The Catcher In The Rye.

SALINGER, J.D.

$5,500.00

Item Number: 143026

Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1951.

First edition of the author’s classic first book. Octavo, bound in full morocco by the Harcourt Bindery with gilt titles and tooling to the spine in five compartments within raised bands, gilt ruling to the front and rear panels, gilt ruled inner dentelles stamp-signed by the Harcourt Bindery, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt. In fine condition. An exceptional presentation.

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."