The Orchard Keeper, first paperback edition

Ballantine Books, New York, 1969. 

First paperback edition, first (and only) printing with “First printing: May 1969” on the copyright page. Softcover, 17,6 x 10,4 cm., 198 numbered pages. White pictorial wrappers lettered in black and brown, all text block edges stained in dark orange. Price of “75 c” on the front cover along the joint. Praise by Cleveland Plain Dealer, Chicago Tribune Books Today, Chicago Daily News, Ralph Ellison, Robert Penn Warren, Saturday Review on the back cover.

Inscribed by McCarthy on the title page in black ink and in an early hand to his friend Bill Kidwell: “To Ole Bill Kidwell / Best Always / Cormac McCarthy”. A photocopy of a letter by Kidwell to Heritage auctions, explaining his friendship with McCarthy, laid in.

CONDITION: very good.

Published on May, 1969 at 75c., unknown print run    

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Random House on November, 1968 sold the rights of publication in paperback for The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark to Ballantine Books for $ 7,500. McCarthy received the first copies on May 23, 1969. (Luce, p.198). This edition repeats the typo of the first hardback edition on page 97 and adds two others: page 104, line 6, “schuffling” for “scuffling” and page 139, line 3, “brair” for “briar” (Woolmer).  

RECIPIENT: Bill Kidwell was a longtime friend of McCarthy. He was born in Knoxville and studied painting at the University of Tennessee. He worked as an assistant to Kermit Ewing, one of the “Knoxville Seven” artists, and later as a technical illustrator for Lockheed Aircraft in California. During the 1960s he traveled across the U.S. extensively, spending prolonged amounts of time in New Orleans, Berkeley and Taos, New Mexico. He eventually returned to the Knoxville area and taught for a while at the University of Tennessee. Kidwell moved to Middle Tennessee in 1973, and remained there until his death in 2015, exhibiting through galleries in Tennessee, California and North Carolina.

A letter by Kidwell, whose photocopy is laid in the book, is addressed to James Gannon, then director of Rare Books Department at Heritage, and reads in full:

“I met Cormac in 1963 in Knoxville while in vacation from Lockheed Aircraft, Burbank. So I have known him for 50 years this spring.The next meeting was in Atlanta in 1964 at a mutual friend residence. Then in 1969 we lived next door to each other Rockford, TN, and in 1970 I moved in Louisville, TN and he and his wife Annie lived a short distance away on light pink Rd., in a house he owned. Much of the marble used in Washington D.C. come [sic] from that immediate area. During this period 1969 to 1973 we were in touch frequently and in 1972 we collaborated on two mosaic sidewalks in downtown Maryville, TN, which I designed and he engineered. He and I did all the labor for the HUD [Housing and Urban Development US Department] project. I moved to Williamson County near Nashville to a community named Fernvale in 1973 and began building custom homes from recycled materials, mostly timber framed buildings. He called one day in 1978 and asked to come to stay a while which he did. I gave him a job and an old Dodge pickup to drive which had no power steering. Recently he told me he had to put one foot on the dash in order to turn it. He built some additions and one beautiful chimney of limestone and white mortar for a client. His work was absolutely impeccable. During this time he worked with Ben Jones Sr., Ben Jr., Ozro, [sic, he is Osreau in The Stonemason] Perkins, of the Stone Mason [sic] book. They worked together on a large addition to house a duck decoy collection for a Dr. Harrington in Nashville. Cormac designed the room as well as supervised the construction. He left Nashville in 1979 for Tucson, Arizona and then to El Paso, Texas where he lived in Coffin avenue, an appropriate street name for the writing of Blood Meridian. One of the things he told me years ago was when he was in New Orleans writing The Orchard Keeper, was that he used a wooden crate for a desk and on the crate was the inscription, ‘World Renowned’. He made up his mind that that description would apply to him one day. And it did. I owe him so much. He introduced me to books I would never have read and enlightened me in so many ways during our times together. He was and still is the most intelligent person I’ve ever met”.

The Bill Kidwell collection of McCarthy sold at Heritage auctions on March, 2013. Other than this paperback first edition of The Orchard Keeper it included first editions of Blood Meridian, Suttree, All the Pretty Horses and an important copy of The Stonemason, all inscribed to him. Six letters were also part of it.

PROVENANCE: this copy comes from the Bill Kidwell collection and was purchased at Heritage Auctions in 2013.

COLLECTING TOPICS:  I have seen a handful of copies signed or inscribed in the years. Less than ten I would say. One of them, just signed and coming from the estate of McCarthy’s brother William, through Brattle Bookshop in Massachusetts, is in a private American collection. Between July, 2023, and May, 2024, only one other copy, flat signed, was offered on the web at $ 5,000.

Rare Book Hub mentions only this copy at auction.

Scarce.