How Does Gutenberg'S The Great Gatsby Differ From The Original?

Question

Saw Gutenberg's adaptation but missed classic details; anyone notice how his take changes plot tone or jazz-age mood compared to Fitzgerald's novel?

Lori Denton · Answer

When I've read a Gutenberg version of 'The Great Gatsby', the differences from the regular edition are things like more/less space between paragraphs, different placement of chapter headings, and the presence or absence of footnotes. (As the edition is based on the public domain original, there's not much scope for serious variation here.) While a lovely free resource, these editions can sometimes lack the publisher's own styling and so appear under-edited and plain. Quite a change of pace from Great Gatsby-esque tales of ambition and plenty, I've recently become utterly absorbed in A Night with the Zillionaire. The book is a clever, fun contract marriage story, where a smart intern marries reclusive tech billionaire for cash and the heroine proceeds to navigate his complex world of numerous domineering relations and employees with plenty of humor and wit. The writing is modern and smart with plenty of twist and turn to keep one entertained and concerned.

Ingrid · Answer

I had been putting off reading The Great Gatsby for far too long and I ended up downloading a free Gutenberg e-book. The text is faithful to the original but lacks the ‘je ne sais qu Bradford’ of the physical book. So no very attractive Art Deco inspired covers, no marginalia from decades of previous readers. However, as someone who annotate a lot, I can say that annotating a Gutenberg e-book is great – much better than annotating around on a physical copy of a book that’s old and of value to others. The ability to search for things in the e-book version is also very powerful. I can easily find all references to the green light or all references where Daisy’s voice is ‘full of money’.

There is one potential problem with old scans (e.g. Gutenburg): letters can get misread (so ‘rn’ gets read as ‘m’ for example) but the proof readers have done a great job in this case. As I said above, it does not have any of the historical context that the book had when it was first published (e.g. advertisements for other books by publishers, notes from the publishers etc.) but for looking up things quickly or comparing a text with other versions, then the digital version is the best way to go.

Helena · Answer

My electronic copy of The Great Gatsby from Gutenberg is a perfectly adequate photocopy of a masterpiece — free, searchable, read overnight for quotes. But it lacks the texture of the printed book: the peculiarities of the type, the paper, even occasional printing errors. Reading both last night, I saw how the uniformity of the font of the e-book made the novel seem somewhat cooler, less jazz age than the printed copy.

Anna · Answer

The Gutenberg edition of The Great Gatsby that I linked to above is a digitized version of the original 1925 edition. It looks like new. The formatting is all modern and there is no cracking yellow pages or aged, caked up, old fonts to peruse through. Occasionally an old print edition of a book will have unusual spacing between lines and even the occasional print error that has not been corrected in later versions. When I compared my grandfather’s 1925 edition to the Gutenberg edition of The Great Gatsby online, I found that there were a few places where there were to be different spacing between paragraphs of text, as an example in Chapter 3 there was to be an extra line of space between two of the paragraphs in my grandfather’s edition but not in the online edition.

The online version is much more accessible. Provided for free by Gutenberg, it’s wonderful for students and amateur literature readers who can’t afford to buy a first edition of a classic. For those who do read a lot of classic literature online, however, there is something to be said for the comfort of being able to hold the physical work in your hands and smell the old ink. The paper feels better between your fingers. But for pure convenience, Gutenberg is hard to beat.

Jhapzytot Khynze · Answer

Reading Fitzgerald as Gutenberg e-book is all about the paratext. The original book is not only the words of the author but also the physical object itself. The now famous cover of the book was designed by Francis Cugat even before Fitzgerald had completed the manuscript. The famous face in the cover art influenced the F. Scott Fitzgerald’s imagery in his novel. Opening the cover of the original book is a ritualistic act. This is completely missing in the Gutenberg e-book version of the novel, which is democratic and fantastic for spreading literature in the best possible way. For some readers it is even a feature and not a bug: they just want the story. For others it must feel like listening to a wonderful symphony through a tinny speaker.

