J.D. Salinger died yesterday. Or the day before maybe, I don’t know.

His death reminded me of a little project I had thought about in the fall. What if lots of people took a photograph of different copies of the same book? Individually the photos would be sure to be boring, but as a group, would the relentless repetition and variation make for a complex, textured, mesmerising whole?

And what should the book be? It should be a book that was in virtually every library in the USA. A book that most literate people were familiar with, whether they had read it or not.

I wanted to choose a book that would have a lot of associations and resonances for people, but that wouldn’t be too loaded, like the Bible. I thought of classics like Moby Dick or Hamlet, both of which would still be interesting. But those have been published in so many variations that I worried there would be not enough reptition.

So I hit on The Catcher in the Rye. It has several iconic covers: the original and re-issued cover with the red carousel horse; the solid maroon Bantam paperback with the gold type (so wonderfully parodied by the cover of Frank Portman’s King Dork); the white Little, Brown cover with the rainbow stripes in the corner. And of course many other less familiar covers.

But the idea isn’t to get single, “ideal” photos of these covers. The idea is to get portraits of individual copies of The Catcher in the Rye complete with evidence of reading, library stickers, stamps, covers torn or pristine.

So here’s what I’d like you to do. Grab as many copies of The Catcher in the Rye as you have available. Your own copy, library copies, friends’ copies, whatver. Take photos of the covers. Like the photos illustrating this post, the pictures should look like mug shots: just the book cover, square in the frame, with a little of the table or floor or whatever behind it. Please don’t get creative. If the photo looks kind of boring, you are doing it right. Crop it, get the color and sharpness right, and you are ready to submit it (or just submit it).

To submit, please add your “mugshot” photo–one photo per copy, please–to the Flickr Group Catcher in the Rye Census, LSW. Give it a Creative Commons license, either “Attribution” or “Attribution–Share Alike” (see Flickr’s instructions if you don’t know how to do that). I’m not sure what the end product will be, but I don’t want to have to ask everyone individually for permission . If you have time and inclination, tell us a bit about that copy in the description. If you couldn’t help but take other non-cover-mugshot photos, link to them in the description.

I’m very curious to see what we get when we have hundreds of images of the “same” book in one place.