150 miles to the closest town and preserves it in alcohol. Love also preserves the severed hand of Murieta’s lieutenant, Three-Fingered Jack, and carts the grotesque oddities around the state as trophies.
Or so goes Ridge’s novel. In 1854, his account of Murieta’s life and times was published by W.B. Cooke and Company, in San Francisco. According to Ridge’s great-niece, Ridge and a partner put up the money to publish the book. A disagreement occurred, and the partner burned the finished copies out of spite—twice. “My father often said that these burnings happened before his father could obtain a copy,” the great-niece notes in an account about the provenance of a first edition in an auction catalog. “The venture left [Ridge] broke.”
Despite the financial failure, Ridge’s story about Murieta caught on. A plagiarized edition was serialized in the California Police Gazette, and the novel has been in print ever since.
The book was fiction, but many readers took it as fact, which may have helped establish the Murieta archetype: a rebellious, handsome, and elusive villain who wears a cape. Years later, the character would inspire some of the most influential protagonists in our culture. In 1919, the Murieta-themed pulp The Curse of Capistrano was published, and a year later, it was adapted as The Mark of Zorro, a silent film starring Douglas Fairbanks, which marked the birth of the Zorro franchise. One of the masked avenger’s biggest fans was Bill Finger, a creator of the Batman comic books, which first appeared in 1939. On the night Bruce Wayne’s parents are killed, the movie the Wayne family is watching is The Mark of Zorro.
As Murieta was evolving into Zorro and Batman, the book itself was becoming a highly sought-after treasure. Only two first editions are known to exist. One is in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and the other entered a private collection decades ago. A third copy is rumored to be hiding somewhere in Europe. Yet after talking to a few collectors, I had reason to believe I might discover a fourth copy in Mexico City.
LIBROS RAROS
A few weeks before I found my way to the Biblioteca Nacional, I had begun my hunt at another landmark, the Centro Histórico, just behind the grand Catedral Metropolitana. The main square buzzes with organ grinders, street preachers, and vendors roasting corn and burning copal. Shamans in feathered headdresses and seashell ankle bracelets dance and wave incense over tourists or pose for selfies amid the ruins of the Templo Mayor. Beyond the plaza, tucked between colonial buildings with crumbling cornices and rusting wrought-iron balconies, lies Calle Donceles—the city’s fabled street of used bookstores.
I visit a shop called the Callejón de los Milagros, or “alley of miracles.” Inside, books are stacked like Jenga pieces. An old man in a derby hat snores in a wooden chair. A cat slinks between the shelves, its tail raised like an antenna, and disappears into the darkness of a back room.
At the register, a young woman with dyed-pink hair and black nail polish looks at me. I pull out my phone, open the photo of Yellow Bird, and slide it across the glass counter like a detective displaying the picture of a suspect.
“Any chance you have this book?” I ask.
She studies the photo on my screen for a moment, then hands my phone to a colleague behind her who is halfway through a taco. He looks, wipes his chin with a napkin, and shakes his head.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” she says.
I shuffle down the street. Bibliofilia. El Laberinto. El Tomo Suelto. I make the same inquiry, show the same photo, and receive the same blank stares. No one has heard of it. Am I even in the right place?
To lift my spirits, I recall a conversation I had a few weeks back with Michael Vinson, a rare-book dealer in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and a Zamorano affiliate. He specializes in Western Americana.
“It’s actually very probable,” Vinson had said when I’d asked if a lost copy could be hiding out in Mexico. “You know, if Murieta is from Mexico, there could have been a copy that migrated into a collection somewhere. You could find it.”
I remind myself that finding a first edition would be worth every penny of frustration. “You could almost buy a house with it,” Vinson had continued. “If it came up today [for sale or auction], it would probably bring north of $500,000. And depending on the competition, it could bring $1 million.”
People have asked Vinson about the book, but he says “there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell they’ll get a chance to buy it.”
