Re: Salinger's covers

WILL HOCHMAN (hochman@uscolo.edu)
Sun, 01 Feb 1998 12:09:18 -0700 (MST)

In some ways I think that first paperback edtion is the quintessential
one--Catcher caught on as a paperback, which seems to me to be more
valuable than one with Salinger's mug on the cover, but book dealers
wouldn't agree...will

On Sat, 31 Jan 1998, Malcolm Lawrence wrote:

> Tim O'Connor wrote:
> 
> > Regardless of how impure it is to feel this way 8-), I just love the
> > original paperback of Catcher, with the picture of Holden in Times Square
> > done by Jim Avanti, with all that text on the cover ("This unusual book may
> > shock you, will make you laugh, and may break your heart -- but you will
> > never forget it.")  Hype aside, that little sentence is quite prophetic.
> >
> > (Ah, and there's a bonus for me, too: in pulling out this copy, to quote
> > from the jacket properly, I discovered that of the two old Signet
> > printings, one of them is the 1953 first printing!)
> 
> I've got the same copy and I love it too. Even though it's in fair to good
> shape, I wouldn't dare read the book because the spine has seen much better
> days. There's a great little gay and lesbian bookstore here in Seattle called
> Pistil, which has a lot of those old Signet paperbacks of classics and when I
> found that their paperback copy of CITR was only $1.75 I just couldn't resist. I
> dunno, maybe you have to be a Tom Waits fan to understand the allure of a copy
> of the book like this. Mine isn't the first printing, though, only the
> seventeenth from April 1961. So if it took eight years to get to 17
> printings...that would mean that it's hovering somewhere around it's one
> hundredth and ten printing these days?
> 
> Malcs
> 
>