I was looking up the original cover art for 'The Great Gatsby' and found out something wild

Our club just finished the book, and someone asked about the first edition. I got curious and looked it up online. Turns out, the famous face on the original cover was based on a real person, a painter named Francis Cugat, and he got paid $100 for it in 1925. That blew my mind... a hundred bucks for one of the most famous book covers ever. It made me wonder how much other classic cover artists got for their work. Has anyone else stumbled on a weird fact about a book's history that changed how you saw it?

3 comments

3 Comments

cole36226d ago

That reminds me of learning the original title for "1984" was "The Last Man in Europe".

the_eva26d ago

Wasn't that cover art done before the book was even finished? I read that Fitzgerald loved it so much he put parts of it into the story, which is pretty cool. Makes you see the whole book differently.

jade326d ago

Yeah, that's actually really cool.