Free The Burglar in the Rye by Lawrence Block

don’t you think? It’s a wonderful book.”
    “It changed my life.”
    “A lot of people feel that way. I read it when I was seventeen, and I would have sworn at the time that it changed my life. And for all I know, maybe it did.”
    “It changed mine,” she said flatly, and tapped the book with her forefinger. “No dust jacket,” she said.
    “No.”
    “And it still brings thirty-five dollars?”
    “Well, it hasn’t yet,” I said, “but I live in hope. If it had a jacket, I’d remove it, and wait until a first comes in without one. Or sell it separately. The jacket’s worth two hundred dollars, maybe a little more. That’s thedifference in price between a first with and without a jacket.”
    “That much?”
    “It would be more,” I said, “but for all the jackets from later printings like this one. The jacket’s identical, at least through the first ten printings or so. Then they started putting review quotes on the back. But what you want to know is why this book costs as much as it does, and that’s because it’s a later printing of the original edition, and that makes it collectible for someone who’d like to have a first but can’t afford one. After all, the only difference between this copy and a first edition is that this one doesn’t say ‘First Edition’ on the copyright page. Instead it says ‘Third Printing,’ or whatever it says.”
    “‘Fifth printing,’ actually.”
    I flipped to the page in question. “So it does. If you just want to read the book, well, Shakespeare and Company’s a few blocks down Broadway, and they’ve got the paperback for five ninety-nine. But if you want something closer to a first and don’t want to pay a fortune for it…”
    “How large a fortune?”
    “For a first edition of Nobody’s Baby ? I had a copy show up shortly after I took over the shop. It came in with a load of stuff, and I thanked my lucky stars when I realized what it was. I priced it at two hundred dollars, which was much too low even then, and I sold it within the week to the first person who spotted it. He got a bargain.”
    “That doesn’t answer my question.”
    “No, it doesn’t. What’s a first of Gulliver Fairborn’s first book worth? It depends on condition, of course, and the presence or absence of a jacket, and—”
    “A very fine copy,” she said. “With an intact jacket, also in very fine condition.”
    “The last catalog listing I saw was fifteen hundred dollars,” I said, “and that sounds about right. For a really nice copy in a really nice dust jacket.”
    “And if it’s inscribed?”
    “Signed by the author, you mean? Because an inscription that reads ‘To Timmy on his seventeenth birthday, with love from Aunt Nedra’ doesn’t add anything to the book’s value. Quite the reverse.”
    “I’ll tell Aunt Nedra to keep her good wishes to herself.”
    “Or write them very lightly in pencil,” I said. “Gulliver Fairborn’s signature is rare, which is a rarity itself in this age of mass public book-signings. But you won’t see Fairborn hawking signed copies on QVC, or jetting around the country with pen in hand. In fact you won’t see him at all, and I for one wouldn’t recognize him if I did. He’s never given an interview or allowed himself to be photographed. Nobody knows where he lives or what he looks like, and a few books ago you started hearing rumors that he’d died, and that the recent books were the work of a ghostwriter. V. C. Andrews, no doubt.”
    “Not Elliott Roosevelt?”
    “Always a possibility. Anyway, someone did a computerized textual analysis, the same kind that reporter did to prove Joe Klein wrote Primary Colors, and established that Fairborn was writing his own books. But he hasn’t been signing them.”
    “Suppose he signed one.”
    “Well, how sure could we be that he really did the signing? It’s not terribly difficult to scribble ‘Gulliver Fairborn’ on a flyleaf, especially when hardly anyone has seen