On Writing Implements...

[klsiegel320]

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.

Comments

[mowglikat]

My boss collects pens. I've bought her a simulated snake skin pen, a pen with an etch-a-sketch attached, and a pen with a boxing frog.

I bought her one that looks like an Oscar (gold, with it's own stand so it stays upright) and she also has one that laughs when she writes with it, others that flash all kinds of different fiber optic colors.

I like pens. But my favorite pen for every day use is the Papermate Flexgrip Ultra. I'm not particular if it clicks or not, but I find it writes very smoothly, and doesn't spot up, like a Bic does.

On Writing Implements

[readinginbed.livejournal.com]

Oh, man! I hadn't thought of those old fat Bic four-color pens in a hundred years. I loved those things. I've been a nut for pens and paper since forever. I was also a fan of Flair pens when I was younger. The only pencil I ever got attached to was a pale blue mechanical one with a very fine lead and an extremely good eraser (didn't leave marks) that I used in college to annotate and underline in my Norton anthologies.