McCarthy was known to a very narrow circle at the time and the modern first editions market was just starting. Nominal prices were several hundred times lower than the ones usually found today. Dianne Luce, perhaps the most authoritative McCarthy scholar, in an email dated February 4, 2024, remembered: 

“I started reading McCarthy in about 1975 or 1976, and none of his books were in print. I asked our local, not so expert, bookdealer to locate copies for me. After a few weeks, I had a phone call from the dealer, who told me he had located firsts of Outer Dark and Child of God through a California dealer. He declared apologetically that the copy of Child of God would be $10, but that since the Outer Dark was signed, he needed to ask $25 for it. I was still in graduate school, and that was quite an expense for me, but trying to hide my exuberance, I told him laconically that I guessed I could manage that.” 
A few years later, at the end of 1978, the important Catalogue 38 was issued by Peter Howard, the owner of Serendipity Books. It was devoted to “American Fiction of the 1960s” and, in the opinion of collectors and bookdealers, it coincides with the true start of modern firsts collecting. It included some titles by McCarthy. A copy of the advance proof of The Orchard Keeper was offered at $125; unsigned first American and British editions of the same title asked respectively $65 and $25; unsigned copies of Outer Dark went for $15 and $12.50; Child of God first American edition was $10. The catalog listed also one of the rarest of McCarthy’s proofs, Suttree, at the time still unpublished, for just $45.

From Canada with Love

At the time Howard’s catalog was published, one of the most important McCarthy collectors had already been working on his collection for ten years. Born in Montreal, Canada, in 1929, Howard J. Woolmer enrolled in the Canadian Merchant Marine at sixteen after forging the date of his birth certificate, and he traveled around the world for the next five years. In 1958, he moved to New York to work for the Australian government. The passion for books prevailed though and he started a rare books business around 1960. 

It was the beginning of an extraordinary career. The bookseller and Woolmer’s friend Richard Gerber writes: 

“In the annals of twentieth-century American independent bookdealers of literature, the name J. Howard Woolmer, though far less well known, might be mentioned alongside those of A. S. W. Rosenbach and L. J. Rosenwald. However, Howard’s skills as a bibliographer also put him in a class of his own” (Richard J. Gerber, “A Profile and Remembrance of J. Howard Woolmer (1929-2022): Gentleman, Scholar, and Bookdealer Extraordinaire,” James Joyce Quarterly, Volume 60, Number 3, Spring 2023, pp. 247-253).

During 50 years of work, Woolmer compiled the first preliminary census of 59 out of the 100 signed copies on Dutch handmade paper of the first Shakespeare and Company edition of Joyce’s Ulysses. Later on he assembled the impressive Leonard L. Milberg Collections of Irish prose, poetry, and theater, American poetry, and Jewish-American writers at Princeton University. Moreover, he wrote remarkable bibliographies of Malcolm Lowry and Hogarth Press. He also worked on a bibliography of Cormac McCarthy, collecting material for years. Unfortunately, he quit but his notes are still of great relevance.

Woolmer met McCarthy’s work in 1969, reading the important review of Outer Dark by the psychiatrist Robert Coles in The New Yorker. On July 29 of the same year, he wrote to McCarthy to introduce himself, to tell him how impressed he was by The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark, and to announce that he was going to collect everything by him. The friendship between them lasted for almost 50 years. One of the results was one of the most relevant collections known to exist, consisting of more than 170 among books, typescripts and ephemeral pieces, and 120 letters. In 2006, Woolmer sold his material to the University of Texas in San Marcos, where it is now part of the Wittliff Collection.
In terms of books, the collection features: all the first American editions up to No Country for Old Men inscribed by McCarthy to Woolmer; all the first British editions, although unsigned, up to Cities of the Plain; many review and complimentary copies; an impressive number of first American and British paperback editions and translations in other languages clearly amassed for the purpose of writing McCarthy’s bibliography; and rare pieces of ephemera. The collection also includes all the proofs known to exist up to 1998 with the only exception of the British advance copy The Orchard Keeper. Some of these proofs (namely, The Orchard Keeper, Child of God, and The Stonemason) are signed or inscribed, which makes them extremely rare. Another aspect that distinguishes the Woolmer Collection is the fact that it includes some rare early copies of McCarthy’s typescripts: the crown jewel is the xerox copy of the typescript of Blood Meridian inscribed to Woolmer.

The Searcher 

Bob “Doc” Sproull, a peculiar man and an unusual McCarthy collector, started his collection around 1986. His experience is an interesting example of the way of collecting McCarthy in the mid-Eighties, through sharp booksellers and by meeting the author in person.

Sproull was born in 1920, grew up in Pennsylvania, served 30 years in the military, and practiced dentistry for a total of 46 years. As Privratsky served in Vietnam, Bob served 39 months during World War II in the 80th Infantry Division, Patton’s Third Army, and during the Korean Conflict. When he retired from the Army as a Colonel, Sproull was Chief of the Hospital Dental Service at William Beaumont Army Medical Center in El Paso and went into private practice for another 23 years. He had many passions: from historical treasure-seeking to art craft, from collecting pre-Columbian artifacts to gourmet cooking. He also had an extensive library (Jan Girand, “Robert “Bob” C. Sproull aka “Doc” (“Papa” to his Grandkids),” in  http://roswellwebmagazine.com/lifestyle-issue-19-2/ ). In 2023, Sprout was 103 years old and still released interviews to local papers. 

