Fountain pens, real writing instruments
Joan was scratchin’. It wasn’t from a rash of poison ivy but the sound of a new pen on note paper. I recall the sound of my father’s pen moving across a sheet of paper, the scratch of the nib.
We serve on an “advisory board” together, and have for years but I paid no attention to what she used to jot down the notes she took.
When I saw her hand moving over the notebook it wasn’t much of a jump to see the point of a real writing instrument poking through her finger tips.
“It was a gift,” she responded when I voiced my admiration, she holding up the dark blue tube by the barrel with a gold nib and trim ring.
“From whom?” sounded coarse so I let that go unasked.
From across the table I watched small angular script flow from the tip, the handwriting of an architect or a mathematician, not full of flourishes and artistic loops but like the font of 1930s movie titles.
I can count on one finger the number of people I know who write with a fountain pen but clearly recall when men and women carried them.
My father probably owned a number of pens but I recall the Arrow clip on the outside of his shirt pocket; definitely a Parker 51.
A bottle of ink stood on his desk beside a blotter. Filling the pen he dipped the point into the ink and depressed a plunger a few times until air bubbles came from the tip.
He later had a pen with a small snorkel that emerged from the base of the tip by twisting the top. The snorkel was dipped into a well built into the side a bottle of “Sheaffer’s Skrip” ink.
Today’s fountain pens use cartridges, which are supposed to be leak-proof.
The important documents of our country were written with quills or other dip pens using iron gall ink, the standard commercial ink for hundreds of years.
The ink was sold as a powder and mixed with water as needed. Some households made their own ink by scraping the carbon from the insides of kerosene lamps, called lamp black.
A nice blue-purple ink was made by crushing poke weed berries, also known as ink plant.
I kept thinking of Joan and her new fountain pen and wondered if this is just one of those things like preferring vinyl records and organic toilet paper.
It is unlikely that a new pen would improve one’s handwriting any more than a new car would improve one’s driving.
I have hopes of finding one of my father’s old fountain pen in another dusty box, but then what?
It would be another dusty box for “Little Miss Phillips” to deal with later.
Joe Phillips writes his “Dear me” columns for several small newspapers. He has many connections to Walker County, including his grandfather, former superintendent Waymond Morgan. He can be reached at joenphillips@hotmail.com.