Twenty volumes and twenty accompanying portfolios, published over a twenty-four-year timespan. 4,956 numbered pages. 2,234 photogravures, including 1,486 original photos inserted into the books and 723 large-format prints in the portfolios. This is a basic physical description of the publication. However, due to the enormity of the work and the extended timeline for its production, The North American Indian (NAI) is far more complex than this simple depiction.

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​For example, the sets originally were available only to the very wealthy by subscription. A complete set of the standard edition, with photogravures printed on Van Gelder paper or Japanese vellum, was initially priced at $3,000 (equivalent to about $107,00 today).  A deluxe edition, with photogravures printed on Japanese tissue, cost $3,750 (about $134,000 today).

 

A review of the literature to date shows that much of the currently available information about NAI has been largely surmised over the years based on Curtis’s original plan and the Lauriat list. We have compared that list with other historical documents about the sets and their subscribers, and we discovered another list in the archives of the Autry Museum of the American West. That list was composed by Frederick Webb Hodge, Ethnologist-in-Charge at the U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology and the editor of the entire book series, from 1908. We found many inconsistencies across the lists we have compared.

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As might be expected with any project that spanned three decades, the original record-keeping for The North American Indian was sometimes rigorous, sometimes lax, and, unfortunately, sometimes missing altogether. We have attempted to overcome these obstacles by locating and assembling detailed records of nearly one thousand documents from around the world. By combining these with hundreds of hours of in-person visits, interviews, telephone calls, and emails, we believe we have created the most detailed record of the creation, publication, and distribution of Curtis’s monumental work. 

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Our work, at its core, comprises a record of every set we have been able to document, as well as those we believe were never published and whose existence cannot be confirmed. We also identify all sets that have been broken apart through auctions and sales, those whose location we cannot determine, and those that have been destroyed. The study incorporates both internationally and domestically held sets. All 500 set numbers are accounted for in this census, although many of those were never used.