In an email sent in 2010, Sproull explained the circumstances in which he knew McCarthy and got his books signed. It reads:

 “I have always loved books and have undoubtedly bought more than my fair share over the years. In 1965 we were assigned to The William Beaumont Army Medical Center in El Paso, Texas. A series of fortunate events made it possible for me to have a Cormac McCarthy collection of signed books he had authored. It became a habit to spend time with George Skans of the Book Gallery and Irv Brown of Hi Books. Irv Brown was the one who pointed me towards Cormac McCarthy, who, fortunately, lived in El Paso at that time. It was about 1986 when Irv handed me Blood Meridian and said I had to buy it and read it. […] Irv had never given me bad advice, so I bought the book. After reading it, I was a Cormac McCarthy fan and actively sought out other books he had written […]. Cormac was a bachelor at that time and did his laundry at the laundromat next to Hi Books every Friday afternoon. He would hang out at Hi Books as the laundry was being done. Anxious to meet Cormac, I would gravitate to Hi Books every Friday afternoon that I could, hoping to meet this great author. After about a month of trying to meet Cormac, I once again arrived at Hi Books on a Friday and said to Irv that Cormac McCarthy was a figment of his imagination. Irv smiled and said, ‘Bob, I’d like you to meet Cormac McCarthy.’ I felt like a teenager at a rock concert! There he was, a gracious and unassuming man! A pattern was established. Any books I found I would drop off to Irv and Cormac would sign them when he came into the bookstore. He would sign them all, hardback or paper! When All the Pretty Horses came out, I went a little obsessive and bought about twenty of them… but Cormac signed them all. The same with The Crossing, which I think I bought at Walden Books as Irv had retired. […] Cormac was by this time being hounded for his autograph and said he would only sign books to specific individuals. Thus most of The Crossing books are for specific names. Cormac moved to Santa Fe and the easy access to his signature ceased, but I got some special editions of his later books. I gave away or traded a good number of his signed editions (which I regret!) but still have a good sampling of his signed books. As I will soon be 90 years old, I feel it is time to find a new home for those treasured signed editions.” 

The bookseller who advised Sproull about McCarthy, Irv Brown of Hi Books in El Paso, was McCarthy’s friend (see Robert Draper, in the interesting article “The Invisible Man” in Texas Monthly, July 1992) and a key figure in collecting his first editions at that time. He was probably the one who also introduced McCarthy’s works to Kenneth Privratsky, another notable collector who will be discussed in the following section.

The Irishman

To meet the second prominent figure in the history of collecting McCarthy, we have to jump to the beginning of the Nineties. Philip Murray was an Irish doctor and a passionate collector of modern first editions. His method was buying the books and then simply writing very polite letters to the authors asking if they were willing to sign them. In doing so, he gathered an impressive collection and many friends. He used to live in Sligo, Ireland, but his wife was Australian so the Murrays traveled there often. It was indeed on one of these trips that Murray became aware of the existence of a writer named Cormac McCarthy. In his book Adventures of a Book Collector (published by Currach Press in 2011), Murray tells the story: 

“In Spring 1990, Vivien and I went on one of our trips to Australia and as usual I spent a few days touring the Sydney bookshops. One of these, in the Eastern suburbs, was owned by an old friend, James Larsen. On the day I went there he was reading a paperback copy of Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy and suggested that I should read it too. I hadn’t heard of the author before and presumed that with a first name like Cormac and a surname like McCarthy he had to be Irish, but James told me he was an American. Back in Ireland I discovered that McCarthy’s books were not available at the time in either hardback or paperback. A short while later, Blood Meridian turned up in an American catalogue and I bought it. The copy was a first American edition, in immaculate condition, with a dust jacket, and it cost me twenty-five American dollars. […] I immediately set out for the other four novels that had appeared by then: The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, and Suttree. Over the next few months, they each turned up in American catalogues and I was able to get them for between twenty and thirty dollars each” (pp. 120-121).

Murray wrote to McCarthy and sent him the books to get them signed. Cormac agreed. This started a long friendship that would bring McCarthy to pay Murray a visit in Sligo in 2004.

The Murray Collection of over 2,000 books was sold at auction in the summer of 2016. But Murray was so fond of McCarthy’s books that they were not included in the auction and they were sold only after he passed away. They were auctioned by Fonsie Mealy Auctioneers in Dublin in 2019. The collection included all the first American editions and many British ones inscribed to Murray, personal letters, and the rare advance copy of the first British edition of The Orchard Keeper. It was highly significant mainly because of material that McCarthy was not used to sign or inscribe, proofs, magazines, and ephemera. Among the inscribed material there was a very rare proof of Blood Meridian and of Cities of the Plain, early proofs of All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing, one of just two known inscribed copies of The Stonemason proof, and some British proofs, which in part came out on the market only in 2024, including rare inscribed copies of All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain.
Murray’s collection was, as far as I know, the most important one along with Woolmer’s. The auction was not given the attention it deserved though. It was possibly because it took place in Ireland, out of the big circuit of the rare books market, or maybe it was not marketed well. Anyway, most of the lots were purchased by a young bookdealer from Birmingham, Alex Wochnik of First and Fine, at very low prices. As an example, the inscribed Blood Meridian proof sold in a lot that included four other minor items for just €1,920. As soon as Wochnik listed it on the web one year later, it sold for eight times the original price.

