This story begins decades ago in a bungalow with squeaky wooden flooring and military surplus desks; my grandfather’s office. It was by no means grand. It looked out into a veritable junkyard he called a machine shop, but to us, his grandchildren, it was a playground and adventure land. Step into his office and on his desk in a special desktop holder sat two glossy black pens with gold tipped ends. They were slim; modern yet reminiscent of those styluses used by scribes in the Middle Ages.
A 2006 Conway-Stewart Maki-e Collection Karyoubinga Celestial Maiden
Neither the style nor the elegance was what drew me to these pens of his. Rather it was the way they painted the letters onto the page. They were like steel tipped brushes gracefully transferring onto the page his every stroke. Little did I know then as I watched my grandfather make his notes that I was hooked.
The new Dunhill Carbon Fibre Sentryman.While neither a collector nor expert am I, each time I’d walk into a bookstore, I couldn’t help but wander over to the pen counter. Much to the chagrin of the saleslady I’d try each one. I’d see how well each one would fit into my hand much like a swordsman testing his blade. Then I’d feel the way the ink flowed onto the page like an artist dipping his brushes into the paint to make the first stokes of his masterpiece. I wanted to feel how smooth the nib traveled across the sheet. Did it glide? Or did it snag itself on every fiber? After all, this is the essence of the fountain pen. The feel. Like a race car driver, the feel must be just right. For me that meant that the pen should skate along the surface of the ink it traced onto the page. Think of a skater on the ice who glides not on the ice itself but on that thin film of water on top of the ice. Then of course there’s the weight. Like most people, I was under the misconception that the heftier the pen, the better the quality; but more on that later. Occasionally I would actually buy one. Nothing fancy mind you. As a student, all I could afford were exactly that, student pens. The regular Big Reds by Parker (the only real brand I remember because of its marketing blitz) or simple Sheaffers. Once, an uncle came home with a Lamy (not that I knew what it was) and I literally drooled as I watched him write with that cool Bauhaus inspired pen. Of course, if my memory serves me right, they scratched across the page more than glided but that may be because the paper we were using at the time was more fibrous. Later on, I would get to know names like Waterman and Montblanc. And more recently I ran into lesser known names like Conway Stewart, Wahl-Eversharp, Nakaya and Conklin.
Pasha de Cartier FP with barcode deocration, in composite and black lacquer with platinum finish.The ink cartridge introduced around 1950 was a disposable, pre-filled plastic or glass cartridge designed for clean and easy insertion. They were an immediate success. The introduction of the ballpoints, however, overshadowed the invention of the cartridge and dried up business for the fountain pen industry.
That is of course until the yuppies hit their stride. If ever the fountain pen had a savior, it would have to be these paragons of conspicuous consumption. Leave it to them to turn a chunky mechanical watch designed for serious diving—the Rolex Submariner—and turn it into a badge of success. And when it came time to sign the checks, there was no substitute for that fat, glossy, cigar-shaped icon of luxury, the Montblanc Meisterstück.
After Dunhill took a controlling stake in the company in 1977, Montblanc did exactly what Lewis Waterman and George Parker, founder of the Parker pen empire, had done in the late 19th century: they out-advertised and out-marketed every one of their competitors. Within a decade, the words fountain pen and Montblanc were practically synonymous.
As well as making the Montblanc a symbol of luxury, the company persuaded the well-heeled that fountain pens could be good investments. In 1992, they launched the first of their annual limited editions named after famous writers and patrons of the arts. As the first models, such as the Ernest Hemingway and Lorenzo de Medici, slowly sold out and then rapidly shot up in value (they are now worth three to four times their original retail price), other companies—-old and new-—saw an Opportunity and charged into the market with dazzling and sometimes dubious designs (the Krone pen company's homage to Abraham Lincoln was impregnated with a replicated strand of the president's DNA).
COLLECTING. Right now, if you want to buy a fountain pen, there is a near-bewildering array of products to choose from, whether made by the giants of the industry—Montblanc, Cross and Parker—or from boutique companies.
But this is only half the story, for with every product there are the consumers, and then there are the consumers who become consumed. What the most committed devotees seek is not a diamond-encrusted Montblanc pen, but an instrument that can write as artfully as those made by master craftsmen around the turn of the 20th century, the golden age of the fountain pen. The trouble is, there doesn't seem to be anybody left who knows exactly how to make them any more… Unless of course you stumble into two master craftsmen, Sadeo Watanabe and Kohsuke Matsubara. Under the employ of one of Japan’s oldest fountain pen companies, Platinum, they create tailor-made pens with no compromise on Quality. Their nibs are said to be duplicates of the early 20th century nibs in feel and tensile strength.
Now that would be something worth owning. Yes, I can hear voices in my head of all those unbelievers. Questioning the value or the worth of a pen. “After all,” they say, “what’s a pen for? It’s just a writing instrument. Any old pen will do.” But then, they never held a fountain pen in their hands and watched the letters form with each stroke like painter filling his canvas. Or beheld the flow of ink as it filled a page.
|
|
 Where did it all begin?Early Cross writing instruments. The modern fountain pen can trace its roots to the lowly quill made from a goose’s tail feather (at least in Western history). But for the sake of saving a few pages, let’s leap forward to the fountain pen as we know it today with a nib, a feed and an ink reservoir. Starting in the 1850s there was a steadily accelerating stream of fountain pen patents and pens in production. In the 1870s Duncan MacKinnon, a Canadian living in New York City, and Alonzo T.
|
|
|
 The functioning of a fountain pen is relatively simple ... the pen holds ink in a reservoir and delivers it to the nib via gravity and capillary action. The earliest successful fountain pens are often called eyedroppers. Simply because you unscrewed the part that held the writing point, or nib, and used an eyedropper to fill the barrel with ink. Without a sac or a filling mechanism to take up space in the barrel, they held a lot of ink and wrote for a long time. The barrel itself was made of hard rubber. And therein lay the problem.
|
|
|
 The nib of a well maintained, vintage Vacumatic.1 Writing with a fountain pen requires a slightly different technique than writing with a stylus-like instrument (such as a ballpoint or pencil). A bit more deliberation is needed, and a more careful application of pressure. If you’re new to fountain pen writing, it may take you a couple of weeks or so to develop the necessary touch or “chops”. It may help to visualize your pen as a brush with two bristles; you are painting ink onto the paper, rather than pushing it into the paper (as with a ballpoint).
|
