Everyday pens
I’ve been under enormous stress lately — the natural result of taking on too many book-writing jobs on top of my teaching, admin work, and column writing (yes, it may look like fun and it thankfully often is, but it’s still a labor to write 1,000 words of anything and try to make sense) — so you’ll forgive me if I veer off from the matters of language we’ve been immersed in these past few weeks into a personal pleasure, my love of pens.
I know that it’s not a terribly exciting subject for many (unlike language, grammar, and all that, which never fails to raise temperatures, including mine, despite my own memo to myself to eat ice cream and leave the fulmination to the congenitally argumentative, which the Internet seems to breed in droves) —so those of you who have more pressing things in mind this Monday morning, please turn the page, now.
I, on the other hand, need to catch my breath and clear my brain (not that there’s too much in it but all manner of junk), so I’ll return to something familiar and soothing. That subject is fountain pens — those plastic tubes that spit out lines of ink on paper, which our grandparents went to school and to work with. They carry both aesthetic and therapeutic value for me in a way, I suppose, that only other stylophiles (the fancy word for “pen lovers”) can understand. Every other month or so, I take my babies out of their cases, ink a few and write with them, polish them, photograph them, look at them, then gently put them back to bed.
Every collector has a ritual, and these are mine; I take, say, a 1938 Parker Vacumatic in hand and turn it around in the light, appreciating the way the pearlescent bands resemble a city skyline at night; and then I imagine all the letters that pen wrote in all its 80 years, from someone to someone else — words of comfort, promises, lies, supplications, and so forth, apart from the more mundane business of checks and receipts. This pen bled meaning, breathed passion, turned minds and feelings around. Every time I uncap a pen it promises a performance, and dares me to discover its possibilities. Will the nib write smoothly? Will the ink gush? Will it leave — with flexible nibs — a line that unravels like a bundled saffron scarf from fine to double-broad?
There was a time, of course, when fountain pens were much less objects of romance (and fashion or conspicuous consumption, as they have become, or become again, among trendsetters in need of revival-worthy pieces). People filled them up from bottles of ink and stuck them in their pockets before marching off to work. Children tossed them into pencil cases and chewed on their butts during essay exams. Inevitably someone came home with a big purple splotch on his shirt pocket; inevitably someone dropped a pen and bent its nib — its writing end, more likely steel rather than gold — and, being too poor or too busy to replace the nib or the pen itself, went on to write impaired, with one injured foot or tine scratching the paper.
Today I’d like to put the regal Waterman Patricians and the big, fat Montblanc Meisterstucks aside and talk a bit about these pens for the common person — the work pens and school pens that our parents and some of us in their 50s can still remember growing up with. These were the pens that didn’t cost more than a dollar or two — or a few pesos, back in the ’40s and ’50s — and which were never meant to become classics or collectibles, though quite a few have become exactly that despite their modest aspirations. These were the Esterbrooks, the Wearevers, and any number of no-name brands and low-end models of leading makers like Parker, Sheaffer, and Pelikan.
A few weeks ago, when I wrote about losing a couple of nibs down the drain while cleaning some pens (they’re still down there), I received a letter from Michael Blackwell, Sr. — a senior master sergeant in the USAF who has since retired here — which said in part: “I really enjoyed your article about the fountain pens you have collected. I once owned some of those Esterbrook pens when I was in high school (’50s) many years ago. I do recall how pleasant and flowing it was to write with a fountain pen which gave you so many choices of tips or nibs. I moved up to the Parker pens because they offered the replaceable cartridges, rather than having to fill from an inkwell the traditional way. I am glad you included a photo as well because I had forgotten about the Esterbrook pens until I read the article and saw the picture.”
SMSgt Blackwell is typical of that generation of pen-users who still remember when pens required unscrewing, rather than pulling, the cap from the barrel, and took up ink by dipping the nib into an ink bottle then pumping a lever on the barrel’s side. Esterbrooks were particularly popular because they were inexpensive, pretty, sturdy, and as Blackwell points out, had easily replaceable nibs in a variety of points from the extra-fine tips that accountants preferred to broad ones for impressive signatures.
Today, what once was a lowly clerk’s pen has a cult following among collectors (for more details, check out www.esterbrook.net). Esterbooks can still be had in the range of $20 online, which makes them a great pen to start a vintage collection with.
But one thing I fail to emphasize often enough is that even among modern pens, there are many perfectly capable and great-looking models Filipinos can buy from the usual school and office supply shops downtown for a song. Inoxcrom, Sheaffer, Parker, Pilot, Waterman, and other brands all have fountain pens below P1,000 that can match the hundred-dollar classics in performance. Many Chinese pens like Jinhao, Duke, Wing Sung, and Hero also offer a satisfying writing experience for a few hundred pesos. (For my money’s worth, the best inexpensive FP out there is the Japanese-made Pilot 78G, available for less than $10, if you have a friend going to Hong Kong, Japan, or anywhere around the region. Produced only for the Asian market, it writes a superbly smooth line.)
And then again, I can hear some people saying, “Why buy a P500 fountain pen when I can get a ballpoint for less than P50?” Ah, why indeed? Why even bother with pens you have to fill up, clean out, and maintain when you can write just as well with a disposable Bic you don’t have to think twice about?
The only answer I can give right now is that people write for different reasons. For most, the physical act of writing is a means to an experience; for a few, writing is part of the experience — if not the experience itself, a commitment of one’s character to paper. For the pragmatic, any line you lay down — broad, medium, or fine, in whatever color — is ever the same, with the same practical effect. For the romantic, lines and even the way the colors bleed within them are expressive of more than what the words mean in themselves. Guess which of these fountain pen lovers are.
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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.