The Roaring Nineties

The year 1992 opened a new scenario both for McCarthy and for collecting his books. The publication of All the Pretty Horses by Knopf granted him a long and widely read interview in The New York Times and made him a world-renowned writer able to sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Collectors all over the world became suddenly interested in hunting down his first editions and every related material they could find, to such an extent that Woolmer complained about it to his friend in 1995: “I find the whole ‘feeding frenzy’ about Cormac McCarthy rather disgusting. These people never heard of you till Pretty Horses came out and they immediately ‘discovered’ a new writer. But I guess that’s how it goes” (letter to Cormac McCarthy, February 6, 1995, Woolmer Collection of Cormac McCarthy, Texas State University-San Marcos, box 1, folder 8).
The collector magazine Firsts included in its April 1993 issue an article meaningfully titled “The New McCarthyism.” The author, Kenneth Privratsky, reported that at the very beginning of the Nineties a bookdealer offered him a signed first edition of The Orchard Keeper for just $125, when prices for unsigned firsts “rarely exceeded $50” and many bookdealers didn’t even know Cormac McCarthy. The publication of All the Pretty Horses had changed everything, “prices on his firsts have skyrocketed almost beyond belief” so much so that a signed copy of the first book of The Border Trilogy, after just one year of life, “goes for over $ 200.” Privratsky explained that it was “a matter of supply and demand” because the new eager interest in collecting McCarthy collided with the very short first print run of his earliest books.

Privratsky is a retired Major General of the US Army, a professor of British and American literature, and the author of several books. Among them Logistics in The Falklands War and, more recently, The Norwegian Merchant Fleet in the Second World War and the thriller Revenge on the Camino. When he was an Assistant Professor at West Point, he edited three scholarly texts on the works of William Faulkner. He is also a passionate collector of first editions, mainly written by Robert Penn Warren, and owns an important collection of his books. His way of collecting McCarthy is an interesting example. In two emails sent to me on September 25, 2011, Privratsky explained:

 “I started reading and collecting McCarthy in the mid-1980s at the recommendation of a bookseller I met at an Austin TX Book and Paper Show. The man had a bookstore in El Paso and was a frequent acquaintance of McCarthy. McCarthy was living in El Paso at the time and was little known; he supposedly visited the bookstore occasionally. The bookseller offered to get signatures for me. I mailed him several books and he got McCarthy to sign them. I actually got into my interest in McCarthy and threw my interest in Robert Penn Warren, who was touting him.”

The “Renegade” Friend 

People who are in touch with writers of every grade of greatness, relatives, friends, and colleagues who own interesting material for scholars and collectors usually keep it until the author passes away. John Sheddan didn’t. 
In the famous interview by Richard B. Woodward, Cormac McCarthy says: “I was always attracted to people who enjoyed a perilous lifestyle.” His friend John Sheddan was certainly one of them. In the eyes of Alicia Western, the protagonist of Stella Maris, he is just a bad, although useful, guy who helped to forge her birth certificate: “My brother had a criminal friend named John Sheddan…” (Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris, Knopf, New York, 2022, p. 28). For McCarthy he was much more than that though. Sheddan is one of the most important secondary characters in one of McCarthy’s last novels, The Passenger. From the pages devoted to him, he appears as a man who lives a seminomadic life, based on expedients, gambling, forging prescriptions and documents, selling drugs, and stealing credit cards; in spite of that, he is also portrayed as a literate fellow, sharp and able to talk in depth about philosophy and life. In the best paper I have read about Sheddan, Wes Morgan demonstrates that the portrait provided in The Passenger is coherent with the real life of McCarthy’s friend (Wes Morgan, Long John Sheddan inThe Passenger: The Actual and the Fictitious, ALA, Boston, MA, May 25, 2023, unpublished). The correspondence between McCarthy and the writer John Fergus Ryan held at the University of Tennessee, in Knoxville, confirms what Morgan writes.

McCarthy probably saw in Sheddan the kind of young man who, perhaps in improper and self-destructive ways, fights the conventions of a society he doesn’t like. Their friendship lasted throughout their lives and when Sheddan passed away on April 25, 1998, McCarthy went to his funeral in Jefferson City along with other mutual friends. McCarthy used to help his friend who was often in trouble and always looking for money. So, in January 1995 when Sheddan asked McCarthy to allow him to sell the books McCarthy had inscribed to him, the writer addressed him to his friend, collector and bookdealer Howard Woolmer. 
A note included in the Woolmer papers describes how the story went. Sheddan’s collection was small but remarkable: it included inscribed firsts of all the seven novels published until then: The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, Suttree, Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, and The Crossing. Woolmer purchased all the books for an unknown amount of money. Sheddan also had seventeen or eighteen letters and some postcards that McCarthy had sent him over the years. Sensitive material indeed. Woolmer was understandably eager to get it and offered to buy all the letters and to not resell them without the author’s permission. But McCarthy didn’t want that and offered Sheddan to buy them back himself. Sheddan instead tried to get more money by selling them to the University of Tennessee. McCarthy was quite amused by Sheddan’s ploy and described him affectionately as “a renegade.” He actually offered to get the letters and postcards back from Sheddan in exchange for five signed copies of Blood Meridian and five signed copies of Suttree. Sheddan finally accepted the offer and the ten copies were purchased by Woolmer. On February 24, McCarthy sent the books to Woolmer and the bookdealer sent Sheddan a check for $4,500. Two days later, McCarthy took Sheddan to dinner in Knoxville and Sheddan returned the letters to the writer at that time.

