The Catcher In the Rye
New York: Bantam Books, 1965. Mass Market Paperback Reprint. 12mo, publisher's stiff oxblood wraps lettered in yellow.
Mass market paperback reprint of J.D. Salinger's classic coming-of-age novel, the copy of photographer Marcia Resnick, with her extensive high school-era annotations. Born in Brooklyn in 1950 (a year before the novel’s original publication), Resnick chronicled the downtown scene of the 1970s and 80s, taking portraits of musicians, artists, filmmakers, and writers, many of whom she mingled with at clubs like Max’s Kansas City, CBGB, and the Mudd Club, before luring them to her Canal Street loft to photograph. Her most celebrated body of work was her "Bad Boy" series of portraits of punk, beat and pop art luminaries: Richard Hell, Johnny Thunders, Iggy Pop, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Joey Ramone, Rene Ricard, Andy Warhol, John Belushi, and others. "Bad Boys can be at once formidable and endearing…. In an attempt to understand the barriers between men and women, I was compelled to record the emotional geography of the male face," she writes in the preface to her collection Punks, Poets & Provocateurs: New York City Bad Boys 1977-1982 (San Rafael, CA: Insight Editions, 2015). She goes on to recount reading Burroughs’s novel Junkie when she was 17, leading to experimentation with heroin, and a trip to Paris where she fell in with a community of American draft resisters and deserters, all of which she describes as her "introduction to Bad Boys." Her reading of this 1965 printing of Catcher In the Rye, however, likely predates her exposure to Burroughs by two or three years, and may be a key text in her fascination with alienated, non-conformist manboys. In pencil notes winding across the margins of roughly seven pages, a teenage Resnick diagnoses Holden Caulfield’s affect and behavior: "Holden Caulfield is an individual who hates more than he loves…," "In realizing how hypocritical the entire world is, Holden regresses to his childhood…," "his concept of sex is universally adolescent…," "Holden had to make the choice between conforming to the phoney world which he detested or…to begin a single-handed fight for his existence against society…," "his hates were exaggerated so terrifically that they almost overcome his loves…," etc. Her portrait of him, however boilerplate, amounts to that of a nascent punk, a forerunner of the type of men she would shoot, and provides a lens through which to view Resnick’s future preoccupations. Other notes include a list of prominent characters and places in the book on the verso of the upper wrap, her ownership signature in ink to the first page, and occasional underlining throughout. Moderate creasing and edgewear to wraps, age-toning to textblock. Very good, intriguingly annotated and with exceptional provenance. Item #12841
$250.00