Cormac McCarthy: The Tom Garner Collection
Downtown Brown Books' new arrivals catalog and newsletter
Hot Off the Press
My latest new arrivals list devoted to Cormac McCarthy hit my website simultaneous with the posting of this Dispatch from the Rare Book Trade.1
Fine Books & Collections magazine interviewed me for a piece on bookseller-collectors.
I’m auctioning more than 30 lots of interesting books and ephemera with no reserve on eBay. One of them is already over $300 from a $9.95 starting point.
Tom Garner, Book Collector
Three decades ago, when I was just getting started as a bookseller at downtownbrown.com, the Texas attorney Tom Garner became one of my first serious private customers. Now, all these years later, his family has asked me to find new homes for his books, and I’d like to share his story because books are so much more interesting when they have a past.
I got to know Tom a bit back in the 1990s, when I specialized in Chicano literature, and he regularly bought any rare Sandra Cisneros item I could find. From a bookseller’s perspective, he was the perfect customer—paying promptly and willing to buy more than one copy of the books he truly valued.
At the time, I had a day job and my phone messages forwarded to a beeper. During breaks, I'd return calls from the phone booth outside my office. Tom and I mostly talked about Sandra Cisneros, so I didn't know then about his broader interests, like the Cormac McCarthy collection featured this week or the Stephen King collection that I’ve scheduled for next Monday’s Dispatch (Jan. 13, about 11 a.m. PST).
It turned out that my lack of email access during the work day gave me a window into Tom's collecting world that few other booksellers experienced—most knew him only through brief business emails.
In person, Tom had a big personality, which served him well as a successful defense attorney in small-town Texas. He maintained good relations with other lawyers and the courthouse staff. In fact, when he remarried in 1999, two judges presided over the ceremony.2 But at home with his books, he wasn’t so extroverted. He built a substantial collection mostly under the radar of the book trade.
Like many collectors, Tom played the field at first. He started collecting seriously in the early 1990s, about the time that Cormac McCarthy published All the Pretty Horses. McCarthy seems to have been one of his first authors—I found notes about prices dated 1995 and 1996 while preparing this week's catalog. He paid comically small prices for some of the key books: $75 for a first edition of Blood Meridian, $475 for a proof, and £38 for a UK first.
Tom’s McCarthy collection reveals many of his future collecting habits: a fondness for uncorrected proofs, British editions, and limited editions. If he liked a book, two copies were better than one (he owned two copies of Blood Meridian). Tom favored new releases to retrospective acquisitions of earlier titles, though for his main author collections, he strove to have examples of every work. I could tell that Tom lost interest in McCarthy because he didn’t have both US and UK editions of every book, his collection of recent proofs was incomplete, and he had shifted the books out of the main library to free up space.
Tom moved on from McCarthy because the reclusive novelist couldn’t offer what he really sought: personal connections. Tom preferred authors he could get to know. He may have been reserved in his relationships with booksellers but he was bold in pursuing signed copies and cultivating friendships with favorite writers.
One of the first authors he befriended was Andre Dubus. The short story writer dubbed him “Tamale Tom” after the care packages of homemade Mexican food sent from Texas. Tom’s shipments often included boxes of books to be signed along with checks with subject lines like “whiskey.”
Tom's knack for acquiring obscure editions and advance copies prompted another of "his" writers, Harry Crews, to ask in an inscription, "Where did you get all these fucking books?"
In addition to Dubus, Crews, and Sandra Cisneros, Tom collected a number of Texas writers.3 He dispensed free legal advice and bought manuscripts when writers needed funds. Neal Barrett Jr. even dedicated a book to him.
Tom saw himself as a patron, which explains his focus on living authors and new publications that he could buy to support their careers. This extended to small presses publishing genre literature, to a box maker who crafted hundreds of clamshell cases for him, and to local used and rare bookstores.
Tom also bought extensively online, particularly early titles by favorite authors and uncorrected proofs. His daughter fondly remembers him coming out of his den at night to announce his acquisition of a long-sought book.
He gambled on lifetime subscriptions to several presses, including two that proved remarkably prescient: Cemetery Dance (subscriber 20) and Subterranean Press (no. 8). He is likely one of the only people to take a chance on both.
A Cemetery Dance employee told me that Tom “was taking a risk to send that money” for the lifetime subscription, which helped fund the startup business. “It paid off because Cemetery Dance did really well and [Tom got] each and every book we published, including many signed Stephen King books, essentially for free.” Tom extended his patronage by purchasing lettered editions, duplicates, and proofs, beyond his subscription copies.
Sadly, the value of these lifetime subscriptions was never fully realized—he died unexpectedly from a rare disease nine years ago, in his collecting prime.
Tom kept books in two places, in his home library and at his office. Over time, as his law partners retired or moved on, Tom converted their offices into book rooms, ultimately amassing about 8,000 volumes at his law practice. In 2018, I acquired that collection through my former store, Eureka Books. I brought several thousand of those books to Portland, when I opened Downtown Brown Books. Many of the Harry Crews, Ray Bradbury, Joe R. Lansdale, and Kurt Vonnegut books I have offered on my new arrivals lists originated in Tom Garner’s law office.
Recently the family engaged me to find new homes for the books in Tom’s home library. Often, these were his best copies, though he had very specific ideas about what belonged at home—hardcover books.
He kept posters, pamphlets, and ephemera at his office. He commissioned custom black clamshell boxes for the paperback originals and proofs that he shelved at home.
The best example of how paperbacks were excluded from his shelves at home is Stephen King’s graphic novel, Creepshow. I don’t know what it was about this book that attracted Tom but when he died he owned 82 copies. He seems to have bought most every one that came on the market. Yet not one copy was shelved at home.4 It’s one of the mysteries he left behind.
In coming months, I’ll publish lists from Tom’s collection devoted to single authors. Stephen King is up next, on Monday. Ray Bradbury, Harry Crews, Joe R. Lansdale, Dan Simmons, and Kurt Vonnegut will follow.
Between all the free books from Cemetery Dance and Subterranean Press and the low prices he paid for writers like Cormac McCarthy before they were hot, Tom’s return on his investment promises to be substantial. I don’t believe Tom ever sold books himself, but now that the time has come, I imagine he would be pleased to see how his authors have risen in the estimation of fellow collectors.
—Scott Brown, Downtown Brown Books
Subscribers to this newsletter find out first about new arrivals posting to my website. However, the books land on my shelves before they hit the web and some of them are snapped up by customers to my physical shop in an undisclosed location in Northwest Portland. If you are ever in the area, make an appointment to stop in, and I’ll give you the secret address.
His wife also worked at the courthouse and knew plenty of judges, too.
The family is keeping most of these collections, for sentimental reasons.
Over several years, Eureka Books sold these Creepshows.