Mockingbird Marathon: Buying my copy of the book

So I’m getting ready for the November 6th “Mockingbird Marathon: To Kill A Saturday” fundraiser, in which a public reading of “To Kill a Mockingbird” will take place to benefit the Literacy Volunteers of the Greater Capital Region.

Since I’m one of the readers for the event, it pretty much behooved me to actually go out and purchase a copy of the book.

So I drove to the Colonie Center Barnes & Noble bookstore, and went through the fiction section of the store, looking for the collected works of Harper Lee.

Okay, collected work of Harper Lee, if you want to really get technical.

And surprisingly, there were three different editions of “To Kill a Mockingbird” on the bookstore shelves.  I could purchase a hardcover 50th anniversary edition for $25, or a softcover 50th anniversary edition for $9.95; or an even smaller 50th anniversary edition for $7.00.

Oh man.  Three different versions.  I needed to make sure that none of the versions were “abridged,” because I didn’t want a situation where I’m reading one version of the book which might have language redactions and bowdlerizations in it.

Gathering all three copies of the book in my hands, I walked over to a customer service representative.  “Do these all contain the exact same text?” I asked.

She nodded affirmatively.  Although each edition has a different page count due to font size and paper size, she said the text is the same throughout, and no editing for language or content is present in any of the copies of “To Kill a Mockingbird” that are sold at Barnes & Noble.  It’s a chiffarobe that was busted up, I tells ya.  Not a davenport or a dresser or a cabinet.

I purchased the $7.00 copy.

But as I was reading my new purchase, there was something about the copy I bought that just didn’t seem right.  The publication seemed too fresh and sterile – the pages were too crisp, the binding seemed too stiff.  It was almost as if I didn’t dare open the book up more than a crack or the binding would crease unnaturally and never close properly.

Although it was the same novel I read in high school, it wasn’t the same copy I read in high school, the copy that my teacher Bonnie Diefendorf handed to every student in her high school literature class.  The copy of “To Kill a Mockingbird” didn’t have a glossy cover and crisp pages and a tight binding.  The copy I remember was a worn, frayed, mass-produced paperback with a generic white cover, with “To Kill a Mockingbird” printed in big red letters.  The pages were well-turned and buttery soft, as if the book was handed down from student to student, from classmate to classmate, like a literary talisman.

I knew that the original copies from my high school were long gone by now (thanks for nothing, Albany City School District); a quick search on eBay turned up over 400 different copies of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” both in hard cover and in paperback; first editions with early dust jackets and worn out library copies.  There were a few autographed copies of the book, the prices for those were way out of my budget.  I’d have a better shot of convincing Thomas Pynchon to pose for a photo session than to afford an autographed copy of “To Kill a Mockingbird” on eBay.

Then I found it.  The white-covered, red-lettered paperback edition of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” just the way I recalled it.  An eBay seller in Texas had it for an opening bid of 99 cents.

Wow… 99 cents.  Let me clean out the couch cushions.

All kidding aside, I placed a bid on the book.  This was the copy I wanted to read at the fundrasier.  Luckily for me, I won the auction.  So it cost me 99 cents – and $2.82 for shipping – for the book, which will arrive in about five to ten business days.  Plenty of time.  So I’ll just wait for its arrival.

And if things don’t work out with this copy, at least I still have the $7 store-bought copy as a  backup.