Stella Maris, first Italian edition. Einaudi, Torino, 2023. First Italian edition, first printing with “Stampato…nel mese di settembre 2023”, full number line and years line (“Ristampa 0 1 2 3 4 5” and “Anno 2023 2024 2025 2026” on the last page). Hardcover, 22,3 x 14,2 cm., 194 numbered pages. Publisher’s usual greenish grey boards lettered in black and with publisher’s logo on spine.
The Passenger (Il passeggero), first Italian edition. Einaudi, Torino, 2023. First Italian edition, first printing with “Stampato…nel mese di maggio 2023”, full number line and years line (“Ristampa 0 1 2 3 4 5” and “Anno 2023 2024 2025 2026”) on the last page. Hardcover, 22,3 x 14,6 cm., 385 numbered pages. Publisher’s usual greenish grey boards lettered in black and with publisher’s logo on spine.
The Passenger & Stella Maris, limited advance reading copies of the boxed English edition, slipcased. Picador, London, 2022. Advance reading copies of the boxed English editions. Two volumes. Hardcovers, 20,6 x 13,5 cm., 381 and 189 numbered pages with numbers appearing only on the odd-numbered pages. Publisher’s red cloth lettered in black and white for The Passenger, blue cloth lettered in black and white for Stella Maris. No dust jacket as issued. Front panels of both books read “Limited edition…
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…
Stella Maris, first Italian edition. Einaudi, Torino, 2023. First Italian edition, first printing with “Stampato…nel mese di settembre 2023”, full number line and years line (“Ristampa 0 1 2 3 4 5” and “Anno 2023 2024 2025 2026” on the last page). Hardcover, 22,3 x 14,2 cm., 194 numbered pages. Publisher’s usual greenish grey boards lettered in black and with publisher’s logo on spine.
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.
Three weeks ago Texas State University’s Wittliff Collections announced that it had expanded its archives dedicated to Cormac McCarthy, adding 36 banker’s boxes filled with his personal journals, photos, letters, and drafts of unpublished novels, coming from the McCarthy’s estate. Now, another key achievement is close to being completed: the university and Anne De Lisle are close to reaching an agreement for the letters that McCarthy wrote to his second wife. There is a strong chance that they will be…
Five letters by Cormac McCarthy to the writer and traveller, Lawrence Millman, dating from 1981 to 1983, are set to be offered for sale by the English book dealer Alexander Wochnik of First and Fine.
The Folio Society keeps on enriching its Cormac McCarthy collection. It just published All the Pretty Horses, which follows limited editions of The Road, Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men.
The McCarthy’s readers and fun community on Reddit, as far as I know the largest in existence, has overcome 30,000 registered people.