STELLA MARIS, THE DELAY OF PUBLICATION, AND THE THREE STATES OF THE ARCS

*Stella Maris, advance reading copy, first state: the front cover. Front covers of the second and the third states are identical to that of the first state.*

Stella Maris, advance reading copy, first, and third state.

Knopf, New York, 2022.

Advance reader’s copy of the first trade edition, first and third state. Softcover, 23,5 x 15,6 cm., 189 numbered pages with numbers appearing only on the odd-numbered pages. Matte wrappers reproducing the design of the trade first edition dust jacket by Chip Kidd lettered in white on spine and front panel. The inside publishing info page mentions “22 November 2022” as date of publication, a price of $26 for the USA market and $35 for Canada and a 300,000 copies print run for the first trade edition, first printing.

CONDITION: my collection houses copies of the first and third state. It lacks a copy of the second one. The first state copy is very good only, the third state copy is near fine.

The advance reader’s copies of Stella Maris are known in three different state resulting from the delay of publication:

the first state reads on the spine “On Sale / November 2022” and the inside publication info page states: “On sale: 22 November 2022“. Copies in the first state have been noted with a publisher’s sheet laid in, reading: “Dear Reader, Please note the on-sale-date of STELLA MARIS is now 12/6/22. Thank you”.

The second state is the same of the first but features the publisher’s sheet tipped into the book.

The third state features a publisher’s sticker lettered in black, glued to the top of spine, reading: “On Sale /December 2022”; the inside publishing info page is identical to that of the first state as still mentions as date of publication “22 November 2022”.

Apparently, the publisher quit to print a new stock of advance reading copies including in it the corrections, similarly to what they did for The Passenger. They restricted theirselves to correct already printed first state copies.

No priority has been determined between the second and third state.

We don’t know when these advance reading copies were issued or how many copies were printed, because the Knopf records remain closed (at least to me). All we know is that they were aimed primarily to marketing (as shown by the marketing info page included), that they were preceded by at least one bound proof pages copy, and that a copy in the second state was available in June, 2022.

NOTABLE COPIES:

GONZALES COPY. An advance reading copy, inscribed, is housed in the collection of Laurence Gonzales, friend of McCarthy and author of a forthcoming biography of him. This is one of two McCarthy’s personal copies.

COLLECTING TOPICS: these advance reading copies are scarcer than those of The Passenger. The second state appears to be rare. I came across only one copy, owned by the book dealer Amir Naghib.

I know of only one copy signed or inscribed, the Gonzales copy quoted above. These are certainly rare.