My edition of "The Great Gatsby" has all the points that let you know it's a first rather than a subsequent edition. These include the misprint "sick in tired" on page 205. (I just double-checked the page and found two more typos. They're in the part where Meyer Wolfsheim, Gatsby's unsavory business associate, pulls Nick Carraway into his office and tells him about his first encounter with Gatsby; the italics are mine: "He hadn't eat anything for a couple of days. 'Come on have some lunch with me,' I sid. He ate more than four dollars' worth of food in half an hour.")

Those misprints are delicately underlined in pencil. Not by me—I've owned the book since the late-1960s, but it's the first time I've spotted them. It was probably done by the person who sold it to me—a bookseller in Princeton, N.J., who I visited with my father, possibly in connection with an interview I was having at the Princeton admissions office.

My father's game plan was to have me collect American first editions and portray me as some sort of bibliographic whiz kid, hoping Princeton would want me to round out their incoming freshman class in the way a star high school quarterback or teenage violin prodigy might.

Unfortunately, they didn't. But "Gatsby," among other first editions I collected in that era, served as my consolation prize. I don't remember the name of the Princeton bookseller or his store—though my dad undoubtedly would were he still around—but I do recall his surprised reaction when I discovered the first edition on a dusty shelf in the back of the shop. He apparently wasn't aware he had it, but was obligated to sell it to me for the price he'd long ago penciled in: $10.

The "Gatsby" with its original green cloth cover (unfortunately, it doesn't have the extremely rare dust jacket, which would boost its value twenty-fold to over $100,000) is one of my connections to my father. An even stronger one is the curious bits of paper that reside just inside the front cover. These are clippings from book catalogues, the first one dated 1972, that document the Fitzgerald classic's rise in value over the years.