I lost a Gatsby. Again.
A few days ago, someone added The Great Gatsby to their cart on our website. They didn’t check out. The copy stayed in the system. A few days later, someone else found it. Checked it out. It’s gone.
That’s how fast a book can disappear.
Jay Gatsby wanted Daisy. And the house. And the parties. And the past. Mostly, he wanted to believe that wanting was enough. It wasn’t.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is about a lot of things: love, class, reinvention, lies. But mostly, it’s about chasing the wrong green light. Which is why it still hits hard nearly 100 years after it was published. In fact, The Great Gatsby actually turned 100 in April 2025 and is still considered an all-time classic.
That copy of The Great Gatsby I told you about, the one that we sold, had a coffee stain across Chapter 5. Right where Gatsby and Daisy finally meet again. You could tell someone had read that part more than once. The pages were soft, just on that scene. A folded corner. Some underlines. A pen smudge where a line hit a little too hard.
We never throw those copies away, not unless they’re unreadable. Sometimes a little damage is the best part. And now that copy’s long gone. But every now and then, we get another one in. And every now and then, we fall in love with a different flaw.
Coffee stains and all.
PS: If you’re the one who left the pen mark later in the book next to the line,
“Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”...
Yeah. Me too.