I have just started reading Simon Garfield's The Pen: A Human History. As you might know, I like fountain pens. I've been into fountain pens for nearly 25 years and even though I've not bought one in some time, I'm very happy with the ones I own.
I've only read 17% of the book so far. It's written by someone who obviously cares about the subject. These are some quotes that I noted when reading the book.
There is more to read about the book on Simon Garfield's site.
Q: And presumably you learned somehow not to get ink all over your hands and all over your clothes?
A: Nobody ever learned that. It’s not learnable.
—Margaret Atwood, interview with the author
The book will also find room for creative extravagance (is there a diamond or ruby that Italian pen makers Montegrappa won’t put on a pen?), and there’s space for the absurd (the phallicity of Sigmund Freud’s Montblanc; the existential dilemma of a felt pen in a space rocket).
This industry was far from dead, a point emphasised by the spread of Moleskine boutiques and other busy specialist stationery shops in Shoreditch, Le Marais and Nolita. And then there are the most vivid enthusiasms online. Reddit pages and fountainpennetwork.com hum with threads beginning: ‘Fountain pens make me fall in love with writing even more’ and ‘Bought my first real pen at the Philly pen show today!’ Stallholders at the fairs told me that the revival had been visible for a decade or so, and showed no signs of slowing; it was not yet at the level of the vinyl record revival, but getting there.
The global pen industry is slightly larger than the global candle industry (about $18 billion in 2024 compared to the candle’s $14 billion, according to the consultancy company Cognitive Market Research; this is for inky pens alone, with digital pens adding another $5 billion. The forecast is for steady growth.) Pleasingly, pens share other attributes with candles, insofar as they are no longer an essential element of modern living, and inasmuch as they both supply a large soul-enriching element of that early twenty-first century phenomenon known as hygge (for where would journaling be without the whiff of scented soy?)
For me, pen academia effortlessly turns to pen consumerism. Beyond its history, and beyond its utility, a well-balanced pen is just a beautiful thing to hold in the hand. To buy one – even something as factory-turned as the Lamy Safari – is to experience the most affordable fulfilment. By the end of my visit to the spectacular Montblanc Haus in Hamburg, I was almost convinced that a fountain pen was an essential tool for life. The truth is otherwise. No one – not even a president signing themselves into office or Charles III signing himself into the Kingdom – needs a Montblanc fountain pen, much less one where the price starts at £555 and goes crazy from there. A Bic Cristal will do: 26p each if you buy a box of fifty. Also, a Bic is a good chew, and its cap a good ear-scratch, and it was once fantastic at winding cassettes. How we got to the 26p pen – that too is the focus of this book.
Before mass digital communication suggested the game was up (erroneously, the mood suggests), pen companies used to advertise their wares with fantastical claims. They had to: how else to stand out in a market where everyone was essentially selling the same thing? So Waterman nibs apparently wrote for thirty-eight miles before signs of wear. Sheaffer made ‘the world’s only pen scientifically streamlined for Balance’. Eversharp asked people to ‘imagine a pen not much longer than your cigarette … so precision-fashioned that you can write at any angle!’, and they paid Humphrey Bogart to endorse it. These days, the tone has shifted. The companies that have survived are as much concerned with promoting the idea of the pen and the pen’s potential. Montblanc wishes to ‘Inspire Writing’. Parker wants us to ‘Be the Author of Your Own Success’, and asks ‘Is your life going to be poetry or prose?’ ‘While other pens just write,’ Parker’s great competitor claims, ‘Waterman expresses.’
Why is the Parker 51 regarded as the best pen ever, not least by Parker?
A back issue of the Journal of the Writing Equipment Society from Winter 2019 has an article on how to repair a cap lip of a Swan eyedropper with a wire feed using a liquid weld landing area on a hand-turned lathe. This book is not for that person. It is, rather, for anyone who ever gazed longingly at the pen cabinet in the shop Choosing Keeping in Covent Garden, and departed £80 lighter with their lives newly enriched.
This ‘iron gall’ ink was more popular than the earlier carbon inks produced from soot and animal glue, or the smoke of pines mixed with oil, not least because it was less fugitive. But its permanence was overrated, as those examining century-old documents have discovered. Not only did the rich dark ink turn to lighter brown over time, but the ink could be highly corrosive, particularly on parchment, and especially if a manuscript was exposed to extreme temperatures. [...] And for God’s sake use it only with a quill or dip pen, and never a fountain pen, unless you want the metal or resin barrel to corrode and clog the feeder. Apart from that, enjoy your writing.
The diehards once included the late American author Shelby Foote, best known for his three-volume history of the American Civil War, all of whose participants only corresponded with steel nibs. Six years before he died in 2005, Foote told the Paris Review that he still wrote with a dip pen, reminding readers that ‘everybody on earth used to have one. They were in every post office in the land.’ He liked ‘the close touch with the paper and with nothing mechanical between you and it.’ He said he was horrified by the very notion of a word processor, and the way it might change his style. ‘I’ve had poet friends tell me they never type a poem until they are really satisfied with it. Once they see it in print it is very different from what it was in longhand. It freezes the poem for them.’
Foote then conjured up the most vivid of images.
My favorite pen-point manufacturer had all but gone out of business – Esterbrook. I was running out and fairly desperate. On Forty-fourth Street just east of the Algonquin Hotel, on the other side of the street, there used to be an old stationery shop, all dusty and everything, and I went in there on the chance he might have some. He looked in a drawer. He had what I wanted – Probate 313. I bought several gross of those things, so I’ve got enough pen points to last me out my life and more.
The problem then, he said, was finding blotters. His interviewer wondered whether he was the last writer to be using dip pens in the United States. Foote replied, ‘There’s probably some other nut somewhere out there doing it.’
The fountain pen began in France in 1827. Then again, it began in Iowa in 1867, and Missouri in 1870. After that it started in Ontario in 1875, and by the time it was invented in Rhode Island in 1876 it was already old hat. By then people were already talking about the gold fountain pen used by an Egyptian caliph in AD 970, and all the pens predictably designed by Leonardo da Vinci in the fifteenth century, and perhaps even the pen put together by the Bavarian linguist and poet Daniel Schwenter in Nuremberg in 1636. This last is my favourite: a multipart tricked-up quill-type instrument which worked by vacuum and squeezing, appearing in Schwenter’s Deliciae Physico-Mathematicae alongside many other inventions and schemes, including instructions on how duck hunters might make inflatable trousers.
The birth of the fountain pen is not like the birth of the railways. With no definable beginning, but a great many lesser-celebrated pioneers, there are few commemorative plaques or postage stamps. Patents from the 1880s, the decade when pens with their own ink reservoir were first exploited for commercial production, tell you much about innovation but less about invention, each patent a refinement of the last. Not that this prevented the leading names we recognise today from claiming each minor improvement as their own gigantic breakthrough.