Jaws First Edition Signed with Drawing by Peter Benchley

First edition, early printing of Peter Benchley’s classic work, Jaws signed by the author on the title page with a drawing of a shark head by the author, a rare feature.
It is a carefully looked after copy and is in a remarkably good overall condition for a book that attained vintage status in 2024.
Although Doubleday and Company first printed Jaws in October 1973 with the gutter code 044, dictated by marketing reason, the company delayed the release of Jaws until the February of the next year. Hence the denotation of 1974 as the year of the first edition on the copyright page.
Benchley is reported to have commented that neither he nor anyone else involved in the In the conception of Jaws initially realized the book’s potential.
The first printing of the first edition was huge sales success and it stayed in the New York
Times bestseller list for 44 weeks, selling a total of 125, 000 copies.
Encouraged by the reading-public’s response to the first impression, the publisher issued a second imprint in 1974.
This copy is from the second imprint of the first edition.
The world-wide sales of Jaws, including the paperback editions are estimated at 20 millions
copies.
When Benchley wrote Jaws in the early 1970s, he meticulously researched all available data about the behaviour of sharks that contributed to the emergence of the book as a classic in its genre. It is a finely crafted, superbly paced study of terror that is meant to terrify the reader with tingling imagery.
It was made into a blockbuster motion picture, which was directed by Steven Spielberg and starred Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Murray Hamilton and Lorraine Gary.
Jaws is the first film to gross £100 million at the box office. It was the highest grossing film in modern motion history up to that time.
In 2001, Jaws was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Library, being deemed ‘culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant’.

Specific Details
Publication Year: 1974
Impression: Out the second impression issued in 1974
Publisher: Double Day ; Company, Inc, Garden City, New York
Condition:
An extremely clean copy, not price-clipped and its price of $6.95 is on the top of the dust jacket flap. There are no inscriptions or previous owner markings.
Text block: Near fine for age, shows minor signs of wear near the top and bottom of spine, there are no signs of foxing or markings or excessive age-toning; the top edge bears minor mark, other two edges are of devoid of blemishes.
Covers: Clean except for a minor patch on the back cover that shows a slight loss of colour.
Dust jacket: It was created by the artist Paul Bacon. Bacon drew an enormous shark head .Initially and Doubleday’s design director, Alex Gotfryd suggested adding a swimmer ‘ to have a sense of disaster and a sense of scale.’
The subsequent drawing became the eventual artwork for the iconic dust jacket with a shark head rising towards a swimming woman in bikini.
Near fine for age, bright and vibrant, few minor patches of loss of the black colour, red pigmented letters show no loss of colour, a clear indication that this copy has not been exposed to light; there are no chips, dinks, tears or creases.
Back of the dust jacket shows a photo of Peter Benchley by Alex Gotfryd in turtle neck and sport coat. Dust jacket protected in a mylar sleeve

Our Comment
Genuine item for a book collector, especially for a dedicated collector of modern fiction; it ranks as a top-grade alternative investment in the genre of modern fiction and has the potential for the creation of an antiquarian book with assured appeal and substantial value, provided its present condition is preserved till 2074, following measures recommended by antiquarian book conservators.
We confidently predict that the value of the book in 2074 when it acquires antiquarian status will be in the same league as are antiquarian copies of such classics as Great Gatsby and Farewell to Arms today. (See James Cummins Bookseller’s publication, ‘The Art of the Dust Jacket’ to appreciate the stratospheric prices antiquarian books with dust jackets achieve today.)

An ideal book to create a family heirloom or gift to a newly born grandchild.