I was able to locate just two of the seven first editions inscribed to Sheddan: The Orchard Keeper and Blood Meridian. As for the letters and postcards, it is uncertain whether McCarthy destroyed them or they are still held in the writer’s estate. 

The Iconic Year

The publication of No Country for Old Men and The Road in 2005 and 2006 soon pushed the prices of McCarthy’s books even higher. A year to remember was approaching.

In February 2009, the bookdealers Ken Lopez and Tom Congalton of Between the Covers published a catalog issuing the highlights of the modern first editions collection owned by Bruce Kahn. He is a lawyer in Michigan specialized in mergers and acquisitions and has been a collector since he was a teenager in the 1950s and ‘60s, starting with comic books and then building a comprehensive collection of science fiction first editions. In the mid-Eighties he sold his science fiction collection and started collecting mainstream literature. Over the course of twenty years, he amassed one of the most important American collections of modern firsts: 15,000 volumes, many of them signed or inscribed, almost all in amazing condition. In the preface to the important catalog, Congalton wrote: “What’s the problem with Bruce Kahn? That’s easy: Jeez, he was a pain in the ass to sell books to. He always wanted his books to be in perfect condition, and even the slightest flaw would be either unacceptable, or if he finally decided he could overlook some nearly microscopic flaw, it had damn well better be mitigated by being a unique copy or an exceptional rare book, or an important association copy, or preferably both.” The collection featured among the highlights the best copies I had ever seen of The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark (signed), The Border Trilogy, among others. 

But the best was still to come. In September, one of the most iconic items that a McCarthy collector would be proud to own was auctioned at Bloomsbury: the signed and captioned self-portrait showing the author of Blood Meridian sitting at his desk in front of his typewriter. It was included in one of the most bizarre and interesting collections I have seen. Burt Britton was a meaningful figure in the American book selling and collecting world. He began collecting self-portraits in the mid-Sixties when he was working as a barman at Village Vanguard in New York, the famous jazz club. One night, Norman Mailer was there, drinking and drinking at the counter in front of him well beyond the closing time. When Britton finally convinced him that it was time to go, the writer asked Britton how he could thank him for his kindness. The barman put a paper napkin in front of him and asked him to draw a self-portrait. It was the beginning. Britton eventually went on collecting self-portraits of artists, writers, movie stars, and musicians. When he moved to the legendary Strand bookstore in 1968 and later opened a place to sell books on his own, he had further chances to meet writers. It was most probably there that he got McCarthy’s self-portrait drawn between 1969 and 1976. The Britton Collection was neither marketed very well nor widely announced. Even I came across it by chance just a few days before it was auctioned. So the self-portrait was underrated by collectors to my surprise (and joy).

The biggest event of the year took place in December. The typewriter that McCarthy drew in his self-portrait went itself to auction at Christie’s. The story is known. When the used light blue Lettera 32 Olivetti mechanical typewriter broke, John H. Miller, a friend at the Santa Fe Institute, suggested sending it to an auction house to be sold. The proceeds would go to the New Mexico research institute and, in exchange, he would buy him a replacement typewriter: the same Olivetti model (which he purchased for less than thirty dollars). So, on December 3, Christie’s auctioned the old typewriter with a letter of provenance, estimated at $15,000-20,000. In the letter, McCarthy writes that he bought the typewriter in a Knoxville shop for $50 in 1958 and that it had clacked down all the novels published until then, plus three unpublished, as well as two published plays and some unpublished ones. Dianne Luce has actually clarified that the Olivetti Lettera 32 was not available in the United States until 1964 and that The Orchard Keeper was written on a Royal Quiet Deluxe. Luce’s statement is also confirmed by the correspondence between McCarthy and his editor Albert Erskine.

However, the $100,000 I had amassed to be sure to get it, being very careful to keep my business out of sight from my wife, was not enough. The news of the auction had spread around the world and it became a true event for collectors from everywhere. The typewriter sold for the astonishing price of $254,500.What about McCarthy’s new typewriter? First of all there are two. The first one is that provided by Miller. The second was later purchased and given to McCarthy by his friend and biographer Laurence Gonzales, who had noticed that the author of Blood Meridian used to bring the typewriter up and down from his home to the Santa Fe Institute where he often worked. One of the typewriters is now in the McCarthy estate owned by his youngest son John Frances. The eldest son, Cullen, owns the other.

The Long Wait

The publication of The Road in 2006 (winner of a Pulitzer Prize), the releases of the Cohen brothers’ movie adaptation of No Country for Old Men (winner of a wild bunch of Academy Awards) and John Hillcoat’s The Road in 2009 were followed by a long silence. Meaning that no new novels by McCarthy appeared until The Passenger and Stella Maris were published at the end of 2022, just seven months before the author died.

Prices paid for McCarthy first editions have stabilized, although at a very high range compared to those pre-1992. Attention paid by important book collectors to the author of Blood Meridian and The Border Trilogy hasn’t dropped though. Some of them collect only McCarthy, while others include him in a wider collection of modern firsts. 

These are the years in which Paul Ford, an American manager and businessman, was amassing a very impressive collection devoted exclusively to McCarthy. In an email dated May 10, 2024, he recalled that his interest was born after reading Blood Meridian, followed by all of McCarthy’s other novels. He purchased his first McCarthy book in 2002 from a then very active Texan collector and dealer named Karl Monger. He recently got some very interesting McCarthy books from Anne DeLisle, McCarthy’s second wife. 

