My fountain pen was always one of my most prized possessions; I valued it highly, especially because it had a thick nib, and I can only write neatly with thick nibs.
Anne Frank
Fourth grade arrived for me, and with it a list of supplies that would be needed for the fall term. New notebooks, pencils, erasers, ruler—all were familiar. But there was one new and intriguing item: One Sheaffer Cartridge Pen, clear, with supply of six ink cartridges. Washable Blue Ink Only. The dreaded year had arrived. It was time to begin to learn to write cursive. My mom called it “penmanship,” but the title of the class was “handwriting.”
It was an exercise full of tears for me. I had mechanical troubles with my pen, and my first instinct was always to give it a good shake. This sent me home with inky fingers, elbows, blouses, and even socks. My papers, or the pages in the handwriting book, were always full of blots and sprays of tiny dots. My handwriting continued all year to be an awkward, backhanded scrawl. It was my only bad grade.
This misery persisted all the way through Grade 7. I was so glad to have made it to the eighth grade, where they didn’t care anymore what your writing looked like as long as it was legible. The series of wretched fountain pens was laid aside in favor of ball points. I quit worrying and began to enjoy life and writing and everything else. I had a brief fling with a fountain pen during my college years when everyone was trying to be Different and Individualistic. I also smoked Gauloises cigarettes, circled my letter “I” rather than dotting it, and arrogantly crossed both my sevens and zeros. My twenties and thirties were spent in the company of ball points and rollerballs, though I did improve my handwriting by losing the adolescent affectations.
All of that changed when I began the downhill slide between 40 and 50. The elder son took a job at a tobacconist downtown, and the store right next door was Bertram’s Ink Well, a store specializing in fountain pens, inks, fine papers, and other elegant office furnishings. I was hooked, sold down the river, fixated, in love. My first venture was one of the original Lamy Safari’s, which I still have. How smooth the writing! How distinctive and unique my handwriting looked! How quickly I unsheathed my credit card!
It was a love affair which continues to this day. I have amassed a collection worth bragging about. No one ever has to worry about what to give me for holidays and birthdays. Instead, they get to worry that I am spending my entire pension on more and better fountain pens. I have vintage pens that are now a century old. There are World War II era pens in abundance, and plenty of modern pens to round out the selections. They are proudly displayed on bookcases in my living room, where they share pride of place with my small print library.
When I began to write JAFF, I simply followed the habits that had served me well in the working world. Because I have worked long and hard in IT, the keyboard feels homey to me. But for actual thinking, nothing beats what a friend once called the “Person/Paper Relationship.” She was an Episcopal priest and wrote out her sermons painstakingly, in longhand, with whatever pen was at hand.
I took a different route. Story ideas, outlines, snatches of dialog, and reminders to myself go into longhand and are written on good paper in black ink with a fountain pen. Character notes go on note cards, Exacompta if you please. When I sit down to write text, I do it on my trusty Mac keyboard. It is an odd style, but it is comforting and fits me. Jane Austen was known for cutting in corrections quite literally. She would cut out the bad spots with scissors or knife and put in her corrections, carefully secured to the main body of the manuscript with hundreds of tiny straight pins. That is a bit much for me.
Anne Frank, in her precious diary, made us all acquainted with her celluloid fountain pen, nicely kitted out with broad nib. (It should be noted that celluloid is not cheap. It was and is a material for fine writing instruments.) One day, to her shock and horror, she burned up her pen in a fire where she was burning some cooking scraps. It took her a long, long time to come to terms with the loss. I write with a Conklin “Mark Twain” crescent filler, fat and heavy for its size. It is kind to my arthritic hands and enables me to write for long periods. I dedicate this little essay to that other Anne, whose fountain pen enabled her to communicate with her contemporary world and, over time, to our hearts and minds here in the future.
7 responses to “A Different Rabbit Hole”
My first use of ink was at junior school using a dip pen (a wooden stick with a nib on the end) I finally managed to write a really neat story and my teacher said I could take it home to show my parents. Running out of school I tripped and my story landed in a puddle! 🙁 When I was at the grammar school my brother started work and bought me a Parker fountain pen and pencil set for my 13th birthday 🙂 I loved it and used to buy different coloured inks to fill it. I still have it almost 60 years later. I really feel for Anne when she accidentally destroyed her beloved pen especially with the hard life she lived.
