Child of God, first edition, inscribed to Anne DeLisle. Random House, New York, 1974. First edition, first and only printing, with “First Edition” on the copyright page. Hardcover, 21.5 x 14.6 cm, 197 numbered pages. Publisher’s red paper-covered and black cloth boards, lettered in gold on the spine and with the initials “CMcC” embossed on the front panel.
Cities of the Plain, first Australian edition. Picador, Sydney, 1998. First Australian edition, first printing with complete number line (135798642) on the copyright page. Hardcover, 22.3 x 14 cm, 291 numbered pages. Publisher’s black cloth lettered in silver on spine. Text-block top edge unstained.
The Counselor A Screenplay, first edition. Vintage International/Random House, New York, 2013. First edition, first printing with full number line (10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1) on the copyright page. Softcover, 20.5 x 13.2 cm, 184 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.
Why is Bobby Western’s cat in The Passenger named Billy Ray? The first answer is another question: who cares? In spite of that, I asked myself while reading the book, mainly because of the care which McCarthy paid to choosing names in his novels and the fact that The Passenger features real friends of McCarthy, like John Sheddan, Bill Kidwell or Cynthia Farah, to name just a few. I guessed that the kidnapped cat was named after Billy Ray Reynolds, a talented musician who played guitar with the outlaw singer, the great Waylon Jennings and had a three-decade songwriting career...
Blood Meridian, “The sculphunters” in TriQuarterly. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill., 1980. Advance excerpt from Blood Meridian in TriQuarterly, 48, Spring 1980. Softcover, 23.4 x 15.3 cm., 298 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.