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Between 1965 and 1969, at the time a second printing was issued, 3,926 copies had sold (Luce, pp.73, 100). Woolmer notes that there is a typo on page 97, line 20: “Slyder” for “Sylder” not corrected in the second printing; and that several copies have been reported with jackets a touch shorter than others.

REVIEW COPIES: review copies with publisher’s slip laid in are noted. Random House sent out at least 125 copies of them before the first edition publication.

REMAINDERED COPIES: Remaindered copies with “H” stamped on first front endpaper were noted. The remaindered copy hold in the Woolmer collection of Cormac Mccarthy shows the “H” in red included in a circle. The book dealer Scott Brown suggested that “copies of The Orchard Keeper with the ‘H’ stamped inside may actually be ‘hurts’ – for publishers these are technically different from remainders. Hurts are books returned from retail stores. Remainders are books that were never sold in the first place. All of the ink stamps prevented bookstores from buying remainders for 50 cents and then ‘returning’ them to the publisher for $3 credit”. 

SECOND PRINTING: A second printing so stated on the copyright page was published by Random House on Fall, 1969 with a short print run of 750 copies. It lists in the “Books by Cormac McCarthy” page The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark published the year before. The new price was $6,95. Dust-jackets printed for the first printing copies and left were price-clipped and used for the second printing copies. All the dustjackets I have seen on second printing copies are price-clipped and, as far as I know, no dust jacket with the new price were noted.

RECIPIENT: Cormac McCarthy in the famous interview to Richard B. Woodward published in The New York Times Magazine on April, 1992 says: “I was always attracted to people who enjoyed a perilous life style”. His friend John Sheddan was certainly one of these. 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 will become the most important secondary characters of the last novel by McCarthy, The Passenger. In the pages devoted to him, he appears as a man who lives a semi-nomad life, based on expedients, on gambling, on forging prescriptions and documents, selling drugs and stealing credit cards; in spite of that he is portrayed also as a literate fellow, sharp and able to talk in depth about philosophy and life. In the best paper I have read about Sheddan, Wesley Morgan, the prominent scholar of McCarthy’s Knoxville and circle, shows that the real Sheddan was not very different by that portrayed in The Passenger (Morgan Wesley, Long John Sheddan in The Passenger: The Actual and the Fictitious, ALA, Boston, MA, May 25, 2023, unpublished). The correspondence between McCarthy and the writer John Fergus Ryan hold at University of Tennessee, confirms that.
It is probable that McCarthy saw in Sheddan the kind of young man who, although in improper and self-destructive ways, fights the conventions of a society that both of them didn’t like. Their friendship lasted all life and when Sheddan passed away on April 25, 1998, McCarthy went to his funeral in Jefferson City along with other mutual friends.

Sheddan was born on February 1, 1936 in Jefferson City, Tennessee, not far from Knoxville. His father was a store-keeper. He had a very long career as a student awarding his first Master of Art Degree in English in 1971, age 35, and his second in Science in 1988. His only marriage, in 1971, lasted instead just three months. Wesley Morgan could establish that he was arrested at least once, on December 1979 and charged “with possession of Marijuana for resale, receiving and dealing stolen property and fraudulent use of a stolen credit card”. On January, 1980 Sheddan was in the Blount County jail where McCarthy visited him. Later on Sheddan tried to write a novel. John Fergus Ryan, a Tennessean writer himself to whom Sheddan was introduced by McCarthy, defined “Lord John” a “fantastic story-teller”. The work, as far as I know, was not completed. The first chapter of it appeared in Voices from the Valley, an anthology published by The Knoxville Writer’s Guild, on October, 1994, under the title “The Man from Davis Hollow”.

McCarthy and Sheddan became friends very early in their life. A fellow student at the University of Tennessee, quoted by Morgan, remembers them “taking a course in American Literature taught by Dr. De Wolfe Miller along with both John Sheddan and Charlie (Cormac) McCarthy in the 1950s” and that “John and Charlie always sat together and had a friendship that extended back some years earlier”. McCarthy used to help his friend who was often in troubles and always looking for money. So, when in January 1995 Sheddan asked him to allow to sell the books McCarthy had inscribed to him, the writer addressed him to his friend, collector and book dealer J. Howard Woolmer.

