Collecting Cormac McCarthy's Work Celebrated in New Website

In this guest post for Fine Books, Umberto La Rocca writes about setting up The McCarthyist, a new website about Cormac McCarthy and his work

Is there a better task for a newly retired man than cataloguing his book collection? I guess not. So, a couple of years ago I started working on my quite extensive bunch of over 200 books, letters, and ephemera by or related to Cormac McCarthy.

It was a long but amazing work. However, as I delved into the books, 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 reading critical and biographical essays, digging into relevant archives mainly in the United States and England, and, earlier this year, I spent 10 days researching the Cormac McCarthy papers and the Woolmer collection of Cormac McCarthy held at The University of Texas in San Marcos. I spoke to McCarthy scholars Dianne Luce and Wesley Morgan, important publishers Dan Halpern, Gary Fisketjon and Christopher MacLehose, and McCarthy friends Lanelle Holley, Laurence Gonzales and Cynthia Farah Haines. All of them shared generously their knowledge and information as did many collectors, librarians and rare book dealers.