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In spite of the poor sales and the negative reviews to Child of God, Christopher MacLehose, editorial director at Chatto & Windus, didn’t give up on McCarthy and already in Spring 1977, he requested to receive a Xerox copy of his new novel. On January 2, 1979 Carolyn Reidy, Subsidiary Rights Administrator at Random House, sent a copy of Suttree to MacLehose “at the suggestion of Cormac McCarthy”(RH, 1611). The answer of MacLehose is dated 8th January: “Hitherto Mr. McCarthy’s sales in England, with Andre Deutsch for the first two books and with Child of God at Chatto, have been rather modest. If you had 2,000 sets of sheets (which would replace the title page of course) to spare, could you let us have a price on them?”. No extra sheets were available though and on the other hand Chatto & Windus, given the poor sales of Child of God, was not in the mood to afford the costs of printing their own edition. So, on 21 March 1979, MacLehose suggested Chatto was ready to buy a quantity of the bound first edition copies left over. Still in April, Random House answer was negative “as we have 1,800 copies in stock and the rate of sales is such that we don’t foresee a need of additional stock in the near future. Since our own stock is not high, we also cannot sell any of it to you”. Things changed by June though, most probably because of Suttree modest sales in the United States which didn’t require keeping many copies in stock. So, on June 25, 1979, Reidy wrote to MacLehose offering to sell 1,000 bound copies of the first edition at $1.90 each. MacLehose accepted the deal and the contract was completed in October. Chatto replaced the copyright and title pages and provided a completely different dustjacket (Chatto).

RECIPIENT: the book was possibly inscribed to Ken Hubner. Book dealer James Cummins lists a form-postcard sent by him to McCarthy and describes it as following: “Ken Hubner (1936-2020) was a bookseller, owner of Main Street Books in Germantown, NY. He sent author Cormac McCarthy a form-postcard, pre-addressed to Hubner, asking if McCarthy would sign books. McCarthy responds in a much more humane fashion, and assents”.  This is just a speculation though.

COLLECTING TOPICS: examples of this edition are uncommon, as it was distributed in only 1,000 copies. Additionally, copies in collector’s condition are hard to find because of the dust jacket produced in thin and prone to tear paper. Signed or inscribed copies are definitely rare. The only other one I have ever seen was in just good (or worse) conditions and was listed in September 2011 by George Houle for $900. Later on it was purchased by Peter Harrington and sold for roughly $2,000. Significantly, even the collection of Philip Murray, which includes almost all the English first editions inscribed to him, lacks it.