In Memoriam: Jake Page, Prolific Author and Editor

Rio Nuevo Publishers regrets the recent passing of Jake Page, an editor and author of more than fifty books, friend, and colleague to many in the book business for half a century.

Born in Boston in 1936, James Keena “Jake” Page Jr. was everything from a ranch hand to a hard-rock miner. Page graduated from Princeton in 1958 and received his Master of Arts degree in 1959 from New York University. He began his fifty-year career as editor for Doubleday’s Anchor Books, became editor for Natural History Press (1963–70), and then joined Smithsonian Magazine, where he edited and wrote articles well into the 1990s.

In 1982 Page and his wife, photojournalist Susanne Anderson Page, published HOPI, an intimate portrait of the Hopi people, followed in 1995 by NAVAJO, also a beautifully illustrated book, both reprinted by Rio Nuevo Publishers. About that time he began writing detective novels and science books for the general reader, and continued to write about Native American culture, publishing In the Hands of the Great Spirit: The 20,000 year history of the American Indians (2003), Indian Arts of the Southwest with Rio Nuevo in 2009, and Uprising: The Pueblo Indians and the First American War for Religious Freedom in 2013.

It was an honor and a pleasure to work with him.