The Stonemason: A Play In Five Acts.

MCCARTHY, Cormac.

$3,000.00

Item Number: 140772

Hopewell, NJ: The Ecco Press, 1994.

Signed limited first edition of this expansively imagined drama about four generations of an American family. Octavo, original cloth. Additionally signed by jacket designer Chip Kidd on the signature page as follows, “It’s actually Mike Tyson on the cover! Chip Kidd.” Additionally signed by Kidd on the slipcase. The designer is referring to the front panel of the original dust jacket on the trade edition. Fine in a fine slipcase. A unique example.

The setting is Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1970s. The Telfairs are stonemasons and have been for generations. Ben Telfair has given up his education to apprentice himself to his grandfather, Papaw, a man who knows that "true masonry is not held together by cement but...by the warp of the world." Out of the love that binds these two men and the gulf that separates them from the Telfairs who have forsaken—or dishonored—the family trade, Cormac McCarthy has crafted a drama that bears all the hallmarks of his great fiction: precise observation of the physical world; language that has the bite of common speech and the force of Biblical prose; and a breathtaking command of the art of storytelling.