Fitzgerald, F. Scott

This Side of Paradise. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920

8vo. Publisher's dark blue-green cloth, stamped in blind and gilt; endpapers darkened and spine lightly rubbed. In a quarter-morocco slipcase.

Bruccoli A5.I.a

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First edition of Fitzgerald’s first novel; 3000 copies issued on March 26, 1920. By August, this title had seen seven printings, two of which (the fourth and seventh) saw revisions in the plates. 

A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: [the first three words are apparently in Douglas’s hand] "To James H. Douglas [all that follows is in Fitzgerald’s hand:] Under whose beneficent patronage I have spent a useless month, cheered only by seeing him sling pregnant words at impressionable sophomores. F. Scott Fitzgerald (the W.K. Author) Cottage Club, Princeton, N.J. March 27^th, 1920." Wanting to be at Princeton on the publication day of his first novel, the “well-known author” had moved into the Cottage Club in late February. Douglas, who graduated from Princeton in 1920, was a fellow member who went on to become Secretary of the U.S. Air Force.