Featured 1951 Catcher in the Rye - Book of the Month Club Book - What do I actually have?

Hats off to you as a teacher. One of the hardest jobs.

 

Hey thank you!! This year has been brutal.

 

Grosset & Dunlap were mainly reprinters, but they did do the first editions - and hundreds of later printings - of many children's series, including Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. They typically reprinted popular fiction a year or so after the original publication date, and the copyright page will often - but by no means always - show language similar to your Catcher: "published by arrangement with..." The list price was usually about half the cost of a new book at the time. Paperbacks were not yet the phenomena that they became.

Book-of-the-Month, by contrast, often bought copies straight from the publisher or had them printed by the same press that printed for the publisher, roughly simultaneously with the first edition - it was a point of pride and part of the sales pitch to have your book be picked for BOMC, like having a Top Ten record.

I've priced the Grosset Catcher from $25 to $80, depending on condition, the one in question being closer to $25. That second eBay price is nuts - some sucker believed the seller's erroneous statement about it being a first edition. The true first was published by Little, Brown and says "first edition" on the copyright page and has a price on the jacket flap. Early book club editions have Salinger's photo on the back panel, which was removed at his request in later printings, so even book club copies with the photo fetch decent money - more than the reprint, which came out considerably later.

As for the book itself, I first read it after college, just because I'd never read it and thought I should, and found Holden to be awful whiny. A bit later I realized that Salinger was portraying a case of PTSD - Holden is effectively shell-shocked by the death of his brother, which Salinger correctly glosses over, because Holden doesn't understand its real effect on him.

 

Your posts are always very informative, @2manycats . Thanks for taking the time to write all of that. It should be very helpful.

I did know about their original publications in the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series (and others). I see that my original reply made it sound as if they were only a reprint publisher. I regret that if it misled anybody.

I have some of their books, mostly photoplay types -- "photoplay" refers to reprinted novels illustrated with photographic stills from early films made from the novels. So I do collect that type of G&D book.

 

Agree! And I appreciate that you say that Salinger 'correctly' glosses over that. Much of today's fiction seems so directly focused on trauma that it sometimes loses its full impact. Holden's trauma is shown indirectly. It's real. It's a bit like seeing more completely out of the passing corner of your eye than when you stare and stare and stare.

 

Thank you. I think one of the important tasks of the bookseller (or antique dealer, for that matter) is educating the public on WHY things are important or valuable. And I agree, the Photoplay books are interesting. Some, of popular movies like Frankenstein, Dracula, and King Kong can be quite valuable - the dust jacket, as usual, being quite important.

 

I'm a big fan of old movies... and also collect antique photography, although most of my photos are a bit older than the time when these books were published. When buying the photoplay books, originally I didn't pay attention to condition or presence of dust jacket. So most of mine are just for fun. I do have a couple with dust jackets, though. Grosset & Dunlap seemed to be the biggest publisher of this type of book.