VALUABLE FINDS
Is your copy of The Great Gatsby worth over $100,000 - check for these mistakes
Book collectors are willing to pay serious money for this edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece.
It’s one of the best-selling, and dearly beloved, American novels: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. But when it was first published in 1925, despite being well-received by other authors, including T.S. Eliot, it sold poorly.
Although it has now sold over 25 million copies and still sells over half a million annually, the first edition of The Great Gatsby of just over 20,000 copies took a long time to sell out. However, those original copies can now be worth serious money.
The most coveted versions are the very first edition, first printing, especially those that still have the original dust jacket with its now-iconic artwork: a pair of eyes and red lips floating in a deep blue sky.
How to tell if you have an original The Great Gatsby
There’s a simple way to tell if you have one of the original copies. In the first edition, first printing, there are six telltale mistakes that were corrected in the second printing.
The six mistakes that define a first printing of The Great Gatsby
Page 60, Line 16: The word “chatter” appears but was later corrected to “echolalia.”
Page 119, Line 22: The first printing incorrectly says “northern Minnesota” instead of the correct “southern Minnesota.”
Page 165, Line 16: The text uses the incorrect “it’s” instead of “its” in the sentence: “The other car, the one going toward New York came to rest a hundred yards beyond, and it’s driver hurried back.”
Page 165, Line 29: There is a missing period at the end of the sentence after the final word on the page, “away.”
Page 205, Lines 9 and 10: The phrase “sick in tired” was printed instead of “sickantired.”
Page 211, Lines 7 and 8: It says “Union Street station” rather than the correct “Union station.”
If your copy contains these errors, it may be an original first printing. However, beware: replicas have been made that include these same mistakes.
How much could a first edition, first printing of The Great Gatsby be worth?
A well-preserved first edition, first printing of The Great Gatsby—particularly one with the original dust jacket—can easily sell for over $100,000. In April 2014, a world record was set when Sotheby’s auctioned a copy from the collection of Gordon Waldorf for $377,000.
That record was broken this summer when a signed first edition sold for $425,000.
Even without the dust jacket, first editions can still command impressive prices, though it is really the iconic dust jacket that sends a copy into the stratosphere of pricing. Without the dust jacket, a copy in fine condition will likely be worth well into four figures, around $5,000 .
So if you check your copy and find those mistakes, and it still has the dust jacket intact… handle it very, very carefully!