I think of what other dealers had told me about the art of collecting: You visit garage sales, book fairs, and old stores, and you dig. This digging is supposed to be the fun part. I move on to the next shop, La Regia, a few doors down.
Inside, I flash my photo.
“Murieta? The bandit?” the clerk asks, the title clearly ringing a bell. But the store’s database hasn’t been updated. Yes, there is a boss to talk to. But no. He isn’t around. Another bust of a lead. Another shrug. Another cat.
Again, I think of what someone told me about the novel. Brad Johnson is a former president of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America and co-owns Johnson Rare Books & Archives, a shop in Covina. He’s also a member of the Zamorano Club. “It was basically a dime-store novel,” Johnson said. “It’s disposable literature. It’s got an outsized reputation for what it is.”
After a few hours of wandering and praying for a miracle, I need a break. I scan Calle Donceles for a taco joint and duck into Don Campirano, where carnitas and other fatty meats steam under heat lamps. It’s early for a drink, but I order a michelada anyway, Cubana-style: ice-cold beer poured into a glass—its rim rolled in tamarind paste and flakes of salt—containing Clamato spiked with dashes of Worcestershire and Maggi sauce and a generous squeeze of fresh lime.
While savoring a refreshing gulp at the counter, I hear the sound of a toilet flushing, followed by the click of a door and the steps of leather soles. From behind a beaded curtain comes a man in a pinstripe shirt, half buttoned, sleeves pushed to the elbows. A panama hat dangles from his fingers.
He slides onto the seat next to me, where he’s left a plate of huevos revueltos. He takes a mouthful, wipes his lips with a fresh napkin, and then folds it into a precise square.
“What’s the book?” he asks in Spanish. He’s looking at my phone, open to the image of Yellow Bird.
The man nods. “The clerks on this street don’t handle books like that,” he tells me. “The people that handle those books are the bosses. It’s all private deals.”
The man’s message is clear. No more shops or street-level hunting.
CIRCLING BUZZARDS
Through Johnson, I get in touch with Nick Aretakis, a noted dealer in Guilford, Connecticut, not far from the Yale campus, in New Haven. The protégé of the late William Reese, the foremost buyer and seller of Western Americana books for most of the past half century, Aretakis is considered a giant in the field. He, too, believes my Mexico theory is plausible.
“Oh, it’s very possible,” he says. “Books are portable. You know, they can move from place to place, and Murieta was from Sonora. Very possible that copies might have ended up in Mexico because of those connections.”
“One of the more prominent auction houses in Mexico,” he says, “is Morton Subastas.”
I look up the location, and it’s across town in Lomas de Chapultepec, a neighborhood often called simply Las Lomas, Mexico City’s answer to the Hollywood Hills. Gated estates, private guards with earpieces, Chihuahuas in sweaters.
Morton Subastas sits on a quiet, shaded street, protected by a wrought-iron fence and gate. Inside an unassuming multistory building, spectacular auctions often feature old chests, ancient coins, sabers, horse saddles, and antique, leather-bound books. The leader of the Books and Documents Department is Rodrigo Agüero. Unlike the clerks on Donceles, he doesn’t blink when I ask him about the Murieta book.
I expect him to refer to the book in Spanish—Pájaro Amarillo—but he calls it by its English name: Yellow Bird.
Agüero knows all about the Zamorano Club. He tells me about Thomas Streeter, a New Jersey corporate attorney and businessman who was a force in the world of mid-20th-century book collecting. Before the Zamorano list was even published, club member Wagner, who had lobbied to include Yellow Bird on it, sold his first edition to Streeter, as if passing the torch.
But several decades later, buzzards were circling. Streeter had passed away, and his edition was going to auction. Frederick Beinecke, heir to the Plaza Hotel fortune in New York and a major benefactor at Yale, had already amassed a formidable collection of rare books, letters, and manuscripts. By the time he was in his 80s, he had acquired 79 of the 80 Zamorano titles. Only Yellow Bird eluded him.
