ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 19, 1997 TAG: 9701200110
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: ALEXANDRIA, VA.
SOURCE: Associated Press
THE RECLUSIVE AUTHOR of ``The Catcher in the Rye'' chose a tiny publishing house that's as obscure as he is famous.
The fiercely reclusive J.D. Salinger is coming out with his first book in 34 years in a literary coup for a tiny Virginia publishing house that apparently shares his passion for privacy.
Orchises Press, which lists no street address or phone number and apparently operates out of a professor's home, will publish Salinger's novella ``Hapworth 16, 1924'' next month. The work first appeared in The New Yorker in 1965.
Not surprisingly, the 78-year-old author of ``The Catcher in the Rye'' is saying nothing about the deal he struck with Roger Lathbury, a George Mason University professor of English and editor and publisher of Orchises Press.
Salinger's agent in New York confirmed only that the book will be issued soon.
And though he has won a literary property that major publishing houses would pay dearly for, Lathbury refused to discuss details of the deal or even how many copies of the book he will print.
``This is a book meant for readers, not for collectors,'' he told The Washington Post and The Miami Herald.
Salinger loathes the commercial aspects of publishing. His most recent book, ``Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,'' was published 34 years ago. He has had nothing new in print since The New Yorker devoted 81 pages to ``Hapworth'' in June 1965.
Salinger retreated into seclusion in Cornish, N.H., and he grants no interviews.
He once instructed his agent to burn letters from him, and further ordered her to pitch his fan mail without reading it. He waged a winning battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court against a biographer who wanted to quote from Salinger's letters.
Last year, he had his agents pursue the author of a World Wide Web site devoted to Salinger's work, and the site was dismantled.
Salinger published four books between 1951 and 1963. ``The Catcher in the Rye,'' ``Franny and Zooey'' and the others have been reissued continuously since.
The magazine story is an episode from Salinger's famous Glass family saga. It is a lamentation from camp written by precocious 7-year-old Seymour Glass.
``I think it's a big deal,'' said Ron Rosenbaum, who wrote an essay on ``Catcher'' last week in the New York Observer. ``I think it indicates some perhaps significant change in Salinger's aggressive policy.''
Lathbury, 51, teaches early 20th century American and British literature. He does not regularly teach Salinger.
Orchises Press has published only 60 titles. It puts out five to eight titles a year and distributes mostly through mail-order catalogs.
The catalog includes reprints of other classic authors, including poets W.H. Auden and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, along with new works.
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: File/1951 Salingerby CNB