Tender is the Night: A Romance by Fitzgerald, F. Scott; Shenton, Edward [Illustrator] - 1934

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934. Advance Reading Copy. Very Good. Advance review copy. [viii], 408 pp. Plain brown wrappers with title, author, and publication date written in pen on front wrap. Very Good, faint dampstain affecting the lower quarter of the title on the wrapper and free endpaper, the text block with a minute residual stain just visible in the extreme outer margin of the first ten leaves or so; rear wrap and terminals have smaller dampstain. Front wrap corner creased as well, slight cock to spine. A scarce variant, perhaps the earliest state, of the only Fitzgerald title to appear in advance form.

Variant ARC unrecorded by Matthew Bruccoli in F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Bibliography. He only records copies bound in wrappers made from a dust jacket trimmed to size, stating "These are the most collectible copies of Tender is the Night in terms of priority and rarity." He notes only three copies in institutions; additionally, we note two of those copies in the auction records only, and two others currently offered in the trade. In F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Marketplace Bruccoli speculates that the reason for their scarcity is that the vast majority of ARCs were bound in cloth by the publisher and sold as trade copies. The textblock of our variant copy is about an eighth of an inch shorter than the published book; the brown wrappers are clearly integral with no indication of a jacket ever having been mounted to them. This is very well may be an earlier state of the ARC than that which Bruccoli describes, prepared perhaps before the jacket design was complete.