Dedication Copy

Catch-22 [Dedication Copy]

Heller, Joseph

Publication: New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.

Notes: A dedication copy of one of the iconic novels of the 1960s, and one of the rare books to add a new word into the English language.

Simon & Schuster reissued Catch-22 in hardcover and in this signed, numbered edition to coincide with the publication of Closing Time, a sequel to the original novel. For the new edition, Heller wrote a preface about the initial publication of the novel. He also changed the dedication. In copies printed from 1961 to 1993, the dedication was to Heller's wife and children. For this edition, billed a few years prematurely as a 35th anniversary edition, Heller changed the dedication to read, "To Candida Donadio, literary agent, and Robert Gottlieb, editor." In the preface, Heller writes about the change: "I embrace the opportunity afforded no to dedicate this new edition to both of them, as colleagues and allies with talents that were of immeasurable value." This is Robert Gottlieb's copy, with a long inscription from Heller:

"May 24, 1995. Dear Bob, I want you to have a copy of this very expensive edition of a novel with which you (and Richard Stern) are now eternally linked, particularly since not many people have wanted to pay the very stiff price and some copies have come to me gratis. Best, Joe (East Hampton, N.Y.)"

Gottlieb, while a young editor at Simon & Schuster, signed Heller to a publishing contract and then worked for several years to turn the manuscript into a publishable novel. The title was Catch-18. As the long-in-progress WWII satire neared publication, Leon Uris, a best-selling writer, announced that his forthcoming novel was titled Mila 18. Heller needed a new number, and Gottlieb came up with Catch-22, a term that came to mean a paradoxical situation.

In his memoir, Avid Reader, Gottieb describes getting the first seventy-five pages of the novel in 1957. "I was knocked out by the voice, the humor, the anger. We offered Joe five hundred dollars as an option payment." (In the preface here, Heller remembers it as $750.) The Richard Stern referenced in the inscription wrote a negative review of Heller's first book in the New York Times. Stern wrote that the book "gasps for want of craft and sensibility." Obviously, despite the success of the book, the riches he got from it, and the passing of more than 30 years, a few harsh paragraphs from the author of Golk and other books, still rankled in Heller's brain. He used this inscription and his preface to settle an old score.

This is one of 750 numbered copies signed by Heller; there was also a new trade hardcover edition released at the same time.

Edition + Condition: A near fine, slightly spine-fade copy in a near fine, slightly bumped slipcase. This is no. 524 of 750 signed by Heller. Dedication copies—books inscribed to a person in the printed dedication of a book—are the ne plus ultra of collecting. Dedication copies, by definition, are few in number and those of household-name novels almost never come on the market.

NB: Many Internet booksellers misuse this term to mean a copy inscribed to someone. This is unambiguously incorrect. A dedication copy is a book inscribed to the person named in the printed dedication in the book. Some booksellers use the term to refer to copies owned by the person named in the dedication. This is also incorrect. As John Carter notes in ABC for Book Collectors (the book collecting dictionary written by one of the most knowledgeable dealers of the 20th century and a reference that has been continuously in print since 1952), "The term cannot be properly applied...to a copy which merely bears the signature or bookplate of the dedicatee, since he (or she) may well have bought an extra copy or copies of the book."

Item No: #364155

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