Meanwhile, a notable English collector started to include first British editions signed or inscribed by McCarthy in his 15,000 volumes collection of firsts published in the United Kingdom. He recently got some very rare proofs: the only (or maybe one of two) known copy of the advance British proof of The Orchard Keeper from the Murray Collection, and the only copy of the British proof of All the Pretty Horses I have ever seen or heard of to be signed or inscribed.

In those same years, a couple of relevant collections were auctioned. Bill Kidwell was a longtime friend of McCarthy. He was born in Knoxville and studied painting at the University of Tennessee. He worked as an assistant to Kermit Ewing, one of the “Knoxville Seven” artists, and later as a technical illustrator for Lockheed Aircraft in California. During the 1960s, he traveled extensively across the U.S., spending prolonged amounts of time in New Orleans, Berkeley, California, and Taos, New Mexico. He eventually returned to the Knoxville area and taught for a while at the University of Tennessee. Kidwell moved to Middle Tennessee in 1973 and remained there until his death in 2015. He met McCarthy in 1963 and the two men were very close for the following 50 years. The Kidwell Collection sold at Heritage Auctions in March 2013. It included first editions of Blood Meridian, Suttree, All the Pretty Horses, a notable copy of The Stonemason, and a first paperback edition of The Orchard Keeper, all inscribed to him. Six letters were also part of the collection.

An even more important collection went to auction the following year at Heritage. It was owned by I.D. “Nash” Flores III, a banker and businessman. He was born in 1943 and grew up in Floresville, Texas, a town founded by his family on their Spanish land grant. Among the many appointments he covered, he was CEO of FGR Foods, the award-winning franchisee of Au Bon Pain and Uno Due Go, which he co-founded. Flores passed away on October 20, 2013. He was an art and literature enthusiast. He dedicated himself for many years to the Dallas Museum of Art and he amassed an interesting collection of first editions. The books by McCarthy were just a part of it, and some of them are of great interest. His collection included indeed the first editions of The Orchard Keeper and Blood Meridian inscribed to John Sheddan (which we talked about above); the only inscribed copy of the first British edition of The Orchard Keeper and one of just two signed or inscribed proofs of Suttree that I am aware exist. Besides a bunch of other scarce proofs, Flores also owned the correspondence between McCarthy and the writer John Fergus Ryan, which was purchased by the University of Tennessee in Knoxville for $56,250.

The Biographer and the Attorney

Three years later, in 2017, Laurence Gonzales started collecting McCarthy. Gonzales, the author of bestsellers like Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies and Why and Flight 232, received a journalism fellowship at the Santa Fe Institute in 2015 and the following year was appointed as a Miller Scholar at the same institute for the next four years. He had previously met McCarthy but the two writers became friends there and, from 2017 on, the author of Blood Meridian agreed to inscribe all the books that L.G., as his friends called him, presented. “There was only one exception, The Road,” Gonzales told me in 2024, “but I still have on my copy the thumbprint Cormac left on it when he pushed the open book across the table saying ‘Sorry, I can’t sign this.’” Gonzales is now writing the first McCarthy biography, which will probably be published in 2025. Gonzales’ aim as a collector was to have a “complete” run of McCarthy’s novels inscribed to him, including for every title also at least an example of the advance proofs. He achieved it. Almost. His collection lacks only the rarest McCarthy proof, that of Child of God. On the other hand, he has many proofs, some of them very rare to find signed or inscribed: The Orchard Keeper, Suttree, Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain, and even the only signed or inscribed examples of The Gardener’s Son, the early “galley” of No Country for Old Men, and the only advance reading copies of The Passenger and Stella Maris that I have ever seen. What makes his collection even more gorgeous is the exceptional condition of almost all the books.

A new entry in the collecting McCarthy world occurred in 2023. Nathan Cooley, an American attorney who grew up in Arizona and who has family ties in the desert southwest and in Northern Mexico, amassed, in less than two years, an amazing collection of firsts editions by the author of Blood Meridian and Suttree. 

In an email sent to me on July 16, 2024, he recalled:

“I wasn’t a reader as a kid nor as a teenager, but I became a serious reader in my early 20s. When I first started to read voraciously, I didn’t read much fiction, but I read The Road in 2006 and I loved it.  It was different and it resonated with me.  I’d read dystopian novels before —1984, Anthem, The Giver, for example — but The Road was different.  Even though I was newly married and didn’t yet have any children, I could “feel” the father-son narrative.  The story was heartbreaking, but hopeful.  Almost more than anything though, the language, the prose was poetic.  Unlike just about anything I had ever read. Then, in 2007, while on an airplane over the Atlantic Ocean, I watched the Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men and it instantly became a Top-2 favorite all-time movie. Digging into No Country For Old Men, I was intrigued by McCarthy’s reclusiveness, his seemingly salty demeanor, and just his overall approach of not saying much publicly other than what is written in his books.  He was mysterious.”

