Description
In 1922, as F. Scott Fitzgerald was planning The Great Gatsby, he wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, that he had begun working on a novel that was going to be different, “something new—something extraordinary, and beautiful, and simple, and intricately patterned.” It was to be a “consciously artistic achievement” and a “purely creative work—not trashy imaginings… but the sustained imagination of a sincere and yet radiant world.”
He was, of course, correct. Fitzgerald was the poet laureate of what he named “The Jazz Age,” and Gatsby was his magnum opus, a novel of the American Dream, and the great price the “dream” demands of the human soul. Fitzgerald’s evocative prose has carried this novel through changing times and shifting cultural landscapes. He had a “pitch-perfect ear,” James West said, and we can hear this in sentences as rich as, “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars,” as well as the stunning, famous line, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
”I am not a great man,” Fitzgerald wrote to his daughter, Scottie, “but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective quality of my talent … has some sort of epic grandeur.” The grandeur of the prose in The Great Gatsby has proven imperishable. The Thornwillow edition of this fine novel is intended to be a vessel with the grandeur to match it.
The Thornwillow Press edition of The Great Gatsby, in concert with Kickstarter’s “exquisite objects” initiative, has risen to the occasion for this best of novels. This title will be published in four exquisitely hand-bound versions, each letterpress printed and hand numbered. Each book features handsome typography with wide margins, so that the reader can easily enjoy the text on genuinely engraved papers inspired by the art deco of the Jazz Age. Finally, each is signed by the publisher and numbered, certifying its place in the limited edition.
