The Counselor A Screenplay, first English and first hardback edition. Picador, London, 2013. First English and first hardcover edition, first printing with full number line on the copyright page (“1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2”). Hardcover, 22.3 x 14.2 cm, 184 numbered pages.
Autograph letter signed to George Spencer. El Paso, TX, 1988 Autograph letter to George Spencer, from El Paso, Texas. Two pages on white ruled paper, 18.5 x 12.9 cm, written on one side only in black felt pen.
The Road, advance review copy of the first limited and first illustrated edition. Suntup Press, Irvine, Ca, 2019. Advance review copy of the Suntup limited edition. Softcover, 22.7 x 15.2 cm, 241 numbered pages.
This is neither a Cormac McCarthy bibliography, as I am not a bibliographer, nor a critical essay, as I am not a scholar. The project started three years ago when I retired. Having more free time, I thought it would be good to catalogue my collection of McCarthy books. However, as I delved into them, I realized that many details about publication, first print runs, different issues, and so on were unknown, not based on strong sources, or even definitely wrong. Moreover, some of the people to whom the books were inscribed were similarly little known and had interesting stories worth telling.
So, I started digging into relevant archives mainly in the United States and England, speaking with McCarthy’s friends, publishers, and scholars, reading critical and biographical essays. What you find on this website is part of this research outcome. It aims just to share with McCarthy lovers, collectors, scholars and book dealers, information which sheds light on some little known aspects of McCarthy’s books history and about people whose lives crossed that of the author of Blood Meridian.
This is obviously a work in progress. In the next weeks, I will add information on all the over 250 items included in my McCarthy collection. Register with your email address to receive notifications about new contents added.
Lastly, English is not my mother tongue, so please be forgiving of any errors you may find in the text. Happy reading.
The post that shares the story of how the collector Nate Cooley uncovered several copies of Suttree and Blood Meridian and a denim jacket that may have belonged to Cormac McCarthy, has raised great interest along with some questions. Peter Josyph - artist, McCarthy scholar, author of three amazing books about him, and friend - has expressed doubts about the source and legitimacy of the material related to McCarthy acquisition.
No Country for Old Men, first edition, limited issue. Knopf, New York, 2005. First edition, first printing with “First Edition” and no mention of further printings on the copyright page. One of an unknown number of copies signed in black ink by McCarthy on a publisher’s tipped-in page.
The books by Cormac McCarthy entered the rare books trade and the collecting world very early. As far as we know, McCarthy’s friend Gary Goodman was among the first to trade signed copies of The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark.
On February, 1971 Goodman, having noted a few copies of The Orchard Keeper offered by second hand bookstores for more than the original price, purchased from Random House forty-five copies of Outer Dark and five copies of The Orchard Keeper (probably from the second printing) at a reduced price. He got them signed by McCarthy and resold them at $ 12.50 each. McCarthy was known to a narrow circle at the time and modern firsts market was just starting. Nominal prices were many hundred times lower than those usual today.
The Folio Society keeps on enriching its Cormac McCarthy collection. It just published All the Pretty Horses, which follows limited editions of The Road, Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men.
The McCarthy’s readers and fun community on Reddit, as far as I know the largest in existence, has overcome 30,000 registered people.
"Wake for Susan" and "A Drowning Incident", originally published in 1959 and 1960 in the college review The Phoenix under the name C.J. McCarthy, are among the rarest and most hard to find items in the McCarthy canon. I was able to locate just one set in private hands.
It is, in my opinion, a beautiful portrait. It was taken in the second half of the 80s in El Paso by Cynthia Farah Haines, photographer, writer and Cormac McCarthy’s friend. It was not included though in her book “Literature and Landscape” which collects 50 portraits of southwestern writers and was saved in Cynthia Farah Photograph Collection Writers of the Southwest held at University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.