No Country For Old Men (Inscribed Association Copy)

McCarthy, Cormac. No Country for Old Men. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. First edition, first printing. With “First Edition” stated on the copyright page. A signed and inscribed association copy of this work. This copy belonged to Jacob Rogers who was the son of Cormac McCarthy’s longtime assistant Rick Rogers. Octavo. 309 pages. Original black cloth, spine lettered in gilt; in the original pictorial dust jacket designed by Chip Kidd, with the publisher’s $24.95 price present on the front flap. VG+ book in VG+ jacket. Rick Rogers worked for McCarthy for more than a decade, assisting with practical matters such as caring for McCarthy’s cars, watching over his storage facilities in El Paso, and building bookshelves and furniture for him in Santa Fe. The Rogers and McCarthy families knew one another personally and visited often, making Jacob Rogers a meaningful recipient rather than a casual name in an inscription. Inscribed copies are rare on the market and much rarer than the readily available tipped in page variety. No Country for Old Men stands at the meeting point of McCarthy’s late style and the moral terrain of the Border Trilogy: spare, violent, philosophical, and stripped almost to the bone. Set along the Texas-Mexico border, the novel turns a failed drug deal and a suitcase of money into a bleak meditation on chance, evil, aging, and the limits of law in a world that seems to have outrun old codes of conduct. The book became one of McCarthy’s most visible works after the Coen brothers’ celebrated 2007 film adaptation, but the novel remains a hard, unnerving performance on its own terms. First printings are desirable as the true trade issue of a title that brought McCarthy to a still wider readership late in his career. A clean first edition, first printing in the original dust jacket is an essential modern McCarthy item.…