The public domain is a swamp, or a valley of ashes.—Charles Scribner III, in conversation, 25 January 2021 Copyright protection for The Great Gatsby expired on 1 January 2021. The novel has entered the public domain. I was curious to examine the new editions that would be coming out. I anticipated low-priced paperbacks, mid-priced student editions, and high-priced gift editions. I ordered (mostly from Amazon) all print editions published in 2020 or 2021. Over a period of several weeks I received and examined a total of thirty-four new editions. Possibly there are other new editions, but I believe I have acquired them all.1In what follows, I will concentrate for the most part on the texts and physical characteristics of these editions, rather than on prefaces, introductions, and ancillary material. I will address several questions. Is a base text declared? How are the various textual cruxes handled? Are editorial emendations reported? Is there an account, even a brief one, of the composition and textual history of the novel? Are there remarks about the image by the illustrator Francis Cugat that appears on the original dust jacket? The answers are as follows: Some of the new editions do declare a base text. Two of these editions offer remarks about emendations, but no new edition includes a full composition narrative. Only one of the new editions has anything to say about the 1925 dust jacket. Most of the editions say nothing about what text is being presented.In the Cambridge variorum, I traced the textual history of The Great Gatsby from its initial clothbound publication by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1925 to the paperback published by Scribner in 2018 (GGVar xxxi–li). I was able to perform this exercise with confidence. Given the methods used by commercial printing firms for the majority of that period, I knew that for each new edition (i.e., fresh typesetting), there must have been a printer’s copy—a typescript or a published text that had been marked for the compositor. The newly typeset text would have been proofed and then printed, on paper, from standing monotype or linotype, or from an electrotype plate or a planographic plate mounted on an offset press. The result would have been a physical manifestation of the text, a bound book. Later editions of The Great Gatsby would therefore inevitably descend, in some fashion, from earlier editions of the novel. Bibliographers demonstrate these relationships by constructing a “stemma,” a tree-like figure that shows the line of transmission from one text to another.Such assumptions can no longer be made. After examining these new editions of Fitzgerald’s novel, I am convinced that the texts have been cross-pollinating in the night. Editions that had been out of print for decades, editions that I thought were dead, have risen from the grave. Variants that had not appeared in a printed text of The Great Gatsby in decades have popped up in one or more of these new editions. Sets of variants unique to one edition have become intermixed with variants characteristic of another. I therefore cannot speak with confidence about the origins of some of these new texts. They have simply materialized. A few years back, critics were apt to speak of the “instability of the text” as an abstract concept. Today, with The Great Gatsby, we have textual instability incarnate.None of these editions pretends to be a scholarly performance. For the most part these are commercial products issued by publishers who want to capture a sliver of the enormous market for The Great Gatsby. Still, one feels that care should have been taken with the text of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. I will admit to feeling protective about that text. Publishers, it seems to me, should feel the same way. A responsible publisher has a fiduciary duty to provide a reader with an accurate, reliable text of a classic work of literature.Scribner’s (since 2012 Scribner), Fitzgerald’s publisher for his entire career, did an exemplary job of making trustworthy texts of The Great Gatsby available while the novel was still in copyright. From 1925 onward, the book was never out of print. It was published in cloth and paperback, in various price ranges, in editions for teachers, students, and lay readers. Scribner’s was sensitive to the accuracy of the text, incorporating Fitzgerald’s emendations from his personal copy into the standard text and correcting errors when they came to light (such as those Edmund Wilson added to the text when he included it in his edition of the uncompleted The Last Tycoon, published in 1941, a year after Fitzgerald’s death). Scribner has now adopted the Cambridge variorum text for its editions of The Great Gatsby. The Scribner 2018 paperback, with an introduction by Jesmyn Ward and a foreword by Eleanor Lanahan, offers the variorum text. This text was reissued in 2020 in a rack-sized edition. Thus, the variorum text is available from Scribner in two soft-cover editions. The original artwork for the first-edition dust jacket is on the covers of both paperbacks.Some of these new editions appear to descend from the digital text first posted on the Project Gutenberg site in January 2002. That text was updated in October 2020, probably in anticipation of the expiration of copyright. It is impossible now to know how the Gutenberg text read before October 2020, during the period when some prospective publishers of new Gatsby editions seem to have used the cut-and-paste feature to appropriate that text. The Gutenberg text available