On Writing Implements...

So, this friend of mine cjsherwood essentially wonders out loud if there's anyone else out there who could - let alone would - post three consecutive entries regarding writing implements...and mentions someone who might possibly be able to...who isn't me, by the way.

Which means she may have forgotten for the moment that I'm a pen freak.

I'm a pen freak of a very eclectic nature. I started out when I was five or six, and I discovered Flair felt-tip pens. They used to have a display of these at the drugstore where we stopped every Sunday to pick up my grandmother's Sunday New York Post, and I was enchanted primarily because there were other colors of ink besides blue, black, and red. There was olive. There was orange. There was brown, and purple, and pink, and turquoise.

Within a couple years, I'd discovered those fat old Bic four-color pens. I never had much luck getting them to work well, and they're really too fat to be comfortable in the hand, but I loved them anyway.

I also had several iterations of the old, mass-produced Sheaffer fountain pens (the ones that invariably leaked all over your hand). I didn't know anything at all about fountain pens, except that I thought they were cool, and that while I loved the idea none of the ones you could get at CVS or the corner drugstore quite lived up to my sense of what writing with one should be like. More on that later.

Oddly enough, this love of writing instruments never transferred to pencils, particularly. Pencils weren't "fun," the way pens were. Pencils were working implements, for doing math and marking music and practicing penmanship (how ironic).

Pens, on the other hand, were for making notes, and drafting stories; for playing and illustrating and doodling; pens were creative, in a way that pencils never were.

The Obsession Grows...

So that was all when I was young and charming and in grade school in the 70's. I had not yet ventured very far out into the wide world, and most of what I could tell you about my taste in pens boiled down to a decided preference for Bics over Papermates.

And then I started exploring the dim corners of obscure book and stationery stores, and discovering ballpoints in all sorts of amazing colors! The best source, as I recall, was Lauriat's Books in the Salmon Run Mall, in Watertown, NY. Although it purports to be simply a bookstore, it was also a stationery shop, and they had a display of these pens - short, round caps; medium point ballpoints; and the colors!

This was when Bics came in a maximum of four standard colors, before they made the bright aqua and pink and purple and neon green that are now so popular. (Oh, and believe me, I pounced on those, when they started making them.)

I can't really say exactly when I started hoarding pens. It happened gradually, over time - I'd see something new or different, and pounce. I'd be a in a "writer" mood in Office Depot, and pounce. So I didn't have a few pens in a drawer, or even a few pens in a mug, or even a lot of pens in three mugs. I had a tin (you know, one of those old-style tins like Oreos come in at Christmas) full of pens...until they didn't all fit and I needed a second tin.

I've weeded them a few times. I go through a box, when I come across them in the closet, and anything that's long since dried up gets tossed. But I also still buy them in boxes, sometimes, when I'm feeling writer-ish.

Edit: And of course it occurred to me later that I completely forgot to mention my love affair with Gelly Roll pens. I have one entire (very large) mug full of these, in every color I could lay my hands on. Perhaps my favorite, in the gel pen family, is the Zebra multi-colors. The barrel shows three colors of ink mixed, and they write in a sort of iridescent, opalescent mix of the colors in the barrel. I especially like the "happier" colors for journal entries on feast days, like Easter or Christmas.

The Obsession Grows Up...

There were special pens, along the way, as well as the more ordinary workhorses. There was a gorgeous rosewood pen that my father gave me one Christmas or birthday, I don't remember now which. I made the mistake of making that my customary use pen at my last job (with Wit-less-co), and it disappeared from my desk (the one in the "aquarium" with no door, let alone a lock; everyone could and did wander through, use the desk, use supplies, use - and then apparently appropriate - pens).

And then I discovered real fountain pens, which is to say, those that are much better crafted than the leaky ones you buy for $3.49 at CVS.

My first real fountain pen was a blue Waterman Phileas, which I absolutely loved, and which became my customary working pen until it also disappeared, this time in the Edison office of my current employer. I think it was clipped to a notebook I was carrying and fell without my noticing, or got left behind in a meeting - we're really not sure, but it was never found.

