Blood Meridian
By Cormac McCarthy
 
First UK edition, first impression: London: Picador, 1989.
 
Octavo. Original red cloth, spine lettered in white. With the original pictorial dust jacket designed by George Sharp, priced £11.95.
 
A near fine copy, the binding vibrant and sharp. Internally, there is a single blue dot to the top corner of the front endpaper and a couple of instances of faint ghosting from former pencil markings; some of the usual tanning to edges, but the contents remain clean, well-preserved and free from any names and inscriptions.
 
The dust jacket near fine and unclipped, with the red on the spine panel notably unfaded. Showing only a hint of wear to the spine tips and a very small area of abrasion to the verso of the spine foot.
 
Blood Meridian is widely considered Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece and one of the definitive Great American Novels of the twentieth century. A harrowing deconstruction of the Western genre, the narrative follows "the kid" and the terrifying, nihilistic Judge Holden through the mid-nineteenth century Texas-Mexico borderlands. While it received little commercial attention upon its initial 1985 US release, its reputation grew exponentially following the success of the Border Trilogy. McCarthy, whose later accolades included the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, is compared by critics like Harold Bloom to Melville and Faulkner. Despite numerous high-profile attempts by directors to bring it to the screen, the novel’s extreme violence and metaphysical complexity have seen it remain famously "unfilmable" for decades, preserving its status as a pure literary monument.