A few years later he read and was hooked by Outer Dark, Child of God and Blood Meridian:

“Not only is Blood Meridian just superior writing and unparalleled storytelling with layers of depth and symbolism, but the book resonated with me in particular because of its setting. I was born and raised in Arizona.  My dad’s family has been in Arizona for five generations. Though my mom’s roots are also in Arizona, she grew up in Chihuahua, Mexico near the Casas Grandes River about 60 km south of Janos, which are all places described in Blood Meridian.  My grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins all lived in a very small farming community in that part of Chihuahua, and some of my fondest memories as a kid and into my teenage years are from visiting my family in Mexico every year. I also come from a farming family.  My brother, dad, grandfather, and great grandfather all farmed in the Salt River Basin in Arizona, and my family owns farms in West Texas and just off the Colorado River in Yuma, Arizona, all of which are also settings in Blood Meridian. So, for as violent and unhinged as Blood Meridian is as a story, the places described in the book are ‘my’ places”.  

Cooley’s collection of McCarthy includes all the first American editions of novels and screenplays, some of them signed or inscribed, all the limited editions, several first British editions and several proofs. Cooley is now focused on McCarthy’s “ephemera and unique and one-off items.”  Cooley shares pieces from his collection on Instagram where his username is @Malpai_Rare_Books. 

The Passenger’s Legacy

The Passenger and Stella Maris were respectively published on October 25 and December 6, 2022 by Knopf in the United States and by Picador in the United Kingdom. The long-awaited novels raised again a huge attention by collectors. A worldwide sentiment was also caused by McCarthy’s death just six months later on June 13, 2023, at the age of 89. 

In 2023, the University of Tennessee acquired photos, letters, and postcards from Elaine, the widow of Jim Long, the Knoxville man on whom writer Cormac McCarthy based one of the memorable characters from his novel Suttree. James William Long, born in 1930, was a lifelong resident of Knoxville. He and Cormac McCarthy were childhood friends and remained in contact until Long’s death in 2012. Long, under the fictional name J-Bone, was a character in Suttree. The collection is small but includes a first edition copy of Suttree with the best and most important McCarthy inscription I have ever seen. Furthermore, there are a photo of Long and McCarthy as youngsters at St. Mary’s Parochial School, a meaningful letter, and postcards from McCarthy in France, Ireland, Argentina, and Spain.

Since the time I became aware of the University of Tennessee’s purchase, I was wondering where the other books inscribed by McCarthy to his friend could be. My curiosity found an answer in May 2024, when I received an email coming from Wes Morgan through Diane Luce. It listed a series of those books offered one year earlier by Lisa Misosky, the owner of Southland Books in Maryville, Tennessee. Lisa is a notable businesswoman and bookseller, and an admirable activist for LGBTQ+ rights. Because of it, fascist far-right militants tried to assault the bookshop in 2018 but failed thanks to the opposition of dozens of friends and customers who gathered to defend it.

The books she got from Elaine Long, all inscribed by McCarthy to Jim, were Outer Dark (two copies), Blood Meridian with a beautiful inscription, the Everyman’s edition of The Border Trilogy, a trade first of The Stonemason, and a vintage paperback edition of All the Pretty Horses. 

Two exceptional collections were auctioned soon after.

The first one sold at Case Antiques in Knoxville on January 27, 2024 and casted light on John and Lanelle Holley, two very close friends of McCarthy about whom very little was known. Lanelle Whitley Holley is a longtime friend of McCarthy. She was married to John Holley, who was a friend of McCarthy since they were young, well before he met and later married Lanelle in 1963. In a phone interview from February 10, 2024, she recalled that they were so close that John was with Cormac also on the night he proposed to her. As far as McCarthy lived in the East, near or around Knoxville, they met with John Sheddan and other friends from Knoxville. After McCarthy moved to the Southwest, they usually talked to each other on the phone once or twice a year, and Lanelle and Cormac kept on talking also after John passed away. 

John was a great lover of and expert in horses, and he was President of the East Tennessee Quarter Horse Association for some time. As the Quarter Horses (a breed obtained crossing English Thoroughbred with other American-grown horses) were crossed with Mustangs from the western planes, the pioneers found that the new crossbreed had an innate “cow sense,” a natural instinct for working with cattle, making it the quintessential cowboys’ horse. So, in the late Eighties or early Nineties, McCarthy called John asking for help to correctly describe horses in his forthcoming novel All the Pretty Horses and sent him book drafts and excerpts. John revised them and later on also reviewed the ones for The Crossing.

The collection featured all the first editions of McCarthy’s novels inscribed to them (of course, with the exception of The Road), including the only copies of signed or inscribed first trade editions of The Passenger and Stella Maris I have seen along those in the Gonzales Collection. A group of letters was not auctioned but was privately sold to the University of Texas, San Marcos, and is now held in the Wittliff Collection. Even more interesting were three early copies of McCarthy’s typescripts (The Gardener’s Son, Cities of the Plain, and No Country for Old Men): they ended in the hands of the historical documents expert Stuart Lutz, who listed them briefly on the web and soon sold them to a very clever American bookdealer. It is worth noting that the No Country for Old Men manuscript dates back to one year before the book was published, it is inscribed by McCarthy to John Holley and is accompanied by a McCarthy letter, which attests that it is one of just two copies in circulation at the time. 

In April 2024, Bonhams auctioned books and other items coming from Anne DeLisle, McCarthy’s second wife. Among the highlights was the writing desk of the author of Suttree, which sold for $20,480. However, according to Laurence Gonzales, McCarthy’s friend and author of a forthcoming biography, “he generally wrote in bed. He did occasionally use a desk, but the place where the bulk of his work took place and where all of his novels were written was not at a desk but in bed. He liked to have furniture for show, but that’s often all it was. He liked to come to the Santa Fe Institute and sit at a desk, but that was generally just to open his mail or do other tasks not related to his actual fiction writing. Whoever bought his desk did not buy the place where Suttree or any of his novels were written.”

