Laurie Spurling and Wendel Cox will be your host and guides to new and provocative books on the American West. Three featured titles for the evening are Jane S. Smith's Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants; Margot Mifflin,The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman; and Marsha Weisiger's Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country. For more more information about the Bancroft Prize, and this year's finalists, see Dennis Hagen's post on these titles.

Incidentally, the cover of Marsha Weisiger's Dreaming of Sheep is a photograph by William Pennington from the Western History & Genealogy Department's collection of approximately 600,000 images. Some 100,000 images, including Pennington's photograph, are available to search online through the department's website.