It is entirely possible that the reason we never seem to be short of The Da Vinci Code and Fifty Shades of Grey is that the tendrils of these books don’t reach deeply enough into the souls of readers for them to wish to hang on to the books, so they’re less reluctant to dispose of them. The Catcher in the Rye must surely – over the years since it was first published in 1951 – have been published in greater numbers than Dan Brown, but still we don’t see them in the same numbers being offered for sale in the second-hand book trade.