The collection also included first editions inscribed to Anne of Blood Meridian, Child of God (American and British), The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain; two signed copies of The Orchard Keeper, one of Suttree, a rare second printing of The Stonemason, and two even rarer inscribed photographs. Moreover, a very peculiar copy of Child of God described (disputably) by Bonhams as a “rare publisher’s presentation binding” was auctioned. Other materials of scholarly interest were not auctioned off but are going to universities. 

A very interesting discovery was made that same month by Jud Burgess, owner of Brave Books in El Paso. McCarthy told to Robert Woodward in 1992 that he estimated to own “about 7,000 books, nearly all of them in storage lockers”. Burgess was able to acquire roughly 1,500 of them, which McCarthy had left in an El Paso storage when he moved to Santa Fe. They were not, of course, the books in which McCarthy was most interested as he had left them behind. There were some amazing items though. Among them, ephemera related to the MacArthur Foundation grant, a Modern Library copy of Stars in their Courses by Shelby Foote inscribed by him to the author of Blood Meridian; a complimentary copy of The Leonard L. Milberg Collection of American Poetry sent to McCarthy by Woolmer; a copy of Scalphunters by Reid; a copy of Meditations on Quixote by Ortega y Gassett with a few notations in McCarthy’s hand; McCarthy’s copy of the essays collected in Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy with a letter by Chip Arnold laid in; a limited edition copy of Baby’s First Step signed by Updike and marked by the publisher “CMC,” Cormac McCarthy’s copy.

Forgeries, Disputable Signatures and Adulterations

McCarthy’s collectors know very well that forgeries have always been a big issue. Forgeries of the writer’s signature have been around from the very beginning of the Nineties. Some of them are easily detectable, but others are very well made and difficult to unveil even for a trained eye. What is less generally known is that whole books, especially proof copies, are forged too. Scott Brown, owner of Downtown Brown Books in Portland, Oregon, did a very good job describing some of them in his blog

( https://downtownbrown.substack.com/p/cormac-mccarthys-early-proofs-real-and-fake ). 

In April 2013, I received an email by Ken Lopez, a well-known and clever bookdealer from Massachusetts. I had purchased some first editions from him in the past five years and he knew I had an interesting collection of Cormac McCarthy. He asked me if I had an Outer Dark advance proof as he had been offered one and had doubts about its authenticity. I was very surprised as I had acquired a copy just a few weeks earlier after spending years looking for it. Moreover, another copy had appeared at the same time on the web, offered for $5,500. So, what were the odds that three specimens of a book that nobody had seen for 45 years had just appeared in less than a month? Possible yes, but not likely. So, I sent my copy to Ken and he established beyond any doubt that it was a fake like the other one he was offered. As soon as I informed the seller who was listing the third copy on the web that it was probably a forgery, he correctly withdrew the book from the market.

I had purchased my copy from a man who had introduced himself under the name of Carson Otley, owner of Cape Cod Books in Forestdale, Massachusetts. He had hooked me by selling a cheap poster related to Cormac McCarthy. After that he sold me a dozen of presumed rare firsts or proofs by McCarthy. A quick check with the author, thanks to the help of his agent Amanda Urban, and with Chip Kidd from Knopf’s art department, regarding some trial dust jackets, revealed that they were all forgeries. 

Of course it also turned out that there was no Carson Otley and no Cape Cod Books. Nevertheless, my payments were made to a bank account on behalf of Grand Oak Rare Books Inc. A research on the web unveiled that the company was related to a man named Stephen Pastore and that Grand Oak had published several books by him and only by him. Pastore, who sadly passed away on February 24, 2023, was born in the Bronx in 1946, the youngest of four children to a family of Italian immigrants. Reportedly, he graduated from the University of Arizona and Fordham Law School. After that, he owned or ran a series of popular and successful nightclubs from Miami to Manhattan over a twenty-year-span. His most high-profile clubs included Z in Miami, Sound Factory, Sound Factory Bar, and the internationally renowned Twilo in New York City. He was known by thousands of New York club-goers as simply TwiloBoss.

He wrote novels, literary essays, and bibliographic studies. Reportedly, some episodes of the popular TV series Dexter are based on short stories by Pastore. He also cultivated a special fascination for researching Adolf Hitler and Nazism, and he developed a wonderful craft in producing and binding books. “He may have been a savant,” says Paul Ford, who coauthored with him a Cormac McCarthy bibliography before breaking up the relationship as soon as he became aware of the forgeries in which Pastore was involved.
Pastore either forged or, less probably, distributed forgeries made by somebody else of: the American proof of Outer Dark and Child of God; long galleys of Child of God and Blood Meridian pretending to be Albert Erskine’s copies; “printer’s proof” of All the Pretty Horses both in softcover and hardcover format with a fake dust jacket different from the Chip Kidd genuine one; British advance proofs of The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, Suttree, and The Stonemason; proofs of a nonexistent Blood Meridian illustrated edition; limited edition copies of The Road; three printer’s proof of a poster for a James Franco movie based on Blood Meridian, and God knows what else. He also sold on the market eleven weird and darkly impressive boxes related to McCarthy works, pretending to be “produced by the Borders Group and various publishers in honor of CM’s achievements. They were to coincide with the 25^th anniversary of Blood Meridian, the release of the movie, and the publication of the illustrated Blood Meridian. They were to be presented to Cormac McCarthy as a public relations blitz to support these events. Unfortunately, the movie went bust (on hold indefinitely) and Borders went bankrupt. These boxes ended up in a storage facility during the bankruptcy proceedings but were rescued (or taken) by somebody.”

