High schoolers, beware: Before
you annotate your next copy of The Great Gatsby, check the publication date. It
might be worth a fortune.
“The Great Gatsby is considered,
in collecting terms, the No. 1 American novel to collect,” says the
London-based rare book dealer Peter Harrington. “A lot of that has to do with
the dust jacket — people just seem to desperately want it.”
Harrington will soon bring a
first edition of the 1925 book, widely considered F Scott Fitzgerald’s
masterpiece, to New York’s International Antiquarian Book Fair, which runs from
April 21-24 at the Park Avenue Armory.
Harrington’s book is priced at
£275,000 (about $360,000), placing it at the upper tier of a booming
collectible market. “For 20th century literature, this is definitely up there,”
he says. “The truth is, the lockdown and that whole period had been very kind
to the rare book market.”
Like most books, editions of The
Great Gatsby are priced based on a fairly rigid set of criteria: when the book
was printed, the condition of its dust jacket, and if any parts of the book or
jacket have been damaged and/or restored.
The first edition numbered 20,870
copies. The easiest way to determine if a book is from this print run — aside
from just looking inside the cover — is by checking for errors that were
eventually corrected.
One telltale sign from the first
printing is a mistake on the jacket itself. The protagonist’s name, Jay Gatsby,
is spelled with a lower-case j, “and rather than reprint the whole thing, they
literally had someone go over it with a rubber J stamp”, says Harrington. “So,
you see a large J on the back that looks a little weird. And when you collect
these things, that part of the story is part of what makes it fun.”
That very first issue also has at
least five typos inside. Rare book dealer Heather O’Donnell, in a primer on
the Gatsby first edition market in Lapham’s Quarterly, writes that on page 205,
“Meyer Wolfsheim’s secretary tells Nick Carraway she’s ‘sick in tired’ of young
men trying to force their way into the office.”
The jacket is an image by the
painter Francis Cugat, which Fitzgerald had apparently seen before he finished
the book. “For Christ’s sake don’t give anyone that jacket you’re saving for
me,” Fitzgerald wrote to his publisher in advance of publication. “I’ve written
it into the book.”
The only problem is that in the
first printing, the book jacket was slightly too large, making it prone to
tear. “The jacket was produced one place, the book was produced someplace
else,” Harrington explains. “So, it usually got chipped.”
About 20 years ago, Harrington
continues, there was a vogue for restoring these damaged editions. “If there’s
a chunk missing from the spine, a conservator fills it in so it looks like a
nice copy,” he says. But original, untouched, mint-condition versions like the
one he’s bringing to New York only turn up, he says, “every five years or so”.
The book in question “just sat on
someone’s shelf, in a box and unlooked for God knows how long”, says
Harrington.
While in one respect that’s a
pity, he continues, on the other hand “the minute it gets handled is when it
gets trashed”. So, its neglect had a definite silver lining. After its most
recent owner died, his heirs, who knew the calibre of the book they’d
inherited, contacted a Midwest dealer, who in turn contacted Harrington, who
then bought the book outright and is preparing to sell it himself.
The $360,000 price tag, while
steep, does have some precedent. In 2014, an unrestored first edition with a
few small chips in the jacket came to auction at Sotheby’s with an estimate of
$250,000 to $350,000, and sold for $377,000.
More recently, a signed first
edition with some condition issues sold at Heritage Auctions in New York for
$162,500. In 2009, a first edition at Bonham’s New York sold for $180,000.
Harrington says that there are
Gatsby collectors around the world, but he’s bringing it to New York, he hopes,
to sell it to an American. “There are definitely some candidates to buy it in
the marketplace,” he says. “They just need to see it.”