She was unable to calculate the total number of books because the cataloging software didn’t account for multi-volume works. McCarthy’s 36-volume history of Utah, for example, registered as a single entry. Nor did the software tally multiple editions of the same book, so McCarthy’s 13 copies of Moby-Dick registered as one entry. The total number of entries was 18,520. Taking into account duplicate copies and multi-volume works, Peebles felt confident that McCarthy’s library contained just over 20,000 books, with 2,170 annotated.

McCarthy was a devoted carpenter and designed these nine-foot-tall shelves along the walls of his living room, with room for 1,000 books—a mere 5 percent of the author’s sprawling personal library. Wayne Martin Belger

I was invited to the house by two McCarthy scholars who were embroiled in a herculean endeavor. Working unpaid, with help from other volunteer scholars and occasional graduate students, they had taken it upon themselves to physically examine and digitally catalog every single book in McCarthy’s enormous and chaotically disorganized personal library. They were guessing it contained upwards of 20,000 volumes. By comparison, Ernest Hemingway, considered a voracious book collector, left behind a personal library of 9,000.