Publishing History and Editions
Ace Books primarily catered to New York City subway riders, and competed in the same market as comic book, true crime, and detective fiction publishers. Ace published no hardcover books, only cheap paperbacks, which sold for very little; Burroughs earned less than a cent royalty on each purchase.
Most libraries at the time did not buy Ace books, considering them trivial and without literary merit, and Ace paperbacks were never reviewed by literary critics. At the time of its publication, the novel was in a two-book ("dos-à-dos") omnibus edition (known as an "Ace Double") alongside a previously published 1941 novel called Narcotic Agent by Maurice Helbrant. Burroughs chose to use the pseudonym "William Lee", Lee being his mother's maiden name, for the writing credit. The subtitle of the work was Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict. This edition is a highly desired collectible and even below-average-condition copies have been known to cost hundreds of dollars. The United States Library of Congress purchased a copy in 1992 for its Rare Book/Special Collections Reading Room.
Numerous reprints of the book appeared in the 1960s and 1970s once Burroughs achieved notability with Naked Lunch, with the work now credited under his real name. Generally, American editions used the original Junkie spelling for the title, while UK editions usually changed this to Junky.
In 1977 a complete edition of the original text was published by Penguin Books with an introduction by Allen Ginsberg; sections of the manuscript referring to Burroughs's homosexuality, which had been edited out of earlier editions, were included for the first time. In 2003, to mark the work's 50th anniversary, Penguin reissued the book as Junky: The Definitive Text of "Junk." It included a new introduction by Oliver Harris, the British literary scholar, who integrated new material never before published; Harris had found edits of deleted material in the literary archives of Allen Ginsberg.
Read more about this topic: Junkie (novel)
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