Blood Meridian, first English edition, review copy
Picador, London, 1989.
First English edition, first and only printing with complete number line from 9 to 1 on the copyright page. Hardcover, 22 x 14,5 cm, 337 numbered pages. Publisher’s red cloth lettered in white on the spine. White dust jacket lettered in red and black with a wraparound illustration by George Sharp. Price of “U.K. £11.95” on the back flap.
Review copy with publisher’s “Picador Hardbacks” slip laid in, mentioning “10 March 1989” as date of publication (APG 005d).
CONDITION: a near fine book in a near fine dustjacket. A lovely copy.
PROVENANCE: purchased from an English collector in 2023.
This is the first book published by McCarthy with Picador, the imprint founded by Sonny Mehta in 1972. The first four novels had been published in Great Britain by André Deutsch (The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark) and by Chatto & Windus (Child of God and Suttree). All of them had sold poorly. Apparently, Blood Meridian was not a huge success either. In 1998, Michael Coffey wrote in The Observer: “When Cormac McCarthy’s fifth novel, Blood Meridian, was first published in Britain in 1989, a fellow novelist as distinguished as Ireland’s John Banville had never heard of the author, as he admitted in a rave Irish Times review (“unlike anything I have read in recent years … an extraordinary, breathtaking achievement”). When I was handed the galley of All the Pretty Horses in 1992 and read the first page and quickly the next hundred, calls to several literary friends turned up but one-the novelist-editor Bradford Morrow-who knew of Mr. McCarthy” (Michael Coffey, McCarthy Continues to Dazzle Without Delivering a Big Yarn, in The Obsever, January 6, 1998).
Since Blood Meridian, Picador have published all the further books by McCarthy in England.
COLLECTING TOPICS: Review copies of this edition are scarce. As far as I remember, I came across only one, which sold for $650 in 2016.
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