In a notable move, Streeter’s widow altered the auction schedule. Yellow Bird was transferred from the lots dealing with California topics, where it had been cataloged, to those for Georgia, the birthplace of John Rollin Ridge. This gave Beinecke a chance to place an earlier bid, and he won his prize. Before his death, he donated his entire Zamorano 80 collection to Yale.
The only other known first edition surfaced in Maine in the 1970s, according to a 1994 Los Angeles Times article. Henry H. Clifford, an investment counselor and longtime collector in Pasadena, had spent decades trying to collect the Zamorano 80. He found a private dealer in Maine who was holding a Yellow Bird. Clifford snagged it and eventually became the third collector to complete the list.
Clifford also became a target. Stephen Blumberg, a notorious book thief from the Midwest, had plans—during a two-decades-long spree to steal the world’s rarest books—to break into Clifford’s estate. Blumberg ultimately stole more than 23,000 books and manuscripts from private collectors and libraries, though he never made off with a Yellow Bird before ending up in prison for years. Of the plot, Clifford said he was prepared. “I also have a nice collection of guns,” he joked.
Soon, though, the buzzards were circling again. After Clifford passed away in 1994, his collection was auctioned off. Waiting in the wings was Daniel Volkmann, an architect (and member of the Roxburghe Club of San Francisco and the Grolier Club of New York). With the help of some first editions obtained from his late mother’s holdings, Volkmann became the last person known to have assembled a complete collection. Volkmann, in turn, auctioned off his collection, and the winning bidder has never come forward.
“Very rare, very rare,” Agüero says. But, he tells me, there is at least one Yellow Bird in Mexico, a first edition, hidden away at the Fondo Reservado.
“You have to go there,” he tells me.
I immediately call a taxi.
GOLD COUNTRY
Here I am, in the Biblioteca Nacional. Alejandro the librarian sits at his computer, browser wheel spinning, the air between us thick with anticipation. His next click might change everything.
“Are you sure it’s ‘Murieta’?” Alejandro asks, squinting at the screen.
“Seguramente,” I reply, sliding my phone toward him and pointing at the book. No question about the spelling. M-U-R-I-E-T-A.
He nods, but hesitates. “Shouldn’t there be two r’s?” he asks, wanting to spell it the Spanish way.
He types another variation. Still nothing. Nothing in the Fondo Reservado. Nothing in the Biblioteca Nacional’s vast holdings. Just digital dust.
I tell him that I’ve heard that not everything is in the fondo’s online catalog. Maybe we could head to the vault, to see for ourselves. Maybe, just maybe, Yellow Bird is waiting for us there, forgotten on a shelf.
“[The stacks] are closed today,” he says.
Of course. He keeps entering new searches and suggests that we query the holdings of the Biblioteca Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, another historical archive. I nod, hopeful, but when he pulls up the Lerdo’s results, the screen freezes. An error message pops up. System down.
I thank Alejandro and tell him that I should really get going. It’s late in the afternoon, and traffic on the Periférico is likely backing up. The drive to the city center could take an hour or more. But Alejandro doesn’t want to give up.
He expands the search: Monterrey’s Biblioteca Cervantina, international collections. Then, suddenly—a hit.
A copy of the Murieta!
I lean over his shoulder to see the monitor. My breath catches. Publication date: 1874.
Chinga. Too late. Yellow Bird originally came out in 1854. Still, databases can be wrong. A typo? A transcription error? Maybe this is the one.
The listing says it’s housed at the Newberry Library in Chicago. I step outside to call. A reference librarian answers on the first ring. I launch into the whole messy search—California bandits, rare-book clubs, a list of 80 titles, Zorro. He listens patiently. Taps at his keyboard.
A pause.
“You know, I see a copy at the Amador County Library,” he says.
I blink. “Amador County?” I ask.
“Looks like California.”
Yellow Bird is in gold country! The land where the fictional outlaw rode and the legend was born.
I thank Alejandro and leave the Fondo Reservado to call the library in California. A woman named Robin answers. I tell her the title and the name of the bandit.
“Oh, I know who he is,” she says. The library is in Murieta country. Rancho Murieta is just down the road.
