{"id":14016,"date":"2025-09-30T11:21:57","date_gmt":"2025-09-30T18:21:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=14016"},"modified":"2025-10-11T15:36:25","modified_gmt":"2025-10-11T22:36:25","slug":"cormacs-library","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2025\/09\/30\/cormacs-library\/","title":{"rendered":"Cormac’s Library"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

from Smithsonian Magazine<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two Years After Cormac McCarthy\u2019s Death, Rare Access to His Personal Library Reveals the Man Behind the Myth<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

The famously reclusive novelist amassed a collection of thousands of books ranging in topics from philosophical treatises to advanced mathematics to the naked mole-rat<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By\u00a0Richard Grant<\/a> \/ Photographs by\u00a0Wayne Martin Belger<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"McCarthy
McCarthy was a devoted carpenter and designed these nine-foot-tall shelves along the walls of his living room, with room for 1,000 books\u2014a mere 5 percent of the author\u2019s sprawling personal library.\u00a0Wayne Martin Belger<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Cormac McCarthy, one of the greatest novelists America has ever produced and one of the most private, had been dead for 13 months when I arrived at his final residence outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was a stately old adobe house, two stories high with beam-ends jutting out of the exterior walls, set back from a country road in a valley below the mountains. First built in 1892, the house was expanded and modernized in the 1970s and extensively modified by McCarthy himself, who, it turns out, was a self-taught architect as well as a master of literary fiction. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was invited to the house by two McCarthy scholars who were embroiled in a herculean endeavor. Working unpaid, with help from other volunteer scholars and occasional graduate students, they had taken it upon themselves to physically examine and digitally catalog every single book in McCarthy\u2019s enormous and chaotically disorganized personal library. They were guessing it contained upwards of 20,000 volumes. By comparison, Ernest Hemingway, considered a voracious book collector, left behind a personal library of 9,000. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What makes McCarthy\u2019s library so intriguing is not just its size, nor the fact that very few people know about it. His books, many of which are annotated with margin comments, promise to reveal far more about this elusive literary giant than the few cagey interviews he gave when he was alive. For as long as people have been reading McCarthy, they have speculated about which books and authors informed and inspired his work, a subject he was loath to discuss. They have wondered about his interests and true personality because all he presented to the public was a reclusive, austere, inscrutable facade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[ click to continue reading at Smithsonian<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from Smithsonian Magazine Two Years After Cormac McCarthy\u2019s Death, Rare Access to His Personal Library Reveals the Man Behind the Myth The famously reclusive novelist amassed a collection of thousands of books ranging in topics from philosophical treatises to advanced mathematics to the naked mole-rat By\u00a0Richard Grant \/ Photographs by\u00a0Wayne Martin Belger Cormac McCarthy, one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14016\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}