Catch-22 by Joseph Heller in Stateside Steel

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller in a Stateside Steel style book jacket. As those who belong to its vast readership can testify, Catch-22 is one of the funniest books ever written. It has a gallery of magnificently strange characters seething with comic energy; it possesses, in the incomparable, malingering, bombardier and Everyman, Yossarian, a hero endlessly fertile and inventive in his schemes to save his skin from the horrible chances of war; and it provides us with incidents and devices (the Great Loyalty Oath Crusade, the hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule from which the book takes its title) that propel the narrative in a headlong satiric rush. But the permanence of Joseph Heller’s masterpiece about a bomber squadron in the Second World War’s Italian theatre – the reason its satire never weakens, its jokes never date – stems not from the comedy itself but from the savage, unerring, Swiftian indignation out of which that comedy springs. This fractured anti-epic, with all its aggrieved humanity, has given us the most enduring image we have of modern warfare.

This book is a clothbound hardcover volume published by Everyman’s Library, complete with silk reading-ribbons, acid-free, natural cream-colored paper, and European-style half-round spines. Each book is wrapped in a hand-folded jacket custom designed by Juniper Books.