Just a little over two years after Cormac McCarthy's death, a rare glimpse inside the late novelist's home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, reveals more about the man behind the myth than any interview ever could. The notoriously secretive McCarthy left behind a cluttered adobe packed with an estimated 20,000 books—more than double Hemingway's fabled collection. Now, a team of unpaid scholars is sifting through the chaos and cataloging each volume, many filled with McCarthy's margin notes and musings, per Smithsonian.
Their findings paint a picture of a literary polymath with an insatiable intellectual appetite: McCarthy taught himself quantum physics (190 books on that topic alone), amassed 75 volumes on Wittgenstein (most annotated), and owned shelves spanning everything from whale biology to Grand Prix racing. McCarthy also designed his own shelves, collected classic cars and bargain kitchenware, and maintained a wardrobe of hundreds of tweed jackets.
The library also provides rare insight into McCarthy's famously private life. His brother Dennis, who oversees the literary estate, describes a man who read constantly, seldom left the house without a book (or a gun), and adored Moby-Dick and Faulkner above all. Despite the dark, violent themes running through his novels, McCarthy's margin notes sometimes revealed a surprisingly benign view of the universe.
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The cataloging effort, organized by the Cormac McCarthy Society, is laborious, dusty, and unglamorous, but for fans and scholars, it's a treasure trove. The annotated books will join McCarthy's papers at Texas State University, while the rest will be split among other academic archives. Eventually, a digital database will let the public explore what McCarthy read, and what he thought about it. (A Slate writer reveals what she found when she went through McCarthy's trash.)
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