Sold for $4,500

Sold prices are inclusive of Buyer’s Premium

Lot Description

HELLER, Joseph (1923-1999). Catch-22. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961.

8vo. Original cloth (slight fading to spine); pictorial dust jacket (a few short splits at edges, very minor soiling and slight rubbing); cloth folding case.

FIRST EDITION, SIGNED BY HELLER on the title of the author's first book, in dust jacket priced “$5.95." The title of this contemporary American novel has entered the language more seamlessly than any other. However, "Catch 22" was not the book's original title. In the late '50s, when a chapter was published in the anthology New American Writing, Heller was calling the novel "Catch 18." He only changed it to Catch 22 the following year when Leon Uris published his bestselling World War II novel Milo 18, beating Heller to the number and begetting a cliché destined to be with us for decades to come. The phrase is used to refer to the maddeningly circular logic used to deny leave on the grounds of insanity to the novel's anti-hero, Yossarian. The Doctor quotes the Catch 22, which states that a man "would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't, he was sane and had to."

Condition Report

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