A note included in the papers of Woolmer hold in the Wittllif collection at The University of Texas in San Marcos tells how went the story. Sheddan tried to sell seventeen or eighteen letters by McCarthy to him other than seven inscribed first editions: this copy of The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, Suttree, Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing. Woolmer purchased all the books but, as for the letters, asked McCarthy what he wanted to do. McCarthy offered to buy them back himself and, after Sheddan had been unsuccessfully trying to sell the letters to the University of Tennessee to get more money, the writer got it trading them for five signed copies of Blood Meridian and five signed copies of Suttree. Also these ten copies were purchased by Woolmer. On February, 24 the books were sent by McCarthy to Woolmer and the book dealer sent to Sheddan a cheque of $ 4,500. Two days after McCarthy took Sheddan to dinner in Knoxville and him was to hand the letters to the writer at that time.

I was able, up to date, to locate just two out of seven of the first editions inscribed to Sheddan. Both The Orchard Keeper and Blood Meridian were sold by Woolmer to I.D. “Nash” Flores III, a banker, business man and book collector born in Texas, CEO of FGR Foods, the franchisee of Au Bon Pain and Uno Due Go that he co-founded. His extensive collection was auctioned at Heritage Auctions in 2014. The Orchard Keeper and Blood Meridian were both purchased by the dealer Raptis Rare Books for respectively $ 11,250 and $ 15,000 and offered at $ 30,000 each. In 2023 I purchased The Orchard Keeper. On March, 2024 Blood Meridian was still on sale but, after McCarthy’s death, its price was raised up to $ 48,000.

PROVENANCE: sold at Heritage Auction on October, 2014. On the first months of 2023, before McCarthy’s death, I purchased it from Raptis Rare Books.

NOTABLE COPIES

• DELISLE COPY. Signed by McCarthy on the half-title page, with a note from Suzanne Beves at Random House, sending McCarthy’s second wife the book: “… I remember you asked for any first printings of The Orchard Keeper that we could lay our hands on. This somewhat battered copy came up from our stock room when I ordered a copy for Jim Wilcox … since he thinks very highly of Cormac’s work, he has been sending some copies to colleagues with notes”. Sold at Bonhams in 2024. Hold in the Paul Ford collection.
• WOOLMER COPY. A review copy, with only the publisher’s slip laid in mentioning no author, title, price but only “May 5, 1965” is in the Woolmer collection of Cormac McCarthy. The book is beautiful with topstain brilliant green, the dustjacket just about very good with edge wear, creases, tears and tape on the verso. It is inscribed on the second half title in black ink and an early hand: “For Howard Woolmer / Cormac McCarthy”.
• HOLLEYS COPY. Book in fair condition, dust jacket poor. Inscribed by McCarthy in a contemporary hand to a couple of longtime friends: “To John & Lanelle Holley / Best Wishes Always / Cormac McCarthy”. Sold at Case Antiques, Knoxville, in 2024.
• GONZALES COPY. A near fine book and dustjacket, inscribed in a later hand to Mccarthy’s friend and biographer Laurence Gonzales. Hold in his private collection.
• MURRAY COPY. A very good copy, inscribed “For Philip Murray / All the best / Cormac McCarthy” was in the Murray collection and sold at auction at Fonsie Mealy in Ireland on December, 2019. On May, 2004 it was listed by First and Fine, book dealer in Birmingham, for $ 26,000.

COLLECTING TOPICS

The Orchard Keeper entered in the rare book market early, simultaneously to the birth of modern firsts collecting and in 1969 a few copies sold for $15. An unsigned copy was listed late in 1978 in the essential Catalogue 38 “American Fiction of the 1960’s” published by Serendipity Books at $ 125.

Signed or inscribed copy are scarce but less than one can expects. Roughly ten copies were sold or offered on the market between July 2023 and May 2024. On that date six copies were offered on Abebooks, although at least one of them featured a strongly disputable signature. They were listed in a price range between $ 12,000 and $ 14,500.

Presentation copies to known people, association copies or copies with a rock solid provenance are completely different fish, are definitely scarce and get premium prices.

Rare Book Hub registers nine signed or inscribed copies at auction.

Second printings signed or inscribed copies are scarcer than the first printing ones. It is not surprising as the second printing was just 750 copies.
Rare Book Hub mentions only one copy at auction. One copy is in the Woolmer collection of Cormac Mccarthy.