The Catcher In The Rye.

SALINGER, J.D.

Item Number: 4034

Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1951.

First edition of the author’s first book. Octavo, original black cloth. Fine in a bright fine dust jacket without the usual tanning to the spine and without any chips or tears, bookplate. The dust jacket is the correct first issue with the cropping of Salinger’s head on the rear panel and the price on the front flap. Jacket design by Michael Mitchell. Photograph of Salinger by Lotte Jacobi. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. An exceptional example, one of the nicest examples extant.

Since his debut in 1951 as The Catcher In the Rye, Holden Caulfield has been synonymous with "cynical adolescent." Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in his sixteen-year-old life, just after he's been expelled from prep school, in a slang that sounds edgy even today and keeps this novel on banned book lists. It begins, "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them."