now appears to descend from a paperback edition published by Scribner’s in the late 1990s. The epigraph is present, but the dedication is missing. Plate changes from the second impression of Scribner’s 1925 have been incorporated, as have emendations from Fitzgerald’s personal copy.Many of the new editions have special designations. We have a Student Edition, a Large Print Edition, a Dover Thrift Edition, an American History Edition, a Collector’s Edition, and a Deluxe Illustrated Edition. Others are “Classics” editions: Vintage Classics, Reader’s Library Classics, Fingerprint Classics, SeaWolf Press Classics, Squid Ink Classics, Word Cloud Classics, Canterbury Classics, Alma Classics, and Mr. Mintz Classics. Some of the imprints are familiar: Penguin, Modern Library, Norton, Harper, Vintage, Everyman, and Dover. Other imprints are less frequently encountered: Black Dog, SeaWolf, Wordsworth, Sirius, Chiltern, Auroch, and Pure Snow. Many of the editions are one-offs that appear to belong to no series. These give no place of publication or publisher; several of them have blank copyright pages.When I prepared The Gatsby variorum for the Cambridge series, I discovered that seven editions between 1941 and 1970 had dropped the epigraph and that nine had omitted the dedication to Zelda (GGVar xxxvii n30). I had hoped that the epigraph and the dedication would reappear in the 2021 editions. Alas, this was not to be. Five of the editions under examination here are missing the epigraph, and an astonishing seventeen have dropped the dedication to Zelda. At one point, I believed this was a nefarious plot to erase Zelda’s name from the novel. I am now inclined to think that the problem is ineptitude. When the epigraph and dedication are present in some of the new editions, they are wedged into odd places—on the half-title, on the copyright page, or at the beginning of the first chapter. The epigraph should appear on the title page; the dedication, if possible, should be printed on an otherwise blank recto following the copyright page.Two of the editions that omit the dedication to Zelda have given us substitute dedications. The Decameron Books edition has the following on its copyright page: “This edition is dedicated to Alison Fields, whose love of this novel | brought others to read it, which is how literature becomes a shared | means of communication and a language unto itself” (iv). And the text published by Wordsworth Editions has this on its copyright page: “Dedicated to | LOGAN and OLIVIA BARBROOK | May your lives be filled with wonderful stories, | great adventures and happily-ever-afters, | Love Mummy” (4).The problem with “orgastic” and “orgiastic” seems almost to have disappeared. Only two of the new editions have “orgiastic” on the final page, but these two, surprisingly, are published by established houses—Modern Library (158) and Everyman (148). I had thought that several others might resurrect “orgiastic” from the Scribner’s edition of 1941, but I was incorrect. As for contested readings, five of the new editions have “irises” rather than “retinas” in the description of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s eyes, but most of these editions do not follow through by emending “Astoria” to “Long Island City” and “eastward toward the park” to “southward toward the park.”2The slur-word “kyke” (Fitzgerald’s spelling on page 41 of the first edition) appears in many of the new editions. The more commonly found “kike” is in other new editions. A bowdlerization, “tyke,” first appeared in a Penguin text in 1974 (36). The “tyke” reading is still afloat and reappears in the new Penguin English Library text (28). Along these same lines, I had thought that some of the new editions might do away with Nick’s mention of “three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl,” and with the “yolks of their eyeballs”—this from chapter 3 of the 1925 edition, as Gatsby and Nick pass over the Queensboro Bridge on the way into Manhattan (83). But these words, which some readers will find offensive, are present in all of the new editions. About half of the editions capitalize “Negroes,” which is normal practice today but was not in 1925.Space breaks have always been a problem in The Great Gatsby. Some of the new editions include the space breaks, or most of them, from the first edition; other new editions omit them altogether; still others mark the space breaks with asterisks or bullets or type ornaments. Several of the new editions have extra space between each paragraph, which swells the page count and makes it difficult to tell where the legitimate space breaks occur. Many of the editions employ sans-serif typefaces; these make the text look like an auto-repair manual. Some of the editions have ersatz tables of contents; others have “THE END” on the final page. Neither of these features appears in the first edition. The Auroch Press edition concludes on page 144, a verso, with this familiar sentence: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” But as one is contemplating this sentence one is confronted, on page 145, the facing recto, with these five lines: OLD SPORT, IF YOU ENJOYED THIS BOOK, AND LEARNT FROM IT TOO, WHY NOT WRITE A REVIEW FOR THE PARTIES I THREW!Only the Norton Critical Edition has something to say about the Francis Cugat painting on the dust jacket of the original Scribner’s edition. (In the Norton edition the painting, a gouache on paper, is referred to as “washed with watercolor and gauche” [xxiii].) This dust jacket image, like the text of The Great Gatsby, is