Found out the first edition of 'The Great Gatsby' sold for under $2

I was reading a piece in the New York Times about book auctions and it said the first printing of 'The Great Gatsby' in 1925 had a cover price of $2.00. It just sat on shelves and sold poorly. Now a first edition in good shape can go for over $100,000. Makes you wonder what book from our club picks will be the sleeper hit in a hundred years. Anyone else come across a fact like that about a book we've read?

3 comments

3 Comments

zara5721mo ago

That's wild, it totally bombed at first. Makes me think about how much luck and timing plays into what becomes a classic. What do you think makes a book flop hard when it comes out but then blow up decades later? Is it just people catching up, or does the world have to change to get it?

patricialee1mo ago

Moby-Dick sold under 4,000 copies in Melville's lifetime. Sometimes the culture needs to shift to create the right audience. A book can be so far ahead of its time that it takes a generation for readers to catch up to its ideas. The initial flop is often about bad timing, not bad writing.

jesse_fisher1mo agoTop Commenter

Yeah, it's kind of comforting to think about... like the work itself was always good, the world just wasn't ready for it yet.