Outer Dark (Inscribed First Edition)

Cormac McCarthy

Published by Random House, New York, 1968

About this Item

MCCARTHY, Cormac. Outer Dark. New York: Random House, 1968. First edition, first printing, with ?First Printing? stated on the copyright page. Octavo; publisher?s blue-gray boards with light blue cloth spine and blue-green top stain; original dust jacket with $4.95 price intact. Inscribed by Cormac McCarthy to ?Dr. & Mrs. Frank Rogers.?

Condition: Very Good in Very Good dust jacket. Book is sound and complete, with a bold, unfaded top stain and only a very slight forward lean. Jacket presents well, retaining its original price, with two small closed tears, some wear to the spine ends, and light handling wear consistent with grade.

Note: Outer Dark is McCarthy?s second novel, following The Orchard Keeper, and remains one of the scarcest and most atmospheric of his early Random House titles. First-printing copies are identified by the stated ?First Printing? and are especially desirable in the original priced jacket. The present copy bearing McCarthy?s inscription to Dr. and Mrs. Frank Rogers, is a meaningful addition in a market where signed and inscribed copies of the author?s early novels are notably uncommon. Particularly presentation copies from early in McCarthy?s career. Dr. Rogers appears to have been a Knoxville dentist as well as a sort of local Knoxville historian. It?s not clear whether he was McCarthy?s dentist, but it?s possible.

Importance: Set in an elemental Appalachian landscape and written in the spare, biblical, and hallucinatory idiom that would come to define McCarthy?s mature work, Outer Dark occupies a crucial place in the development of one of the major American novelists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Long admired by readers of McCarthy?s darker early fiction, the novel has taken on renewed visibility with reports of an impending film adaptation, adding timely cultural interest to its established literary and collectible importance.

Seller Inventory # ODIC-001

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Outer Dark (Inscribed First Edition)
• Publisher: Random House, New York
• Publication Date: 1968
• Language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Printing: 1st Printing
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Signed: Inscribed by Author(s)