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

Someone contacted me asking if I had any antique books & I remembered I had a drawer full; when going through them I found this Catcher in the Rye book, and when I looked at the date I saw
Printed in 1945, 1946, 1951 by J.D. Salinger
And when I looked that up I saw it called a first commercial edition, and with the Book of the Month Club at the bottom of the back dust cover jacket I found those saying First Edition - what exactly do I have?
Also - I found some with the author's photo on the back & some without - but none with advertising for other books like mine has? What is that about?
Thanks for any information!

 

At dead minimum, a fine read!

 

The book was initially published in 1951 by Little, Brown and Company. Yours says "By arrangement with", so I'm guessing yours is the Book Club edition. Book Club editions are worth much less than publicly released trade editions, but it probably has some value, being so well-known.

The dust jacket on a true first has a picture of Salinger on the back, and a price printed on the front flap of the dust jacket.

 

Grosset & Dunlap were well known as a publisher of reprints. They did not always print the dates that they did reprints. Often they just reprinted the original copyright date. A bookseller friend did a lot of research on them about 6-7 years ago. I proofread a report he was writing about them and so I learned something, too. Not sure whether you have a Book of the Month Club edition, or if G&D were just printing that statement as information. Their books can be very tricky to identify, edition-wise.

 

Can I call it a 1951 G&D book of the month club edition?

 

Is there a price on the front flap of the dust jacket? Show a picture of the front flap.

https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?bi=0&bx=off&cm_sp=SearchF-_-Advs-_-Result&ds=30&pn=grosset&recentlyadded=all&rollup=on&sortby=20&sts=t&tn=catcher in the rye&xdesc=off&xpod=off&yrh=1959&yrl=1951

I don't know that those plugs on the back are consistent with Book Club editions. If they were, I would expect to see something alomg the lines of "Also available to Book Club members" (or somesuch).

 

I don't know the answer that, since I don't know whether G&D ever published book of the month club editions. Also, book of the month club editions are not particularly valuable, in general. So it doesn't really add anything.

 

I'd call it a donation. Book-of-the-Month reprint in poor condition dust jacket.

Debora

 

If jacket is reprint anyway to tell which book I have? If it's a several hundred dollar copy it might be worth buying a original dust jacket?

 

The jacket certainly looks original to this edition. It's beat up enough. All the jacket says is this isn't a first, which is also what the publisher says.

I wouldn't sink any money into it.

 

Well, there does seem to be some market. Here's your edition but caveat. The dust jackets are in much better condition.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/2038720208...=true&nordt=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2557

https://www.ebay.com/itm/3342815807...=true&nordt=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2557

Debora

 

The 1945 and 1946 publication dates were because the story originated as two short stories published in the New Yorker on those dates, which were then expanded into the novel for 1951.

Also interesting: Salinger was a WW2 vet at Normandy on D-Day. He wrote these stories not long after. That's always been interesting to me.

 

I've read that Salinger worked on "Catcher" for years and that he carried the manuscript with him throughout the war.

He also had a big thing for Oona O'Neil, Eugene O'Neil's daughter who went on to marry Charlie Chaplin, and broke Salinger's heart. (She was 18, Chaplin was 53. She had daddy issues and he was notorious for his little girl proclivities. It was a match made in... somewhere.)

https://nypost.com/2017/09/07/this-new-york-socialite-dumped-j-d-salinger-for-charlie-chaplin/

 

Just curious - did Charlie Chaplin ever do a speaking movie?

 

I had to read that book in either high school or college. And I am probably the only person who thought, why does everyone think this is so great??
I hardly remember the story at all, but I do remember thinking, this is not my cup o tea.

 

Wow, and under the second link the seller called it a first edition. Wrong.

The only reasons I can imagine this book selling for as much as the amount in the second listing are:

1) The buyer is collecting absolutely every edition of this title
2) Somebody collects Grosset & Dunlap books (maybe there are some collectors of G&D out there?)
3) Buyer ignorance combined with either seller deceit or ignorance

I'm even surprised about the price the listing under the first link fetched. That seller at least seems to have described it well. They sell a lot of books and seem to know what they are doing.

 

He did several. His first talkie was The Great Dictator.

 

I think everybody has a strong reaction to the book, and they run the gamut from love to loathe. Not much middle ground when it comes to Holden Caulfield.

 

True @Potteryplease

I remember having so many English Lit books to read in college that I just stopped reading some because the stories were so awful to me. Some I really liked, but many were G'd awful. I could not turn one more page.

I had one elderly professor teaching English Lit. And it was a small class of about 17 students on a warm spring day. None of us read the book, none. I forget what book it was but we all sat there thinking how many more minutes till this class ends.

Anyway, the professor was quite liquored up that day and when not one of us could answer a question, he started making sounds like a pig for about 5 minutes. That got our attention but then we went back into watching the clock.

Yes, that is where some of my college tuition went. LOL

 

Wow! That's a memorable day! Well, I'm a high school teacher, and the 'no one read anything' phenomenon is still very much real. Some things never change.