Seventy years after its first printing, This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald ’17, is being released again in its original form—with cover art, dust jacket, and spellings just as they were in 1920. Henry Reath ’69, the president and publisher of Collectors’ Reprints, Inc., has engineered the reprinting of first editions of many major American novels, including three of Fitzgerald’s.
Reath founded Collectors’ Reprints in 1987, after leaving the presidency of the publishing division at Doubleday. Fascinated by the history surrounding first publications and realizing that rising prices were rendering rare first editions inaccessible to the average reader (copies of The Great Gatsby with original dust jackets sell for more than $10,000), he set out on a literary quest to reprint the original Gatsby, aided by his wife, Mary.
At the suggestion of Charles Scribner III ’73 *77, whose family had donated the Scribner Room and Scribner Archives to Firestone Library, their first stop was Princeton. The first Gatsby printing was so small and is now so rare that the Reaths had not been able to find any copies of the dust jacket among their bookseller friends. With the help of Steven Ferguson, the library’s curator of rare books, Mary Reath found Fitzgerald’s own copy of the Gatsby dust jacket, which features a painting by Francis Cugat. The dust jacket is of particular significance to this novel. The painting featuring a huge pair of eyes over a brightly colored New York skyline, was actually commissioned several months before Fitzgerald finished the novel. When Fitzgerals saw it, he wrote to his editor, Max Perkins, “For Christ’s sake don’t give anyone that jacket, I’ve written it into the book.” The eyes appear in Gatsby on a deserted billboard alongside the railroad track between West Egg and New York. The original Cugat painting, also donated to Princeton by the Scribner family, hangs in Ferguson’s office in Firestone.
Collectors’ Reprints’ First Edition Library published its first re-release, of the 1925 edition of The Great Gatsby, in 1988. To their chagrin, the Reaths learned that their reproduction dust jackets were starting to show up on original copies of the books, tremendously increasing their values. First Edition Library now prints its logo on the backs of the dust jackets as well as on the copyright pages.
Since publishing Gatsby, First Edition has produced fifteen more reprints, and This Side of Paradise is the sixteenth. At the time of its release in 1920, Paradise was far more popular than Gatsby would be in 1925, when it was released. But while Gatsby’s reputation has grown, says Reath, This Side of Paradise has not “stood the test of time.” Nevertheless, he adds, of all the twentieth-century authors included in the First Edition Library, “Fitzgerald is the most popular.”
This was originally published in the October 24, 1990 issue of PAW.