Larry M. Coleman

I have the best wife ever. I could end this post here because anything I add wouldn’t make it any truer, but a little proof never hurt.

My favorite novel is The Great Gatsby. There are a dozen reasons I could give, but I won’t because no one ever needs to justify why they love something. Love is its own justification.

So a few years ago, for Christmas she got me a lovingly crafted replica of Fitzgerald’s own manuscript for the novel. It’s from SP Books, a company that specializes in producing manuscripts that are as close as possible to what the pile of papers on the author’s desk would have looked like. Although it was $240, it is heavy, durable, well-bound, and worth the price. They’re produced in limited editions, and I’m not sure if it’s still available. Mine is a few years old, and it’s number 1783 of 1800.

This year, my wife found another limited edition issue of something related to The Great Gatsby: a Mont Blanc fountain pen. It’s always been a dream of mine to own an actual Mont Blanc pen, but I’ve been saving that to buy on a trip to Europe so I could get it from the flagship store, but when she found this one, that plan went out the window:

Not only did she get me a Gatsby pen, she got me the matching notebook so I’d have something to write in it with. The notebook itself is a work of art to match the pen:

What I love about the pen is the attention to detail. The JG logo on the cap is surrounded not just by a clip, but a real money clip! The barrel evokes the windows of New York City, and the cap color references the famous cover of the novel:

The nib is beautiful and alludes to not only opulence, but the fateful car in the novel. The nib and notebook match perfectly:

The notebook has a luxurious, heavy feel. It is well bound and while $85 for a blank notebook is by no means cheap, it actually manages to not feel overpriced. The edges of its pages are gold and something that surprised me when I felt it is that the Mont Blanc emblem is an actual raised emblem, not inked on:

This pen now has pride of place in my pen display case:

It sits alongside (left to right):

• a real Fisher Space Pen which looks short because it’s designed for the halves to come apart, flip, and connect into a regular-sized pen in order to save precious space in, well, space
• a Cleveland Indians (yes, Indians, which makes it an irreplaceable collector’s item now) pen with game-used infield dirt in the top part
• a cheap Yale ballpoint (seriously, Yale, up your pen game already) waiting to nestle next to the Harvard one my wife will surely get me for my graduation gift in a few years when the Master’s degree is done
• a Frank Lloyd Wright pen I got during our visit to Fallingwater in October 2024.

I think my wife has won the “top this” game for years of Valentine’s Days to come.