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 > >