Re: Salinger's covers
Malcolm Lawrence (malcolm@wolfenet.com)
Sat, 31 Jan 1998 13:41:39 -0800
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