Forgeries put on the market by Pastore have spread across collections and keep on appearing here and there. The last ones were two British proofs of Outer Dark and Child of God coming from the Philip Murray Collection and auctioned by Forum UK Auctions on September 30, 2023, selling for £1,440 and purchased by collectors or bookdealers who were as naive as I once was. In February 2024, less than one year after Pastore passed away, some books from his collection appeared on sale on the web listed by an otherwise unknown dealer named Ultra Premium Classics based in Marston Mills, Massachusetts. At least four of the McCarthy titles listed were forgeries. Especially notable was a first edition of All the Pretty Horses pretending to be Albert Erskine’s copy inscribed by McCarthy to him. It is also of some interest that, among the books listed, there was a copy of Travel at Home by Mark Twain with the author’s signature forged by Eugene Field, Jr. 

At the end of the day, though, I wonder: McCarthy certainly didn’t like that somebody had forged his books, but are we sure that he wouldn’t like Pastore’s borderline, complex life, his imagination, and his skills in working with his hands? Wasn’t he the one who actually told Bob Woodward: “I was always attracted to people who enjoyed a perilous lifestyle”? Wasn’t he the one who was indulgent? He was also a long-time friend of Clifford Irving, who was known for writing a famous fake autobiography of Howard Hughes; in 1973, McCarthy asked Random House to send Irving a complimentary copy of Child of God at the State Penitentiary in Danbury, Connecticut, where he was serving his sentence (Random House records, Box 1611, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library).

But Pastore was not the only one who produced or marketed fake proof copies of Outer Dark. A forged proof, by far of lower quality, appeared on the web at the beginning of 2024. It was part of a group of McCarthy proofs, owned by a serious collector, which also included some genuine copies of other titles. But two of them, Outer Dark and Child of God, are certainly forgeries. 

After McCarthy’s death on June 13, 2023, the production of forgeries exploded due to the renewed attention on him and the dizzying rise in prices. Besides the usual signature forgeries, a few sellers offered truly hard-to-find items signed by McCarthy at a frenetic rhythm. In just a few months, an established American bookdealer offered: a copy of the 25^th anniversary edition of Blood Meridian, one of The Sewanee Review including the first appearance of The Orchard Keeper signed on the front cover, a signed copy of the TriQuarterly issue featuring an advance excerpt of Blood Meridian, and three first editions by other writers signed by McCarthy and pretending to come from his own library: The Town and The Reivers by Faulkner, and Conclusive Evidence by Nabokov. As the signatures in the books were similar and, in my opinion, disputable, and no provenance was offered in the listing of all the items, I tried to confirm whether they were fake or not. A further question to the bookdealer to make the books’ provenance crystal clear remained unanswered. So, thanks to Dianne Luce’s help, in an email dated April 18, 2024, I sent a photo of Conclusive Evidence signed by McCarthy and got an answer by Dennis McCarthy, Cormac’s younger brother. It deserves to be quoted almost in full: 

“I wish my answer could reach booksellers across the universe: there’s a 99.44% chance that this is a fake. For several reasons. Yes, Cormac’s LIBRARY is still intact. No, Cormac didn’t sign books in his library. The only books he ever signed were for friends, and those, of course, were novels he wrote, not books written by others. The number of books he did sign was minuscule compared to the number that have appeared for sale on the Web. Cormac bought books, he didn’t sell them. He didn’t lend or give them away either. Is there a remote possibility that many many years ago, long before he became famous, a friend asked him to sign a novel written by someone else and he agreed to do it as a bit of a lark? Yes, but the chances of that happening are less than 0.01%. […] 

—Dennis”

Of course, Dennis McCarthy refers to McCarthy’s library in his house in Santa Fe and not to the big bunch of books left in El Paso and recently purchased by Jud Burgess of Brave Books. However, it is interesting to note that none of these, as far as I know, bear McCarthy’s ownership signature. 

The words of McCarthy’s brother throw more than a shadow not only on the books by other authors pretending to come from the writer’s library but also on McCarthy’s signed rare titles listed by the same bookdealer. 

A practice that can’t be defined as forging a book but is still disputable appeared after the publication of The Passenger and Stella Maris. It consists in excising the signed page tipped in the limited boxed edition of the two books and bound in earlier, more valuable first editions by McCarthy. At the beginning of 2024, I came across some examples of it: firsts of Child of God, and No Country for Old Men “signed” this way were offered, a copy of Blood Meridian sold for $3,900, a copy of The Road for $1,500, and a copy of All the Pretty Horses for $491. Another copy of Blood Meridian was listed at $4,900. These copies, although not forged, are adulterated and not original. So, in my opinion, they are of no interest to serious collectors.

At the end of the day, the only way I know to escape McCarthy forgeries, or at least to try, is the one clearly suggested at the end of Dennis’ email: 

“That said, the only signatures I would ever endorse are ones accompanied by a verifiable provenance, and even then I’d be skeptical. And as Cormac would say, you can take that to the bank.”