Old Books.

Books When J.D. Salinger left us, I realised two things:

(a) I've never read The Catcher In The Rye
(b) I didn't even own a copy of The Catcher In The Rye.

I've stopped buying books brand new unless I'm desperate or it's an emergency. I like books to have a life, whether that's loved or abused or abandoned on a shelf for decades, in other words second hand. Example. Straight to Amazon's old marketplace for one of the penny copies and an edition from a seller called thriftbooks. Posted from Alburn, WA on the 29th January, the book arrived this morning.

It's an old edition, from Little, Brown and Company, published in July 1951. The spine is broken, the smell is musty. It has the potential life story I craved. The cover is as simple and tasteful as Patrick Bateman's business card in American Psycho. The title and author. There isn't even a sales blurb on the back. Simply a barcode and the price in US and Canadian dollars. Enigmatic and tantalising.




But as I begin to flick through the pages, I notice something else hidden within the pages. It's a photograph. Here is the photograph:



What?