Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West [Inscribed]

New York: Random House, 1985. First edition, first printing. Hardcover. Near Fine/Near Fine. Inscribed by Cormac McCarthy in black ink on the half-title page to Santa Fe bookseller, Nicholas Potter: "For Nicholas Potter | With all best wishes | from your friend | Cormac McCarthy."

337 pp. Octavo [21.5 cm]. Publisher's red cloth and red paper-covered boards, lettering stamped in gilt with ruling in metallic red. Maroon dust jacket designed by Richard Adelson with red typography and Salvador Dalì's "The Phantom Cart" on the front. Photograph of the author by Mark Morrow on the back. First edition clearly stated on the copyright page. Dust jacket with "$17.95" price intact at top-front flap and "3/85" code at the bottom of the rear flap. Housed in a custom slipcase by Robert Wang of Denver, mirroring the dust jacket design.

A Near Fine copy, with only a few light spots of surface soil at the edges of the text block, which is otherwise clean, solid, and square. The dust jacket is also Near Fine, with only very light surface rubbing, some minor wear near the folds, and just a hint of toning at the top edge. A bright, attractive copy with an intimate association. A significant association copy, warmly inscribed by the notoriously reclusive author to his long-time friend, the late Santa Fe bookseller Nicholas Potter. Throughout a friendship spanning forty years, Potter's bookstore served as a frequent destination for McCarthy, where the two shared a rapport rooted in their mutual appreciation of literature, art, music, and history. This volume represents a vital fragment of that connection; McCarthy, who famously avoided public life, inscribed most of his published works to Potter.

A short note in Nicholas Potter's hand is laid in: "Incredibly powerful prose combined with a dark and bloody subject matter. This copy inscribed to me by Cormac in the mid 1990's. Very rare inscribed. 1st issue, without remainder mark (fewer than 2,000 of the 5,000 copy printing were sold before it was remaindered). Considered by many to be the greatest American novel of the 2nd half of the 20th century."

Largely ignored upon its release, Blood Meridian is now widely considered the preeminent American novel of the late twentieth century. Set amidst the scorched landscapes of the mid-nineteenth-century American Southwest, McCarthy completely reimagines the Western myth. A significant departure from the author's previous four Southern Gothic works, McCarthy takes a leap into the desert sublime. The narrative tracks the harrowing journey of "The Kid" through a landscape of escalating depravity, haunted by the terrifyingly eloquent and primordial figure of "The Judge." Renowned for its beautiful apocalyptic prose, the novel stands as a monumental interrogation of the violence of history and the nature of evil.