McCarthy, Cormac (1992) ‘All the Pretty Horses’, US signed and inscribed uncorrected proof

Provenance: James Cahill is an American bookdealer. We can trace the ownership back to the inscribess. We have also compared the handwriting with other matching examples from the early 1990s.

Cormac McCarthy is a very private author who has granted just a handful of interviews to journalists. His principle is that it is better to write than to talk about writing. As a result genuine signed books are few and far between and provenance is key. We recommend that ‘flat signed’ copies should be avoided by the collector as signed material is rare and many forgers cannot resist the temptation of ‘enhancing a book’s monetary value’. Whilst a ‘flat signed’ copy might be genuine, in our opinion the risk of acquiring a forgery is too great.

‘All the Pretty Horses’ is McCarthy’s sixth novel and the first in his ‘Border Trilogy’. The book bacame McCarthy’s breaktrhough work and earned him the U.S. National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Filmed in 2000 starring Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz. Genuinely signed and inscribed uncorrected proofs are very scarce.