Most people would not pay more for a pen than a meal. When you realize you’re an oddball who would, you look back at your childhood and think “huh, I guess the signs were there all along.” Me? I guess the signs were there all along.

First I was into mechanical pencils. I was so into them that I was willing to stare down every teacher who asked, before every test, “is that a number two¹ pencil?” and say, firmly, “yes.” At some point they² made a mechanical pencil out of hexagonal yellow plastic. I doubt it fooled anyone, but I thought it was the coolest thing. I think it also had its lead advance button on the side instead of the top. I loved that—having to physically get up and walk over to a device to loudly shave wood off your pencil like some caveman was the worst, but having to reposition the pencil in your hand to reach a button at the very top was a waste of time, too. Even a millisecond you spend advancing your point is time you don’t spend advancing your point! (Look, as you can see, I was a pretentious little twerp. Today, I will freely admit that most of the time I spent writing the preceding sentences, I was staring out the window, thinking about how to phrase them. And I haven’t even gotten to the part of the story where I spend time washing pens. Regularly!)

A day came when we were finally blessed with the right to use pens in school! Pens! This was a moment of arrival for my fellow kids, as if there were no intermediate steps between sharpening Ticonderogas³ and doing all the adult, pen-required things like, I dunno, signing checks at the grocery store.⁴ But I liked my pencils, so I didn’t care. To me a pen was just a messy stick you couldn’t use for math. And to press hard enough to get its tacky oily smear on the page, you had to death-grip its skinny little body. Hands both inky and crampy. No thanks!

Well, one day at Walmart I found the first pen I remember. It had a beautiful bright blue ink, and what awed me was that you could see the ink sloshing about in the pen’s clear body. In retrospect, I probably should have recognized it as some kind of new liquid-ink magic. I didn’t; I just thought it looked really cool. I wrote that pen to death. It seemed an untimely death, because half of the ink was still sloshing around in there—like I said, I could see it!—but it was a different time, and that new liquid-ink magic didn’t work very well yet, I guess.

There are two pens I remember after that. One was my favorite pen of my childhood: the Papermate Silhouette. They don’t make them anymore. I guess they haven’t made them for a while, because there was apparently a later line of things called “Papermate Silhouette” that bore no resemblance to—and was frankly an insult to the memory of!—the stunning, classic, stately pen of my youth, and those are also, mercifully, gone.⁵ The colorway was called “champagne”; I think the exterior was plastic with a metallic finish, but I remember the pen being heavy enough that it must have had some metal in it somewhere. It had the rare “comfort grip” that was not false advertising—perfectly cushy, actually comfortable. It was a ballpoint, but the ink was dark and smooth. Writing with this pen was class and joy. And the coolest detail of all was its black accordion-style knock: I had never seen something so fun on a pen.⁶

The last pen I remember from this era is what I thought was the pinnacle of pen luxury: a Parker Vector. I think I found it clearanced at Walmart, and I forget if $18 was the original price or the clearance price. But wow: such an expensive pen! Unimaginable. I’d never held anything like it: this one was definitely made of metal. Quality! The grip section was a brushed stainless steel, and it connected to some sort of icy blue non-plastic body. The clip was, of course, the signature Parker arrow, which I thought was just mega cool—it was the first thing I was ever conscious of having that was “nice” enough to have unnecessary ornamentation. Its rollerball refill was smooth and unfussy, the best I’d ever encountered. The pen was also thick, heavy, slippery, cold to the touch, loud when dropped on your desk, and generally not very comfortable or practical to use for, y’know, pen stuff.

The pendulum swings

There was a lesson to learn from that Parker Vector experience. I mean, probably! I didn’t. But that was fine; it didn’t come up again for a long time, because around then is when I decided: COMPUTERS!

This wasn’t the past, this was the future! Pen? Paper? Pah! At this point, I could type faster than I could write by hand, and remember: I was the dweeb who was thrilled by a click button on the side of a pencil, because efficiency! I was also discovering that I might want to study computer science, and what kind of absolute fraud would study computers while also writing and thinking on paper? I remember being actually convinced that I was somehow failing because I couldn’t think into a computer.

So I committed to fixing this, hard. At some point I graduated from Windows and Microsoft Word to Linux and whatever passed for word processing there. Then I got into Vim and plain text. Most of my college homework was math stuff, and while my classmates were hand-writing their summations and their lambdas and their induction proofs and whatever, I typeset every last assignment with LaTeX.⁷ For a little bit, I was working on a program that would let you type structured notes during a lecture, leaving placeholders for adding photos later, to deal with the quick-typing–hostile problems of diagrams and math notation and such.⁸ At one point, when we talked about our “workflows” in a creative writing class, I rhapsodized drafting your stories in plain text and using a version control system to document how they evolve.⁹

Eventually I went to work instead of school, and now I don’t even remember how I dealt with information then. I don’t think it involved paper; it must have been some combination of code comments and emails and just remembering stuff by virtue of having a young and unpolluted brain.¹⁰ Occasionally I saw people arrive at really good ideas while using a whiteboard or a notebook. There was a lesson to learn there. I mean, probably! I didn’t. I just thought these people were really smart.

Suddenly, the fountain pen

One day, the startup I was working at ran out of money, and I found myself unemployed. So I did the obvious thing and decided to write one of the novels I’d always wanted to write.

Ha! No, no. I didn’t do that. What I actually decided to do was learn to play the harmonica.

The thing about the harmonica is, learning resources (at least the ones I used) don’t assume you can read music. They give you a notation for what holes to blow or draw on, and they trust that if you’ve got the right pitches, you can work out the timing of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” for yourself. Well, I knew how to read music, and I wanted to be able to play written music on the harmonica, not just numbers and arrows.

