Like many of us, we have a lot of books—probably too many. We keep saying we need to purge some of them, but haven’t quite gotten around to that yet.
There are two books, though, we know we’re not purging.
While meandering through the tumbled-down interior of the bookstore Shakespeare and Co, in Paris, nearly 50 years ago, we accidentally came across those two, the most valuable books we own. The charmingly ramshackle store had no obvious shelving system or at least none anyone could decipher, and the two slim paperback volumes were stuck somewhere in the fiction area.
They were selling, at the time, for 25 francs each, about the equivalent then of five bucks per volume.
They are “The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J. D. Salinger, Vols. 1 and 2.” Last I checked, according to several rare book sellers, they could be worth anywhere from several hundred dollars to as much as $2,000. Not only are they the most valuable books we own, they are among the most valuable items of any kind in our house.
They are worth a lot even though they are clearly a slapdash job. The print is tiny; the page design almost nonexistent. There is no ISBN number, no mention of any publisher or any of the standard stuff every normally published book has. There are some typos strewn throughout, as if someone sloppily typed the old stories into new documents, which is probably exactly how the books were put together.
They were published and distributed anonymously in the early 1970s and were priced then at $3 to $5 for each volume, and just a few thousand of them were printed. That’s because they were not authorized, and the notoriously reclusive Salinger was aghast and angry at their publication and successfully threatened suit to stop their illegal printing and distribution.
Salinger wrote the stories mostly in the 1940s. He wrote them for magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, The New Yorker and Esquire. He never wanted them to be published in book form.
In one of the extremely rare interviews he gave, to The New York Times in 1974, he said, “I wrote them a long time ago and I never had any intention of publishing them. I wanted them to die a perfectly natural death. I’m not trying to hide the gaucheries of my youth. I just don’t think they’re worthy of publishing.”
They really were worth publishing.
Like most of us born in the late ’40s or early ’50s, “Catcher in the Rye,” now celebrating its 75th birthday, was a touchstone of our youth. And two of the collected stories feature the book’s reluctant hero and narrator, Holden Caulfield. They are unpolished versions of chapters that would later appear in “Catcher” and offer insights into both Holden’s evolution and Salinger’s creative development.
But we can also see why Salinger might have wanted to keep the stories from publication.
Several of them were not quite amateurish but obviously were the output of a young writer searching to find his voice. Interesting but maybe a bit superficial. A few of the stories, however — in particular, “Blue Melody,” a mesmerizing, elegiac tale of the preventable and tragic death of a deep South black blues singer in the Jim Crow era — are masterful and moving.
Only many years later, with news stories about the publication of a Salinger biography, did we learn the back story for the two volumes — and get an inkling about their subsequent value.
To be honest, knowing now how much they are worth doesn’t really matter. Nor does the fact that they were unauthorized. We’re definitely keeping them.