Just in time for Colorado’s 150th, “The Colorado Book” opens a new chapter

Bob Baron passed away this year, but not before he gave Colorado a big 150th birthday present: a new edition of “The Colorado Book.”

On the surface, Baron was an unlikely person to capture this state’s literary history. Born in Los Angeles, he studied physics and philosophy, went into engineering, served in the Army, and was program manager for Computer Control Company, which worked on the Mariner II (Venus) and the Mariner IV (Mars) on-board computers; he later became worldwide systems manager for Honeywell’s minicomputer business. In 1971, he founded Prime Computer, which became a Fortune 500 company in the 1980s.

Along the way, though, he wrote numerous articles, and when he moved to Denver in 1984, he founded Fulcrum, a publishing company focusing on books that reflected his deep interest in history, conservation, civics, the Southwest and Native American writing.

In 1993, Fulcrum published “The Colorado Book,” an anthology of writings about Colorado that became a fixture on bookshelves across the state. “I wanted to spend the next period of my life on helping to present meaning,” he told the Denver Post in 2007. “Books always have been the way to communicate meaning – and even more so now.”

As the state’s sesquicentennial approached, Baron knew there was still more to communicate about Colorado, so he asked author Sandra Dallas (who worked on the original anthology) and Tom Noel, the historian known as Dr. Colorado, to update “The Colorado Book.”

“I didn’t want to get involved,” Dallas admits. “Been there, done that.” But Baron “really pushed this,” and at his urging, she decided to go there again.

After all, much had changed about Colorado’s literary landscape in the preceding thirty years. “I hadn’t even written fiction when the first book came out,” Dallas points out. Since then, she’s published more than twenty novels, adding to her roster of non-fiction books about Colorado. And so many other authors have started writing…or been rediscovered.

“I sort of viewed this not as an updated version, but also almost as a companion book,” Dallas says. While Noel focused on history, Dallas concentrated on contemporary works. “We had no criteria on this book,” Dallas says. “A lot of it was writings that we knew. There were areas that were not covered in the first book, and authors that were not covered … we looked around for anybody we could find.”

And they consulted everyone they could find, before comparing notes with a third editor, librarian Pam Sandlien Smith, and coming up with the final roster. “We added stuff that we wanted, but the disappointment was that there was so much we wanted that wouldn’t work,” Dallas says. Authors like Ted Conover, who’s written many nonfiction books – but whose recent “Cheap Land Colorado” just didn’t have a section that could be excerpted. Ultimately, they whittled 210 possibilities down to 155.

The new edition includes nature writer Enos Mills, who somehow was left out of the first book. Both John Denver and Judy Collins made the cut for this volume, as did Allen Ginsberg’s “Plutonium Ode.” While some of the writers in the original were trimmed or eliminated altogether, other favorites remain, such as Thomas Hornsby Ferril’s “Old Men on the Blue,” a poem about Breckenridge, where Dallas lived in the early ’60s.

“Colorado authors hold up, and are getting national recognition; they’re not just regional authors,” she says. “They have a sense of the state, they know it. They’re not outsiders flying in and telling a story. Essentially, they’re fun to read and they’re worth reading…

“We have such a rich literary heritage in Colorado, and it’s continuing,” Dallas concludes.

Fulcrum will continue, too; his family is carrying on Baron’s legacy. And just three weeks before he passed on April 24 this year, he gave Colorado a real present: the special edition of “The Colorado Book.”

And if your own favorite doesn’t appear in this special edition? “Stick around,” its editors advise. “There will be another edition thirty years from now.”