So J.D. Salinger passed away. I certainly am not pretentious enough to call Salinger an influence, but I believe that reading Salinger was influential on me as a writer. While I don’t think that anything he’s published is ‘bad’, my favorite of the stuff out there is 9 Stories, followed by the Glass stories, and then by Catcher In The Rye, perhaps more a reaction to me having read Catcher first than a knock against its quality.
My favorite Salinger-themed anecdote, though, has precious little to do with his writing or his storied reclusiveness.
When I was in high school, I worked at a bookstore. I hated every moment of it, except for getting to borrow books and snag stripped books for free. The main reason I hated it? The customers. The dumb, dumb customers. I suppose to be thematic, I should call them a bunch of goddamn phonies.
I remember one customer came in to look for a copy of The Catcher In The Rye. But couldn’t remember the name of the book. Or the author. Or the plot. But she read it in school and wanted a new copy. How did I know it was Salinger’s novel? Well, the only thing she remembered was the cover. It was red, with yellow letters on it.
Only one book matches this description:
“Catcher In The Rye,” I say.
I retrieved a copy of the book, but unfortunately, we only had the white, striped cover that the current generation of high schoolers knows and loves. “No,” the customer tells me, “this isn’t a red cover.” No amount of assuring the customer that this was the same book, she would not stop insisting that she needed the red, currently out of print, version of the book. Was it for a bet, maybe? A scavenger hunt? An oddly specific bedroom role-play scenario?
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Should have offered to order it for her.
Out. Of. Print. At. The. Time.