R.S. Evangelista

I know I haven’t written in a long while, but Fall IS just around the corner. 

I have one little tidbit that I’ve found to help me get back to posting. And I know that J.D. Salinger isn’t Christ, but his old toilet is for sale at a Million dollars…

NC memorabilia dealer selling J.D. Salinger’s toilet

Published: Saturday, August 21, 2010, 8:40 AM    

The Associated Press

KERNERSVILLE, N.C. (AP) — A North Carolina collectibles dealer is hawking a toilet ripped from reclusive author J.D. Salinger’s former home.

Rick Kohl of The Vault said Friday he bought the standard white porcelain fixture from a New Hampshire couple who owned a home where the author of “Catcher in the Rye” once lived.

To vouch that this is no phony, Kohl has a letter from the homeowner attesting that she and her husband replaced the toilet while remodeling, and that they knew the workmen who installed it decades ago.

The receptacle has an eBay asking price of $1 million, though Kohl says he’s willing to see what the literary giant’s home throne will fetch.

The toilet’s lid is stamped with a manufacturing date of 1962, well after the 1951 publication date of Salinger’s classic novel.

http://blog.syracuse.com/entertainment/2010/08/nc_memorabilia_dealer_selling.html

Now, two weeks after Mr. Salinger’s death at age 91, the letters are being made public. They are likely to be among the first batch of many such correspondences, given Mr. Salinger’s history of letter-writing, that will surface and deepen — or perhaps even alter — the public’s understanding of one of the 20th-century’s most puzzling, and puzzled about, literary lights.

Now cloistered at the Morgan Library and Museum in Midtown Manhattan, the letters had reached the museum by way of gift, a single clamshell box of papers in a much larger collection of 20th-century American literature assembled by Carter Burden and donated to the museum in 1998, two years after Mr. Burden’s death.

The references to Mr. Salinger’s writings are tantalizingly specific. One 1966 letter refers to an accumulation of “ten, twelve years’ work” that includes “two particular scripts — books really — that I’ve been hoarding at and picking at for years.”

*all quoted from Ny Times article