Books

New York: Random House, 1965. First edition of the author's rare first book. Octavo, original half cloth. Signed by Cormac McCarthy on the title page in a contemporary hand. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket with some light wear to the extremities. Jacket design by Muriel Nasser. Books signed by McCarthy are uncommon, especially his earlier novels. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box made by the Harcourt Bindery. The novels of Cormac McCarthy owe much to William Faulkner, especially in their "use of dialect and concrete sense of the world— a debt McCarthy does not dispute. ‘The ugly fact is books are made out of books,’ he says. ‘The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.' "Cormac McCarthy is expert in generating an emotional climate, in suggesting instead of in stating, in creating a long succession of brief, dramatic scenes described with flashing visual impact" (The New York Times). James A. Michener said of it,…

The Orchard Keeper was Cormac McCarthy's first novel, a work of rich, poetic prose, telling the intertwining tales of a rural trio trapped by acts of violence and a mysteriously connected orchard.