The Catcher in the Rye
Collected Projects 2018-2022

Collection of 100 used and annotated copies of The Catcher in the Rye with various artist editions

My work with The Catcher in the Rye began after years of collecting used and annotated copies of the novel from secondhand bookstores. My interest in the novel began in middle school as I was always fascinated by the design and imagery on the cover, but because it was never part of my english curriculum I never read the novel. To this day I have not read the book, so my knowledge of its contents is limited to cultural allusions made in reference to the book, annotations made by readers in the used copies I’ve acquired, and the brief bits I’ve scanned over while making artist editions of the novel.

My aim in reproducing The Catcher in the Rye was to uncover how much a person could glean from the annotations made by a reader in the margin of a novel. The comments I found in my copies ranged from thought provoking invocations about the contents of the book, to the most banal mis-statements most likely used to fulfill a class assignment. I love what I assumed to be misreads of the text and the slanted versions of its content, thoughts, and comments that would likely change with a re-reading or deeper look into the text.

In each artist edition of the novel I removed all of Salinger’s original text, reproducing only the comments, notes, and lines left by a previous reader. The three artist book variations of the novel include a small paperback edition with notes and lines written throughout, an edition presumably written in by a young woman who wrote exclusively on the left or right margin, and an alphabetized edition with uniquely torn covers.

Image: Installation view as part of Collective Tissues at the Visual Arts Center, UT Austin

The Catcher in the Rye (2018)

Silk screened cover with laser jet printed newsprint Interior
Edition of 21 Books, 2018

This work is a facsimile of an annotated copy of the Catcher in the Rye which was found while browsing the stacks. I altered the book by scanning in the entirety of its contents and removing all but the page numbers and the previous owners' annotations. The new contents of the book shed light on the notion of shared knowledge and ownership.