Between the Covers

Hardcover. First English edition. Blue cloth. Spine sunned, some modest foxing mostly on the foredge that show slightly in the margins of a few pages, a near very good copy lacking the rare dustwrapper.

Fitzgerald had almost no popular success in England, and that failure was a matter of continuous vexation to him, a fact borne out in many of his letters and in every biography that treats on it. William Collins had published Fitzgerald's first four books in unknown but clearly very small numbers: According to *Some Sort of Epic Grandeur*: "None of these books sold well... Collins declined *The Great Gatsby*, which was published by Chatto & Windus in 1926. The novel was not a success... ." Consequently first English editions of all five of these books are extremely uncommon.

Chatto declined to publish Fitzgerald's next book, *All the Sad Young Men* and consequently that book had no contemporary English publisher. By 1934, Fitzgerald had all but fallen off the literary map when this, his last completed novel, was issued. Apparently the sales of *Tender* were no better than Fitzgerald's earlier efforts in England: this first edition was the last book by Fitzgerald published in England in his lifetime. No second printing was required. Publisher Butler and Tanner issued a "cheap edition" in 1936 with leftover sheets of the first edition.

Bruccoli, in his bibliography, locates four copies of the first English edition of *Tender is the Night. OCLC* locates those copies and nine others, only of five of them in the U.S. We could find only one copy of the English edition recorded as being sold at auction (during the same span of our search, 82 copies of the American first edition were sold).

Item #410124