The $175,000 Dust Jacket Comes to Auction
by Stephen J. Gertz
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| Sotheby’s Oct. 10, 2011. Est. $150,000-$180,000. |
The incredibly rare and desirable dust jacket to the first edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is coming to auction via Sotheby’s-New York Library of an English Bibliophile Sale Part II on October 20, 2011. It is estimated to sell for $150,000-$180,000. An excellent copy of the first edition, first printing of The Great Gatsby, a book that in near-fine/fine condition sells for $7,000-$10,000, is included with the dust jacket.
The dust jacket is in the corrected first state, i.e. the “j” in Jay Gatsby on the rear panel was printed in lower case and carefully hand-corrected in ink to upper-case by the publisher. No uncorrected copies of the first state dust jacket are known to exist. In the second state of the dust jacket the “J” was corrected by the printer.