Party celebrating All the Pretty Horses receiving the National Book Award, invitation card. N.p., November 1992. White card, lettered in black, 14 x 11 cm. Enclosed in two plain white card for preservation and in an Alfred A. Knopf envelop (which may not be the original one).
All the Pretty Horses, first edition. Knopf, New York, 1992. First edition, first printing, stating ”First edition" and no mention of additional printings on the copyright page. Hardcover, 22 x 15 cm, 301 numbered pages. Publisher’s black paper covered and cloth boards, featuring “CM” initials in gilt on the front panel and gilt lettering on the spine. Top text-block edge unstained.
The Road, graphic novel, adapted by Manu Larcenet, uncorrected proof of the first American edition. Abrams ComicArts, New York, 2024. Uncorrected proof of the first American edition, softcover, 26 x 21 cm, 160 unnumbered pages in poor-quality paper, printed in black and white. Publisher’s grey wrappers, lettered in white.
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.
Some months ago, Jud Burgess, a book dealer who runs Brave Books in El Paso, made an amazing discovery. He found in a storage several boxes of books that had once been owned by Cormac McCarthy. The author of Blood Meridian, had lived in El Paso for nearly 25 years, in and out. Therefore, the Texas town promises to be a goldmine for collectors and book hunters.
All the Pretty Horses, first English edition. Picador, London, 1993. First English edition, first printing with complete number line (135798642) on the copyright page. Hardcover, 22.2 x 14.8 cm, 301 numbered pages. Publisher’s white cloth lettered in silver on the 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.
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.
"Wake for Susan" and "A Drowning Incident", originally published in 1959 and 1960 in the college review The Phoenix under the name C.J. McCarthy, are among the rarest and most hard to find items in the McCarthy canon. I was able to locate just one set in private hands.