In John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation, the character Paul wins the hearts of a wealthy art dealer and his wife by talking about books. He finds a reference point for the modern malaise in The Catcher in the Rye. Paul notes that three assassins–Mark David Chapman, John Hinckley Jr., and an unnamed Long Island substitute teacher–all cited J.D. Salinger’s book as their justification.
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Throughout the history of the printed word, books have been the instigators of passionate (and sometimes irrational) acts. According to local book dealer Tom Joyce, the value of a book depends almost entirely on the buyer’s personal stake in the material. He thumbs through a catalog of used and rare books that lists a copy of The Catcher in the Rye priced at $5,000. Big letters pronounce that the book is a first-edition copy, but a much smaller addendum–“later printing”–is not lost on Joyce. “And he still wants $5,000. That’s not bad for a book published at about $7.95,” he says. But for some people, it may be worth $5,000. We all have our reasons. “There are people who like to have things because they have it and nobody else does,” Joyce says. “On the other hand, there are people who enjoy having something because it belonged to a particular person.”
Although Joyce regretfully admits that he’s no relation to the author of Ulysses, he says that James F. Spoerri, one of the first Joyce collectors in the world, was a Chicagoan whose collection is now at Northwestern University. Joyce says many notable Chicago collectors focused on early Americana and the settlement of the west, including Indian history, cartography, and anything dealing with Abraham Lincoln.
