Sturdy piston
Nice little essay by writer and art critic Brian Dillon on fountain pens.
The pen is not exactly an object of nostalgia, because I have no memory of my father writing with it when I was a child. I found it after he died, when I was twenty-one; I must have been rooting in the wardrobe for life-insurance papers or a nonexistent will. I carried it around with me for about a year — I was wearing his watch too, but it slipped from my wrist on the library stairs — before it occurred to me to buy a bottle of Quink and actually use it. The pen would only suck up sufficient ink for a few lines at a time, but I spent the summer of 1992 writing an MA thesis with it, stopping every ten minutes to hook a fingernail behind the thin gold lever and get blue-black stains on my fingers.
By the time I took it to The Pen Corner on Dame Street to have it repaired — a supple new ink sac, an unclogged feed — I’d developed an anxious, OCD-ish, relationship with my father’s pen. It saw me fretfully through much of my drawn-out, half botched Ph.D. I wrote scraps of my first book with it, before I knew it was a book. It’s still the pen I reach for in the early stages of all sorts of writing, always with the intention — an obsessive displacement, for sure — of making it to the end of an article, essay or book with the little Craftsman still in my hand.
[Via @HamishH1931]