now in the public domain. Any publisher can use it. Seven of the post-copyright editions have the image on the front cover, but the reproductions are often blurry and the colors not quite right. Also popular are representations of Gatsby’s yellow car. Five editions feature the automobile on the cover; three have champagne glasses and bubbles; four have the motif of a feather fan.Several of the hardback editions have decorative stamped bindings, silk ribbon bookmarks, and gilt edges. These editions, one assumes, are for the giftbook trade. The Canterbury Classics edition has a gold-stamped image of a languid-looking woman on the front cover. The rendering of her dress is probably meant to suggest the style of the American 1920s but to my eye looks like something from the Mauve Decade, done in the manner of Aubrey Beardsley. The most elegant of the decorated editions was published in New Delhi by Fingerprint Classics. Representations of a man and a woman in evening clothes are stamped, in shiny gold and glossy red, on the front cover. This is appropriate, but the automobile parked behind these two people is a Dodge Charger (the muscle car popular during the 1980s), and the house behind the car is a McMansion. My favorite cover is on a paperback published in Boston by Squid Ink Classics. The image is of majestic pine trees over which hover the Northern Lights—in luminous green, of course.The prize for the most peculiar edition goes to a paperback that has no title page, no copyright page, no half-title, no epigraph, no dedication, and no page numbers. (It is the last of the thirty-four editions listed at the head of this review.) Fitzgerald’s name appears only on the cover. The text of the novel begins on the very first page of the book. Some of the dialogue is set off with double quotation marks, as in the first edition, but most of it is prefaced only by a hyphen before the first word. The text is bizarre. Fitzgerald’s words appear to have been translated into another language and then rendered back into English by an antic computer. Consider this passage, typical of many in the edition: Anyway, Miss Baker’s lips frizzed; she nodded almost imperceptibly in my direction, then very quickly threw it back—no doubt the object she was balancing had almost fallen to her terror. Again, a sort of justification rose to my lips. Any display of self-assurance extorts me an astonished tribute. (5)Or this passage: I glanced around. Most of the ladies still present were arguing with gentlemen who were said to be their husbands. Jordan’s first companions, the two East Eggs, were themselves cruelly torn by an argument. One of the men was talking to a young actress with serious intensity and his wife, after trying to laugh at it indifferently and dignifiedly, finally lost all restraint and engaged in flank attacks—at intervals, she suddenly appeared at his side, sparkling with anger like a diamond, and whistled in his ear: “Yet you had promised!” ” (31)I merely transcribe. The two double quotation marks at the end of the passage above appear just as they do in this strange edition. Finally, we have this familiar exchange between Nick and Gatsby:Gatsby turned to me all in one piece: I have nothing to say in this house, old brother.She has an indiscreet voice, a voice full of . . .I hesitated.Her voice is full of change, he said suddenly. (73)There is a surprise at the end of this edition. The final three pages of the original novel have been omitted. The text stops in the middle of the confrontation between Nick and Tom on Fifth Avenue (109). At least one does not have to worry about “orgastic” versus “orgiastic” in this edition.I am curious to know how this misbegotten text came into being. The publisher is not identified. The cover is black; it bears the title of the book and Fitzgerald’s name. Between the title and the author’s name appear three rectangles in a sandy brown color. Collectors of textual curiosa will want to acquire a copy (ISBN 9798708844682). In September 2021, the edition was still available from Amazon, but it was necessary to scroll quite far down through the listings to find it.Some of these editions are responsibly done. One of the best is the Penguin Books paperback, with a text prepared by Philip McGowan. Both McGowan and Min Jin Lee, who supplies the introduction (ix–xxviii), have done their homework. The documentation (xxix–xxxii) and the “Suggestions for Further Reading” (xxxiii–xxxv) show an admirable effort to put into play the available scholarship on the novel. McGowan has consulted both the Cambridge edition of 1991 and the Cambridge variorum of 2019. McGowan tells us that his text is based on the first appearance of The Great Gatsby on the British book market, the 1926 Chatto & Windus subedition (xxxvii). As McGowan must have learned from the Cambridge variorum, this Chatto & Windus edition was in fact printed from a set of duplicate electrotype plates cast from the Scribner’s plates, or possibly cast from the standing type, at the Scribner’s printing plant. These plates were used for the second American printing of 1925.This new Penguin text therefore actually derives from the second printing of Scribner’s 1925, incorporating the six changes made for that printing (e.g., “echolalia” and “sickantired”) plus one other, the correction of “absorbtion” to “absorption” at 119.5–6, which appears first in the Chatto & Windus text. McGowan lists new emendations in his textual note (xxxvii–xxxix). The revisions from Fitzgerald’s personal copy have not been included. This edition