Zamorano Eighty

The Zamorano Eighty is a list of books intended to represent the most significant early volumes published on the history of California.

[2][3][4] A series of committees of Club members, including former American Smelting and Refining Company executive Henry Raup Wagner and bibliographer Robert Cowan, assembled a list of a hundred books, eventually whittled down to eighty.

[5] The list contains significant works by a number of well-known authors like Mark Twain, John Muir, Bret Harte, and Robert Louis Stevenson, as well as obscure texts concerning geographical exploration and legal matters.

Some of the works exist in very few, highly sought after copies, while others were quite common and not particularly valuable, until interest in the list caused their prices to rise.

[7] The rarest book on the list is number 64, the dime novel The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta by John Rollin Ridge writing as "Yellow Bird".