45¢

[From 1967, a 39th printing, by Washington Square Press.]

That’s my copy, one of the first two books I bought outside of a school book fair. The other: stories and poems by Edgar Allan Poe. I know that these books came from a spinner rack in a department store (back when department stores had book departments). I might have bought them with birthday money.

The Poe, I read. And though I’ve read a fair number of Dickens novels, I never read A Tale of Two Cities. And now I have. Elaine wanted to put it on the list for our two-person book club. Bleak House it ain’t, and the novel’s reliance on coincidence (or resemblance) is a bit of a reach. But it has all the Dickens stuff — comedy, pathos, and dazzling narrative effects — and in 2026, a strange timeliness. And it’d be hard to beat the price.

[Thinking about book production: there’s foxing, but this book is in good shape, with no cracks in the spine. And there’s an introduction by Edgar Johnson, author of the two-volume biography Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (1952). The CPI Inflation Calculator suggests a price of $4.something in 2026.]