Hi! I have a couple of dip pens around here somewhere. I use them to test and sample inks I might want to buy. Our desks had ink wells, but they switched to fountain pens at some point before I got there. Funny the things you remember. My father used a Parker fountain pen with hooded nib all through the Fifties, switching off to a ballpoint in the Sixties. My mother used a Sheaffer Snorkel, and I bought one just like it. I also bought a vintage Sheaffer Cartridge Pen just like the ones I used. I re-read that passage in Anne Frank’s diary, and it is so very sad. She was trying to put a lighthearted face on the whole thing and not succeeding. What I can’t recall and didn’t see was whether she somehow got another one.
I still hand write all my novels in a wide-ruled spiral notebook. I read what I wrote yesterday and make my first edits before I write today. I use a black pen for the first writing and an ink gel style pen for the edits. I use the wide ruled so there is a bit of room to write corrections over and under my initial lines of the story. I mark “wc” above for Word Choice, meaning I have used that particular word too many times, but do not want to stop the flow to think of another. “Sp” is for me to check the spelling. In the margins, I write “timeline,” “description,” “character names,” etc., for when I actual type the first draft of the story (though my handwritten one and its correction are theoretically the first draft), I also keep a separate “history of …” the story with a list of character names and brief descriptions, a list of places, and a timeline to make certain Darcy and Elizabeth are not arguing when they should be in church. LOL!
As to handwriting or cursive writing, as we called it, mine is generally very easy to read. I say my print and cursive are such for I spent 40 years in the classrooms without monitors and the blackboard and later the whiteboard required “readable” writing skills. My DIL and oldest granddaughter are both lefties. I purchase lefties notebooks, pens, and etc. for both, as my DIL is a 4th grade teacher.
When my son was in third grade, the school district in Ohio used the D’nealian handwriting system. My son was still ambidextrous, had not chosen a dominate hand for he had been a premmie and was still quite small. (Such is the reason I did not permit him to take martial arts then though he wanted desperately to be like The Power Rangers, but that is another story.) so he would switch hands depending on the direction the letter was meant to go. The “s” and the “a” were completed with his right hand for they either began or ended to the right. Meanwhile, the “o” and the “u” started to the right, but ended on the left, so those were left-handed letters. His teacher was more than a bit intimidated by me, for I was on the state’s testing commission at the time. She demanded he be tested for learning disabilities. Though I knew her full of hot air, (remember I have both a masters and a Ph.D. in reading and learning disabilities) I permitted him to be tested. He came out high average in IQ, but with a tendency for perfection. (Gee! I wonder where he got that!). His handwriting now looks like he should have been a physician writing prescriptions. You older folks know what I mean.
I do think it is a shame that today’s generation will never be able to read anything but computer speak.
There was a very funny meme going around saying that us oldies could make our demands felt because we can all communicate in cursive and drive cars with stick shifts. Not a bad idea, that. My mother was a teacher, and her handwriting was lovely, graceful, feminine, and absolutely legible. She came through with whatever was taught in the Thirties. As for me, I am living proof that small girls do not all fall deedily in line with neatness, tidiness, and small muscle coordination. I was a slob then and I still am to an extent. I wanted to do better, but I simply couldn’t. I had a punishing teacher in the fifth grade who put me through a child’s garden of hell, and I’ve never quite gotten over it. Think of how smart your boy had to be to set up his handwriting like that. I wish I’d thought of it. 🙂 My sons were not really taught cursive writing in school, and their handwriting is awful. My older son’s has improved because he shares my passion for fountain pens. Have a great weekend!
What a jolly read. I too am long retired, but went through an English infant /junior school age 5 to 11. Age 7 we were given an italic nib fountain pen and taught to write italic. Starting secondary education age 11 no one cared how we wrote ( sound familiar?). So long as it was legible, and I took to a biro happily. I never worked with IT and dislike computers. The corona virus UK lock down had me take to internet shopping like a duck to water, I am now just slightly more in touch with the www, but not much! My favourite bit of technology is my trusty Kindle where I discovered JAFF several years ago.
What a nice post! I read Anne Frank’s diary in school it was a very good read. My handwriting was not the best in school but as I moved up grades it got better. It is decent today not always legible sometimes but decent.lol I can do cursive pretty well.