fsahi1246 · Answer

One obvious difference between reading a classic on an e-reader and reading the same work from Gutenberg.org is that you can’t proudly display a .txt file on a shelf between other classics and feel superior to other readers. Half the fun of classics is the cultural capital we gain from owning physical copies of famous literature. Especially those that are rare or were published in a certain era in especially nice form. The original copy of ‘The Great Gatsby’ is a statement piece – a real boast about one’s cultural superiority. The .txt file, on the other hand, is completely invisible. No container for the content here. And that makes for some very interesting reading of the novel by America’s greatest writer about people attempting to construct identities by displaying their possessions and putting on appearances. Especially when we consider that Gatsby’s library was comprised of real books, printed in their entirety on bound pages of substantial weight and size. It was the ultimate facade of substance. A digital file is all substance, no aesthetic exterior to fooled by. Is it more authentic to read the novel this way?

Tj Black Stone · Answer

Is it possible that the plainness of the Gutenberg text is actually a virtue for a first-time reader? No introductions, no footnotes, no blurbs. Just you and the voice of Nick. It is so much simpler than so many of the books out there today. Sometimes the added material creates such expectations that they can even get in the way of really experiencing the book. I imagine that a reader of The Great Gatsby in 1925 would have had an experience more like reading the bare Gutenberg file than a modern, heavily annotated scholarly edition. Simple. Just the story. Allow it to be judged by the reader on its own terms.

jackieliz2018 · Answer

There are no margins for notes and doodles in a print book, only in very wide ones for reactions. The Gutenberg .txt file typically does not have any margins at all, and those it does have are set by your ereader. The act of writing in the margin of a book is always a very direct physical act and thus in some fundamental sense a conversation with the text as you read it. And that is very different from typing a note into a digital file, which is in a very different sense of ‘typed’ certainly much more detached from the body of text. The printed book is something that you can write in and thereby make your own, leave your mark on it and thereby personalize it. The digital file on the other hand is something that you can leave exactly as it was published. For a novel about people trying to inscribe themselves into a world which rejects them, the possibility of literally inscribing yourself onto the pages of a book feels significant.

Ola GoLd · Answer

This is how Tom Buchanan might explain Project Gutenberg to Nick Carraway: “See? These guys want to give away books for nothing. There’s no good end to this kind of thing. Next thing you know, everyone’s going to think they can just read without paying real money for it.” The key to this, however, is the ideology behind it. The original Moby Dick was a commercial article, sold to readers as a commodity to be displayed on a shelf. The Gutenberg book is a gift. And how one values a gift is very different from how one values something purchased in a store. And how one reads a gift is probably different too from how one reads a commodity. Gatsby would probably prefer the gilt-edged original but Nick Carraway might appreciate the straightforward utility of the free book.

Nothy Nkhocy · Answer

The length of the original Gatsby is fixed. You can see it on a shelf. The same Gutenberg text is of fluctuating length depending on screen size, font and margins. A short book looks like a tight, focused tragedy. A long digital scroll of seemingly endless text reads as surprisingly short and focused in fact. While the original book physically constrains the reader to acknowledge the characters’ wealth cannot bring them the things they want within the small parameters of their tragic lives, the seemingly limitless digital format of the same text ironically underlines the brevity and uniqueness of the narrative contained within it.

Rina Elizabeth Abrego · Answer

So does the new Gutenberg version include a table of contents for The Great Gatsby? The original book includes a table of contents for the chapters in the book, which is included in the .txt file I linked to above. But as a .txt file, a linked table of contents is not particularly useful, so you are stuck scrolling or searching through the file to refer to a particular chapter. The original book has a fixed physical index to the various parts of the book. The digital version is a fluid, searchable structure. The original book feels like a bounded, cohesive object with a fixed, pretty architecture. The digital version of the book is more of a stream of text that you can read in whatever style you prefer. But it’s not fixed or linear, the way Fitzgerald and his publisher intended.

How Does Gutenberg'S The Great Gatsby Differ From The Original?

11 Answers

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