The Great Gatsby

New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/Good. 8vo. First edition. Full green cloth binding with blindstamped letters to boards & gilt lettering to spine under dust jacket illustrated by Francis Cugat, 7-3/4" x 5-1/2", 218 pp. First printing with all flaws. Dust jacket is third state with eight blurbs. Small blemish to front panel, small price sticker with penciled 20-cent price to rear endpapers. Jacket has wear and shallow chipping at edges, shallow loss to spine ends with no lettering loss except a smidgin of the first S in Scribners, short tear to center of spine panel, front flap detached, closed tear to rear panel. Near fine in good jacket.An uncommon book in that almost all states of the jacket are important. It famously flopped upon release, and only went through two printings (the second printing is actually less common than the first.) The first printing was 20,870 copies based on the success of his first two novels, but the second only 3,000 copies. It was slow to sell. Very slow. The first state jacket had a typo, which was hand-corrected in the second state. This third state jacket, however, shows a renewed marketing effort on the part of Scribner’s, as they were able to find enough positive reviews to fill the rear panel. Alas, it still didn’t catch on, and by the time Fitzgerald died in 1940, copies of the second printing were sitting unsold in Scribner’s warehouse. (Inventory #: 202039)