Catch-22

“There was only one catch and that was Catch-22”

Books can accumulate a lot of personal baggage. Keep them in your life for long enough, and they’re likely to become encrusted with memories. This dust jacket is from my personal copy of Catch-22 and goes back a long way, as you can tell from the $2.45 price drastically marked down to $2.19. This was the second and more durable copy I owned after I read ragged the more familiar blue paperback with the dancing airman on the cover. The library’s copy in the Berg Collection of English and American Literature is the first edition, published in 1961. The branch libraries have a recent Everyman's Library edition with a picture of Joseph Heller on the cover. But it is the Modern Library edition and its cover art that resonate with me. I didn’t encounter the novel until the early 1970s, during my first years of college and the last nightmarish years of the Vietnam War; but I read it again and again, not only for its wit and style, but for the message, articulated for me clearly and for the first time, that governments and other institutions were not always to be trusted, that they might even be out to cause harm. Heller’s assertion that “The only freedom we really have is the freedom to say no” vibrated through the halls of Hunter College--as well as most other college campuses--and black humor was the very atmosphere we breathed.  read more »