This was the pen that stopped a meeting in its tracks, my first day at work at DMR. I calmly walked into the meeting, where I'd been asked to act as scribe, sat down, flipped open a Circa notebook and uncapped the Phileas to date and title the page.

And my manager - a thoroughly unorthodox, handsome and amusing person, to be sure - stopped the conversation in the room in its tracks by noticing the pen, and saying authoritatively, "Now that's a real writer!" And asked to see the pen, looked it over - rather the way a musician might ask to be allowed to handle someone else's violin, and with rather the same reverence - and then handed it gently back. It's one of the more enjoyable first impressions I can recall making.

It was followed by a gorgeous red Aurora Ipsilon, which I still have; that's a fine point, because one of the thing I discovered about the Waterman Phileas was that a Waterman fine point isn't fine enough for my handwriting, especially on particular surfaces where the ink spreads. The Ipsilon is a nice little pen, and for a while I loaded it with red cartridges and used it for editing, until I realized that it only approximately fit the cartridges I was using, and leaked like mad. Aurora only makes blue, black, and blue-black cartridges, unfortunately, and I'd intended this pen to be my "editing" fountain pen. Instead it doubles as a journaling pen, since the fine point is better suited to the paper in my journal.

Then there was a green plastic-barreled Cross fine point, on sale, and a beautiful bronze-finish Sheaffer Prelude fine point that I customarily loaded with King's Gold or brown ink. These were further acquisitions on the path to the perfect journaling fountain pen.

These two traveled in a pen case from Levenger, along with some of Levenger's signature 3 x 5 notecards, in one of the side pockets of the leather backpack that was my purse in the summer of 1999. One night on the way home from the office of that summer's client, there was a lot of pushing and shoving behind me, and when I got downtown to the PATH station at World Trade, the side pocket and the bottom outside pocket were unzipped, and the pen case was gone. I can only assume that since the pen case was about the size and shape of a small wallet, that was what the pickpocket thought he was getting. Surpise!

I've always been a little sad to think they were probably thrown out in disgust when the thief realized what he hadn't gotten (namely, my wallet or my checkbook). On the other hand, they protected far more sensitive things - like that very checkbook that was riding right next to them in that same pocket - from being stolen.

Let's see, what else? Well, eventually I replaced the stolen Prelude with a cream matte finish with gold trim version of the same pen, and bought the matching ballpoint and mechanical pencil. For some bizarre reason, I also bought the black and chrome Prelude ballpoint and pencil. That particular Prelude I believe I bought with an extra-fine point, and found it so scratchy I ordered a fine point nib to replace it. I've managed to drop and break both pencils, both (I think) at different Schola rehearsals. (I now carry a plain old retractable mechanical for rehearsals; it's lighter, and cheaper, and I don't care quite as much when it takes a five-foot fall from its customary place stuck through my clipped long hair.)

I tried a Levenger True Writer - gorgeous pen, absolutely gorgeous tortoiseshell barrel...but the "fine" nib was broader than the Waterman fine, and way too broad for my hand. So that beauty went back.

I've tried a cool and unusual Pelikan, with a plunger filling mechanism and a transparent barrel. It's called a "demonstrator" because of that; originally these were made for salespeople to demonstrate the mechanism, but in these days of fascination with the inner workings of things, they're now made for sale. You can only fill this pen; no cartridges. And I love it but despite the very easy mechanism I'm not very skilled at filling it. If I ever get sufficient practice, this will be my primary editing pen.

Then there's the Waterman Charleston. I bought this one while I was on the road a couple years ago, because I was starving for a fountain pen to write with and most of mine were sitting home. A lovely pen, also blue, with an extra-fine point. Writes beautifully, but the balance is different from my good old Phileas. I tell you - no pen, ever, has matched that Phileas for feel.

So finally this summer, I broke down and bought another one. After all, the Phileas is really a rather inexpensive fountain pen - but Waterman makes good pens, it's that same gorgeous and soothing blue, and it writes like a dream.

A very writerly sort of history, I guess...I love ballpoints for their workmanlike ordinariness, I love colored gel pens (now there's an entry all its own, for sure) for their wild and weird colors, I love quality ballpoints for their air of authority - but there's nothing like sitting down to write a note or a letter or a story with my trusty blue Phileas fountain pen. Go figure.