BLOOD MERIDIAN AND MCCARTHY’S INTEREST FOR ILLUSTRATED EDITIONS

*Blood Meridian, Suntup illustrated edition, numbered issue.*

Blood Meridian, first limited and first illustrated edition, numbered issue

Suntup Editions, Irvine, Ca, 2022.

Limited edition, numbered issue, one of 350 copies, this being copy 175. Hardcover, 23 x15,5 cm., 461 numbered pages. Publisher’s handmade binding, butterfly sewing laced into reddish-brown leather covered boards. “Blood Meridian” embossed on the front cover and the same, written from right to left, embossed on the back cover. Housed in a cigar-style box covered in Italian dark red cloth “with a foil blocked paper label applied to the spine”. Without dustjacket as issued. Frontispiece illustration by Rob Wood who also provided five other water color paintings throughout the book. Introduction by Bret Easton Ellis. Publisher’s bookmark laid in as issued.

Signed by Ellis and Wood on a colophon page at the end of text pages.

CONDITION: as new in as new box.

PROVENANCE: purchased before the publication from Darlene Schroeder in 2021.

Published January 26, 2022 at $975 in a print run of 350 copies.

Preceded by the lettered issue by 23 days.

MCCARTHY AND BLOOD MERIDIAN’S ILLUSTRATED EDITION: McCarthy has always been interested in the relationship between words and images. His engagement with movies is known and his screenplays were studied in depth by Stacey Peebles and other scholars. Less known, as far as I know, is his enthusiasm for illustrated books. While writing Blood Meridian, McCarthy collected a bunch of images aimed to illustrate the book’s first edition. Of course, he was influenced by the drawings and paintings which Samuel Chamberlain had included in his book My Confession, one of the main historical source for Blood Meridian. But there was more. Actually, there are traces of interest by McCarthy for illustrated editions of his earlier works and even for cartoons. In a letter datable to 1963 or 1964 he recommended to his editor Albert Erskine the works of Chilean cartoonist Fernando Krahn . In another letter, mailed in December 1978, he sent to Erskine maps for the endpapers of Blood Meridian first edition. Later on, in a letter to his friend Guy Davenport dated September 16, 1982, McCarthy requested help to find “more old period prints similar to ones that used to be in Harper’s Magazine”. He explained that he had already gathered about twenty of them but he needed more “odd-illustrations for the book”. The book was Blood Meridian which, he told an Ecco Press manager just after the publication, “at some point had to be illustrated”. McCarthy pushed his project for two years but Erskine apparently didn’t give much attention to it as there are no traces of this in his letters to the writer. So, in a letter to Davenport dated November 20, 1984, just four months before the publication of Blood Meridian, McCarthy announced that he had surrendered: “The illustrations were finally vetoed and I suppose its [sic] just as well” (Davenport). Therefore, I guess the Suntup edition met in some way McCarthy’s old wish.

ADVANCE READING COPIES: 30 advance review copies paperbound in pictorial wrappers were possibly issued. Just six of them do exist though. In an email sent in July 2024, the publisher Paul Suntup explained:

“I do not recall how many copies of the ARC were produced but it could have been 30. Usually it was around 25 or 30. These ARC’s included a frontispiece painting which we ended up not using for the published edition. The artist created a different one on my request which I preferred, and that is what was printed in the book. However, at the time we produced the ARC’s, the rejected illustration ended up in there, so all but 6 copies were destroyed”.

I could locate only two of them: one is still in the publisher’s archive, the other is part of an American private collection. As far as I know, none of these has appeared in the market. Book Hub registers no copies at auction. Rare.

COMPLIMENTARY COPIES: 12 copies for presentation do exist. Suntup usually produces 10-15 copies of them for every title published. Only one of them, given by the publisher Paul Suntup to the designer Michael Russem in acknowledgement of his work on the book, and signed by him, have appeared in the market. It was offered by Burnside in December, 2024 for $5,000.

COLLECTING TOPICS: several copies of this Suntup numbered issue were sold in the past two years on the Web, in a range between $1,250 and $2,000, but recently it has become increasingly uncommon and sought after. As of December 2024, only one copy was offered for $ 4,500.

Rare Book Hub doesn’t list copies at auction.

FORGERIES: some forged copy of an illustrated edition of Blood Meridian do exist. They are softcover books in dustjacket and were offered to collectors by Stephen Pastore back in 2012 and 2013. They purported to be “artist’s proofs”, issued in just ten numbered copies, of an illustrated edition to be published by Random House for the 25th anniversary of Blood Meridian’s publication and to coincide with the release of a movie based on the book. Pastore explained that since the movie had been scrapped and Border’s, the book’s co-publisher, had gone bankrupt, the illustrated edition hadn’t gone to print.

More than a few collectors, including me, purchased copies of the presumed proof for amounts varying from $2,000 to $3,000. One of them was Philip Murray. His copy recently sold, without any notice that it was a forgery, at Forum auctions Uk on February, 2023.