emends to “irises” in the description of the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg (27) but leaves “eastward” (40) and “Astoria” (72, 132) as they appeared in the first edition (respectively 27, 43, 82, 150).3 Much of the quasi-British orthography from the first Scribner’s edition has been preserved. The epigraph and dedication are present in their proper places, and “orgastic” appears on the final page. The space breaks from the first edition are present, along with a new one that appeared for the first time in the 1991 edition.4 Because the 1926 subedition has been used as the base text, however, the “Muhlbach Hotel” appears in this Penguin text instead of the “Seelbach Hotel” (80), and, surprisingly, “Mavromichaelis” appears instead of “Michaelis” (144).5 Both of these errors were corrected by Fitzgerald in his personal copy.6The Norton Critical edition omits the dedication to Zelda. This is not a good beginning. The editor, David J. Alworth, includes a textual note which gives a sketchy account of emendations. This Norton edition is based on the second trade printing of Scribner’s 1925. The emendations that Fitzgerald made in his personal copy of The Great Gatsby are not included. A few mistakes in the second printing are carried over in the Norton text: “Mulbach hotel” rather than “Seelbach hotel” again (51). “Mavromichaelis,” however, has been silently corrected to “Michaelis” (89). Alworth’s textual note reads in part: “Throughout the manuscript I have favored U.S. English spellings, but some British variants (e.g., ‘centres’) have been preserved” (xii). The Norton text has most of the quasi-British word divisions from the first edition, such as “any one,” “down-stairs,” “to-night,” and “to-day.” Attention has been paid to other readings: Wolfshiem’s name is spelled with the “ie.” On the final page, one finds “orgastic,” as is proper, not “orgiastic” (117). The rest of the volume (548 pages in length) is of great utility. The edition includes much material that Fitzgerald read and was influenced by during composition, along with writings by Fitzgerald that have bearing on the novel, including the stories “Winter Dreams” and “Absolution” (ASYM 43–65, 78–93, respectively). There are also letters and essays, reviews and criticism. Like all of the volumes in the Norton Critical series, this one will be of considerable value in advanced undergraduate courses and graduate seminars. Everything needed for extended discussion and for the preparation of term papers is here.I have been able to identify the source or base text for some of the other editions, even if that text is not announced in the volume. Source texts can be identified by checking readings unique to particular typesettings. Book collectors call these “points.” I like to think of them as “tells”—the quirks and tics that investigators in detective novels look for when questioning suspects.The new Modern Library paperback does not disclose its source text or give a list of emendations, but it descends ultimately from Wilson’s 1941 Scribner’s edition. The epigraph and dedication are present (both were absent from the Wilson edition). The “tell” here is “orgiastic” on the final page (158), along with “Wolfsheim” throughout and “said” for “sid” both times (61, 150).7 Other signs of the Wilson text are the words “with particular intensity,” missing from page 109 of this edition, and a short sentence (“It just shows you.”) absent from page 152. Four space breaks are omitted in chapter 9, as they are in Wilson’s text. Most of the emendations from Fitzgerald’s personal copy of The Great Gatsby are present, suggesting that the Modern Library text was typeset from one of the later subeditions of Scribner’s 1941 into which Malcolm Cowley had introduced those changes (GGVar xxxv–xxxviii).The Everyman edition also descends from Scribner’s 1941. The “tell” is again “orgiastic” on the final page (148), although the epigraph and dedication are both present (they are absent in the 1941 edition). The Everyman gives us a text with mix-and-match variants. Much of the quasi-British accidental texture has been reproduced (e.g., “neighbour,” “week-end,” “eastwards,” and single quotes in dialogue). Wolfshiem says “said” instead of “sid” both times (57, 139). The phrase “with peculiar intensity” is omitted (101), as in the 1941 text, but “It just shows you,” missing from the 1941 edition, has been restored (142). The plate changes for the second printing of Scribner’s 1925 are here, but the emendations from Fitzgerald’s personal copy are not. Hence, we again have “Muhlbach” instead of “Seelbach” (63), and “Mavromichaelis” rather than “Michaelis” (112).8The Harper Perennial edition also has a mixture of variants. Gatsby’s self-admonitions toward the end of the novel (“No more smokeing or chewing,” “Bath every other day”) have been enclosed in boxes, as on a spread sheet (155). The dedication is present, but the epigraph is missing. Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s eyes have “retinas” (20). We have one “sid” (61) and one “said” (153); “Wolfshiem” is spelled with the “ie.” The changes from the second printing have been incorporated, as have Fitzgerald’s emendations from his personal copy. On the final page, we find “orgastic,” as we should (162).The Decameron edition offers an introduction that had its beginnings in the World Heritage Encyclopedia. To this encyclopedia entry has been added “further historical additions and edits” by E. Z. Kunst (155). This edition has the following to say in the back matter: “The text from this edition follows most of the edits Fitzgerald made to the novel later in life, keeping only a few earlier spellings and minor eccentricities of punctuation” (155). Exactly what this statement means is unclear. The fact is that the edition was typeset from the paperback edition that I edited for Scribner in 2018. The “tell” is this line: “‘The Old Metropole,’ said Gatsby.” This line appears only in the 2018 Scribner paperback, on page 70. (This was an early attempt by me to resolve the difficulty about who is speaking here, Gatsby or Wolfshiem.) There is nothing improper about using the 2018 Scribner paperback as setting-copy, but it would have been nice to have an acknowledgment. The Dover Thrift Edition is likewise a resetting of the same Scribner paperback with no acknowledgment.The next new edition, from Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, features illustrations and other decorations by the London artist Adam Simpson. The publisher’s note tells us that the base text for this new typesetting is the first printing of the Scribner’s 1925 first edition (iii). The note goes on to say that this new edition “remains faithful to that edition, including in spelling, punctuation, and other characteristics of the text.” For the most part this is true. Neither the alterations for the second Scribner’s printing nor the changes marked by Fitzgerald in his copy are included. One quibble: The ditto marks in Gatsby’s self-improvement list are typeset as curly quotes (193–94). I found the illustrations and other vignettes to be distracting, particularly a typographical arrangement on pages 134–35 that has vectors running through the text. This is a gift edition and perhaps is not meant to be read. All else is in order, including the epigraph and the dedication.The Black Dog edition is the best of the illustrated texts. The Mr. Mintz Classics edition promises on its cover to be a “Complete Edition with Original Illustrations.” The illustrations turn out to be “computer-made” and include an image of a farmer and a plow horse early in chapter 6 (99), the chapter in which Tom Buchanan, his rude friend Sloan, and Sloan’s wife arrive at Gatsby’s mansion—on horseback. Perhaps that is the connection.The Great Gatsby and Other Works, from Canterbury Classics, includes This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned, both of which have been out of copyright for some time now, in the same volume with The Great Gatsby. This Canterbury edition came out in 2020, which would technically put it in violation of copyright for The Great Gatsby, but the book was printed in China. Perhaps this made it possible for the publisher to jump the gun by a year? This edition has a heavily decorated binding, figured endpapers, and gilt edges all around. The text appears to descend ultimately from the 1941 Edmund Wilson edition. The epigraph is missing, as is the dedication to Zelda—characteristics of Wilson 1941. Fitzgerald’s “Wolfshiem,” however, appears throughout instead of Wilson’s “Wolfsheim,” and at the end of the book we find “orgastic” instead of “orgiastic” (717). This indicates emendation, or perhaps two source texts.This same treatment is on the way for other classic American texts. The Sun Also Rises (1926) loses copyright protection in 2022, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and Elmer Gantry (1927) in 2023, and The Sound and the Fury (1929) in 2025. Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and Black Boy (1945) will pass into the public domain in the years after that, barring a change in copyright law. These books do not have the sales potential of The Great Gatsby, but all of them are important literary works. Any publisher will be free to release a new edition of any one of them.Some readers are probably asking themselves whether any of this matters. Are we playing bibliographical parlor games here? Other than the dedication, none of these variants carries truly heavy interpretive weight. The reader who purchases one of these editions will still get most of what Fitzgerald has to say. Daisy’s voice will be full of money; Gatsby will have his same smile. Nick will be observant, Tom obnoxious, and Jordan faintly arrogant. Wolfshiem, whether he says “sid” or “said,” will wear cufflinks made from human molars. Myrtle will be vulgar and George full of despair. Owl Eyes will be the only guest to come to the funeral. The language will be beautiful, the parties spectacular, and the jazz hot. Perhaps a textus immaculatus is not necessary.That said, I believe we owe it to Fitzgerald, and to this superlative novel, to attempt to get the text right. A great deal more care might have been taken with most of these new texts. In preparing the Cambridge variorum, I came to the conclusion that many of the editors and publishers other than Scribner’s who issued editions of The Great Gatsby between 1925 and 1975 believed that any old text would do for a start, and that it was all right to improve Fitzgerald’s novel with a little helpful blue-penciling. I had hoped that such would not be the case this time around, but with the majority of these editions not much seems to have changed.Other new editions of The Great Gatsby are surely in the works. It would be good if the editors and publishers of those editions would consult the existing scholarship, including the two Cambridge editions. Such an effort will help them choose a base text and make decisions about textual cruxes. It would also be good, dammit, if publishers would stop leaving out the dedication to Zelda.