The Passenger & Stella Maris, first limited slipcased edition, signed state. Knopf, New York, 2022. First limited edition, only printing, signed state, two volumes housed in a pictorial slipcase. Hardcover, 24,9 x 17,2 cm., 383 + 189 numbered pages with numbers appearing only on odd-numbered pages.
The Counselor, “Scenes of the Crime” in The New Yorker. Advance Magazine Publisher’s Inc. / Condé Nast, New York, 2013.
The Stonemason, uncorrected proof. The Ecco Press, Hopewell, NJ, 1994. Uncorrected proof of the first edition. Softcover, 20.8 x 13.6 cm, 133 numbered pages. Cream wrappers lettered in black on the spine and front panel. The front panel mentions the tentative price of “$23.00” (APG 008a).
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.
Some months ago, Peyton Gupton, a collector from Knoxville, sent me photos of a first edition of Suttree gorgeously inscribed by McCarthy to his friend Jim Long. The book had been acquired by the University of Tennessee in November, 2023 from Jim Long’s widow, Elaine. The inscription is one of the best I have ever seen and plays on the year McCarthy and Long first met and on the title of Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” published in the same year: “For Jim Long / without whose friendship / this book would not exist. / All best to you,...
No Country for Old Men, first edition.Knopf, New York, 2005. First edition, first printing with “First Edition” and no mention of further printings on the copyright page. Hardcover, 22 x 15 cm, 309 numbered pages.
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 McCarthy’s readers and fun community on Reddit, as far as I know the largest in existence, has overcome 30,000 registered people.