A Rare First Edition of ‘The Great Gatsby’ Lists at $360,000

(Bloomberg) -- 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.”

Determining Value

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 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.” 

Condition Issues

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.”

Market Precedent

The book in question “just sat on someone’s shelf, in a box and unlooked at 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 caliber of the book they’d inherited, contacted a Midwest dealer, who in turn contacted Harrington, who then bought the book outright and is now 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.”

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