Sending books out onto the river of life: Cormac McCarthy's Library

The latest Smithsonian Magazine Sept/Oct. 2025, has a wonderful essay about the team of vounter scholars of the life and works of Cormac McCarthy, American author, who are spending their free time cataloguing his vast library of over 20,000 books. His books were in boxes, on shelves in heaps on tables and in no order whatsoever, except as they interested him and he bought and rad them. They were also in rental units!

In case you don't know who Cormac McCarthy was/is, he was the author of a dozen highly regarded novels, one of which one a big prize (Pulitzer?) and three of which became movies and made him wealthy: No Country for Old Men, The Road are two of the ones I remember reading about. McCarthy's scholars are devoted to him and are avid about the annotations in the books he read because they show the workings of his apparently unlimited mind. He was literally interested in everything, and in particular, in scienc, and architecture. Interestingly, ne not only voraciously collected books but also, tweed jackets, cowboy boots, and old cars.

I am not a fan of Cormac McCarthy's work although my experience with it is slight. I met him, didn't like him and didn't get to know him any better. I have no aesthetic interest in the bleak dystopian despair of old men, or the soaking up of brutality. Like broken down old cars, cowboy boots and guns, these material artifacts are nof of my world. What we shared was a reverance for books! And a book collector's apetite. Although where we diverged is in his hoarding and my release, these last few years, of my books back into the world. I have no need for boxes of books in storage units.

I do think it is an interesting detective assigment, connecting the annotations and books to the literary works, mining the influences and the branches and connections between the works the author absorbed and the uses he made of the fuel.

"To peer into someone's library, is to peer into their brain, and here, it seemed was a mind that wanted to know everythin." (pg. 128 "There is an intelligence to the universe (of which we are fractal) and that intelligence has a character and that character is benign. Intends well toward all things. How could it not?" McCarthy is known for the bleak, violent, nihilism in many of his novels, so it was a surprise to see him describing the universe as intelligent and well intentioned. (pg. 80)

By the way, they mention in the essay that the McCarthy collection numbers over 20,000 and Hemingway's collection ran to 9,000. I have read a lot abut Hemingway over the years and I never remember any ention of his library or his literary infuences.

Today, I was pondering how to get the Poetry Collection in a bookcase in the attic downstairs and into cartons for my next donation run. I cannot manage those attic steps any more. I was thinking I might put the dog bed at the foot of the attic steps and throw the books down onto it.

Happy Trails, in the woods, in your mind, on the page. wrightj45@yahoo.com