Blood Meridian.

New York: Random House,, 1985. Inscribed to a fellow scholar of the Old West First edition, first printing, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "for Al Lowman, all best wishes, Cormac McCarthy". Lowman was a respected Texas historian who spent his life studying and sharing stories of the American Southwest, the setting for McCarthy's most celebrated works, including No Country for Old Men, All the Pretty Horses, and his brutal masterpiece and quintessential Old West novel, Blood Meridian. McCarthy grew up in Tennessee and Appalachia, where many of his early works are set. His first trip to Texas in 1970 inspired him to write Blood Meridian, and in 1974 he moved to El Paso to immerse himself in the history and geography of the region. The subsequent work was "as close to history as novels generally get, drawn in sometimes verbatim tones from memoirs, chronicles, eyewitness testimony" (Mitchell). McCarthy was a notoriously reclusive author, but it is likely he and Lowman met during the course of McCarthy's research. Lowman (1935-2013) curated the special exhibits and catalogues at the Institute of Texan Cultures in San Antonio and served as president of the Texas State Historical Association, the Texas Folklore Society, and the Book Club of Texas. He was a member of the Grolier Club and the Philosophical Society of Texas, and he published a number of book, including Printing Arts in Texas (1975), "the best history of fine printing in Texas" (Jenkins), and This Bitterly Beautiful Land: A Texas Commonplace Book (1972), with an introduction by Carl Hertzog, El Paso's master printer and an internationally renowned book designer. The year before his death, Lowman wrote a love-letter to the Texas of his youth: "My earliest memories are of Aladdin lanterns, battery-powered radios, treadle sewing machines, and mud roads... The fecund black earth extended from our house in all directions. Four hundred years before my time Cabeza de Vaca saw part of Nueces County and described 'vast and handsome pastures, with good grass for cattle... it strikes me the soil would be very fertile were the country inhabited and improved by reasonable people.' Nothing waits more patiently than the earth itself." Octavo. Title page and facing page illustrated with map of New Mexico. Original red quarter-cloth, spine lettered in gilt and ruled in metallic red, red paper sides. With dust jacket. Very faint foxing to top edge: a fine copy in fine, unclipped jacket. John Jenkins, Basic Texas Books, 1983; Al Lowman, "Some Recollections of Defining Events", First Timers and Old Timers: the Texas Folklore Society Fire Burns On, 2012; Lee Clark Mitchell, "A Book 'Made Out of Books': the Humanizing Violence of Style in Blood Meridian", Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 57, no. 3, 2015.