Thursday 29 May 2003

Pic of the day: Cheap fountain pen, expensive ink cartridges. And dust.

Fountain pens and I

This night I stood in front of the fridge and my eyes fell on a few items that have laid there since around the time I moved in. A few paper clips, not quite corroded but starting to change now. Rubber bands, now too fragile to stretch. And a dried-out fountain pen.

***

When I started school in the mid-1960es, we learned to write with ink and pen. There were pencils too, but for serious writing the pen was it. The pen consisted of two parts: A long, slender handgrip made of wood, and a short metal head. (I believe these are called "nib" in English, but it is not a word I see every year.) These two parts were stored separately and combined at the beginning of class. And then of course there was the small, shallow ink bottle.

The nib was known as "pennesplitt" (pen split) because a narrow split went through much of it, all the way to the tip. You dipped the pen in an ink bottle, and ink (slightly more viscous than water) would cling to it. The split helped the ink spread slowly to the tip of the pen as the tip gave off ink to the paper. Even so, there was a tendency that too much ink was deposited on the paper. A very porous paper (blotting paper, I think is the English name) was used to absorb excess ink so you could go ahead with your work.

The ball point pen was almost certainly invented at this time. But it was not yet available, certainly not at a competitive price. And I suspect that even after the world switched to ball point, the school probably stuck with the old split pens for a while. Because that is the way school works, trying to prepare children to grow up in the world their teachers grew up in. Anyway, some good came of it: According to sources close to me, I once overturned an ink bottle over the head of a bully boy who tried to mess with my laces. I have no memory of this myself, but I really hope it is true.

After a while - I think maybe a couple years, but it could be more - my parents let me borrow a fountain pen. I was so proud! I may have been the first in my class to wield such a tool; certainly one of the very first. This invention let you put the head of the pen down in the ink and then by rotating the top, it would suck ink from the bottle up into the pen. From there, the ink was slowly released to the nib as it lost ink to the paper, ensuring constant writing without constantly dipping the pen in the ink. Like magic!

Even later, I got my own fountain pen. I do not remember how old I was then. Fifth grade? It was fairly early at least. I treasured it and used it for a long, long time. Into high school for sure.

By then I had long ago met ball point pens. They soon were so cheap that their cost was not a concern at all. But the very aura of cheapness worked against them in my mind. They were shoddy goods without a future. If they dried out or otherwise stopped working while still half full, so what? You could always find another. I guess somewhere deep down I equated them with a type of people.

Certainly, in my teen years, when my religion was at its most emotional, I perceived it as a great sin to not replace the cap on my fountain pen immediately after use. There may be some great deep symbolism there, or perhaps I just considered it wasteful, but this is one of the sins that stands out in that hazy and chaotic time of my life, so it must have felt really important.

***

There was one other invention that also excited me, although it never became such an important part of my life: The copying pencil. My father had at least one, and during a trip when I was young I came upon a shop that was selling out their copying pencils very cheaply. I bought a bunch and traded with friends on the bus, but I kept one blue, one violet and one red. I am sure I still have them, although the violet one seems to have gone into hiding.

For those unfamiliar with this technology (which pretty much expired with the coming of the ball point pen): The copying pencil is much like a common color pencil that kids use. But the color is a strong aniline dye that loves water. When you first write, your writing looks much like that of a common pencil, or at worst a color pencil. But if you expose the paper to steam, the color will intensify greatly. Even if not, the color is likely to slowly absorb water from the environment and intensify over time. The name comes from the now forgotten process of making copies of letters by pressing a wet sheet of paper against them. The strong dye would then make a mirror image on the wet paper. Due to the strength of the color, you could do this over again repeatedly. As a bonus, the writing could never be erased after it was exposed to humidity, so it was as good as ink. I used it to sign money transfers when I was fairly young.

Now, of course, money transfers are electronic, as is most of my writing. My handwriting is deteriorating year by year; I can still make my signature look reasonably like the old samples, but I don't know for how long. Pens, pencils and such things are artifact of a past when dead trees were used to transmit human knowledge. The name and the symbolism may be retained for a while yet ... I do not know how long. The fountain pen is dead, while I yet live. Who would have thought it?