My pulse quickens. This is it. Maybe this copy of Yellow Bird had never traveled far. Maybe it never had to. Of course the book would surface here, in the shadow of its own myth.
“Yep,” she says. “Looks like we have it. Want me to go check?”
I pace in the sunlit parking lot, gripping my phone like it’s some kind of divining rod. A few minutes later, she’s back.
“I’ve got it.”
I inhale. “Can you check the year it was printed?”
“The real one or the replica?”
I stop. “Replica?”
“The copy we have,” she says, “was printed in 2003. But it looks just like the original.”
My heart sinks. I explain what I had been hoping to find.
“Close,” she says. “But no cigar.”
COWBOYS AND INDIANS
I come home that night empty-handed. No Yellow Bird. Not in the national libraries or in the cracked bookstores on Donceles or in the vaults of Morton Subastas. Not even in the sleepy library of Amador County, where the fictional Murieta once rode.
That evening, the television broadcasts ICE riots in California, clashes between police and protesters. Mexican Americans in the headlines again. It all feels like a time warp, as if it’s 1850 and John Rollin Ridge has made it to California and his Murieta has crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Both men sought freedom and prosperity, but faced a system stacked against them.
The next week, I call several dealers, hoping to find new leads. I waste several days trying to confirm the third-copy rumor. It’s a whopper of a theory involving a historian named Doyce B. Nunis Jr. (now deceased), who had whispered to other Zamorano members that a Yellow Bird was in Europe. Where? Apparently, Nunis’s close friend in the club, a Monsignor Weber, had connections to the Vatican, and so this third Yellow Bird was likely in Italy. But I can’t find the senior home where Weber supposedly lives, nearly everyone else who knew him and Nunis from the club has died, and the Vatican’s digital archives are just as spotty as those at the Fondo Reservado.
Eventually, I need to vent. I call Vinson, the dealer in Santa Fe, to share my conversation with Agüero and the madcap taxi ride to the fondo and how that led me to Amador County.
“Oh, I know that story,” he says, laughing, and describes his own failed missions with online catalogs, searching for titles only to learn that the entries were not what he’d hoped. “The hardest thing in this business is turning things up. It takes a lifetime to build connections to get the stories, to know where things are.”
I beg him for a fresh theory on Yellow Bird.
He tells me about Karl May. “He was the most famous Western novelist in Germany.” In the 1890s, May published adventure tales of the American West. A con man and petty thief, he did his research in German prison libraries.
The stories were total fantasy. May had never even set foot in the West. “But Hitler read him,” Vinson says. “Loved him.” In every story, a German character found a way to dominate the landscape.
In Germany, May enthusiasts hold reenactments every year. “They do cowboys and Indians—this is huge in Germany,” Vinson says. “Germans are also collectors, organizers; they go after stuff.”
I’m following along, eating it up.
“My guess, if the Joaquín Murieta is anywhere,” he says, “it’s going to be in Germany.”
First California, then Mexico, then the Vatican, now Germany. I imagine the collector, somewhere outside Hamburg. Balding, spectacles. A timbered house tucked behind pine trees. A personal library stocked with Karl May novels and antique volumes, cowboy lassos on the wall, a faded headdress on a mannequin. And somewhere, in that curated chaos, perhaps in a climate-controlled vault, resting on a shelf in the dark, my Yellow Bird.•
Geoffrey Gray is a New York Times bestselling author, longtime investigative reporter, and the current founder and publisher of True Mastery, which specializes in adventure tales and interactive, real-life games. Known for his eclectic range of subjects and gonzo spirit, Gray started his writing career covering boxing for the New York Times and later specialized in unsolved crime, travel, food writing, and more as a contributing editor at New York magazine. He has also produced two feature documentary films, Patrolman P. and GORED, the latter of which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and debuted on Netflix. He is the co-creator of 9 Arches, an adventure card game, lives (most of the time) in the colonial highlands outside Mexico City, and once drove an ice cream truck.