So I went to the local art store and bought a Moleskine music notebook and a Sakura Pigma Micron pen and set out to transcribe real music from some book’s notation of “Yankee Doodle” or whatever. I did two—maybe three—short songs. Then I realized that this was slow and tedious, and one Sakura Pigma Micron and one lifetime were not going to get me close to filling this notebook.

That’s when I had the epiphany: isn’t this what a fountain pen is for?!‌¹¹ The main difference between me and Bach was not skill, nor practice, nor muscle memory, it was tools! Christmas was approaching (and my bank balance was dwindling, a common effect of both unemployment and harmonica buying¹²), so I asked my then-girlfriend for a fountain pen. On Christmas day, I unwrapped a brand new Lamy Vista.¹³

Anyone who has used a standard fountain pen to write music and/or anything on Moleskine paper can imagine what happened next. What actually happened next was not the things they’re imagining¹⁴, what happened was that I started a new job in January and never returned to this whole ill-advised project to realize how stupid I’d been.

But! The fountain pen stuck! I thought it was cool, and I enjoyed using it. The idea of being able to choose my pen and ink separately just made sense to me. The idea of having one pen that I could clean and care for and reuse, that was meant to last, appealed to me. The way the ink looked on the page was just different, and I was delighted to find this little area of life where there were whole dimensions of variety that I’d never known existed! Plus: the way it felt to write with? Incredible. Even when I’d used rollerballs or fineliners, the way I made marks on the page was basically etching because of the amount of force I used.¹⁵ Using a fountain pen, I learned that writing on paper could be a sustainable flowing motion. I realized that cursive—which I hadn’t used since early high school—actually made sense and felt right! (Embarrassingly, I was so out of practice that I didn’t even remember how to form some of the letters.)

From there, my accumulation of stuff followed what I think is the Standard Internet-Era Stationery Enthusiast Trajectory: I realized I needed a fancy notebook¹⁶, then I needed more inks¹⁷, then I needed more pens¹⁸, I discovered my favorite paper¹⁹ and saw it discontinued²⁰, and over time I’ve blundered into understanding what I really enjoy and consistently using a smallish subset of the hoard I’ve built.²¹

And now we’re at today! That’s the end of the origin story.

Early on, I shoved a pendulum metaphor in and then left it hanging.²² That, I think, is the present-day story. If my origin story was about how I learned to appreciate pens ‘n’ stuff as objects, the story I’m interested in now is how I appreciate them as tools. And let me foreshadow: that pen–computer oscillation is still going!

1. American for “HB”. ↩

2. “they” who? I don’t know! They! It was a long time ago. ↩

3. American for “basic school pencil that everyone has”. ↩

4. Kids: we used to, uh, pay for things by handing out little slips of paper with our bank account numbers on them, where we would write how much money the receiver could withdraw. You might think this doesn’t sound very secure, but as noted, we did this in pen. We also wrote the money amount two different ways, so it was pretty much fraud-proof. ↩

5. To the designer of the later-generation Papermate Silhouette: if against all odds you ever read this, I’m sorry. I don’t mean it, I’m just being dramatic for humorous effect. I really only looked at your sad impostor pen for the briefest of moments when I did an image search expecting to find the original nice one. ↩

6. Yes, I probably do have a Lamy Safari ballpoint with me right now. ↩

7. Also while they were watching movies, playing sports, making friends, &c. It really took a lot of time. But it looked fucking great! ↩

8. This is funny to remember, because it doesn’t make sense in the context of today’s technology. What do you mean it was impossible to intersperse text and photos in real time? Did the lecture also take place in a cave? Were the “diagrams” actually complicated hand-shadows that the professor made in the light of the fire were were all huddled around for survival? ↩

9. Confirmed: still pretentious. ↩

10. I mean, really. How did this work? I interviewed people! How did I evaluate them? Half-remembered vibes? Scary. Embarrassing. ↩

11. No. ↩

12. But at least this was before the fountain pens! ↩

13. You know, that one version of the Lamy Safari that gets a different name because it’s see-through. ↩

14. One or both of “this idiot realized that a normal fountain pen is just a normal pen that makes normal-shaped pen marks, duh” or “standard Lamy Blue bled through every sheet of Moleskine paper and ruined the whole notebook, and that was the day my genius bro learned about paper”. ↩

15. If you thought to yourself, “what was this guy doing if he thought one Sakura Pigma Micron would not last through one Moleskine?”, well, here’s your answer. ↩

16. A Traveler’s Notebook, back when it was colloquially known as “a Midori”. I was just in time to get the limited-edition blue one from MISC-STORE in Amsterdam, which is still with me and has faded over the course of a decade to a lovely greenish color. ↩

17. I remember Diamine’s Ancient Copper and Oxford Blue being two of my earliest inks. I got the big bottles, which of course I still have and which are of course still mostly full. ↩

18. I took a “quantity over quality” approach here, which I feel a bit stupid looking back on. I suppose one must learn one’s preferences, but I wish I had been methodical in learning what I like rather than prolific in buying things. Almost nothing from this era stuck with me. If I were a newb again with my current wisdom (yes, that is definitionally a paradox, shut up), I’d get fewer pens and more interchangeable nibs or nib units. For some reason, “I can change the ink in this pen!” made immediate sense to me, but “I can change the nib on this pen” took me years to get OK with. ↩

19. The “lightweight paper” in the Traveler’s Notebook refills. Unlike every other notebook maker, they did not say that this was Tomoe River paper. ↩

20. Turned out, Midori’s “lightweight paper” was Tomoe River paper. I didn’t know this. I also didn’t know about that whole thing where Tomoegawa retired the original machine that made Tomoe River paper and tried making it on a different machine. It was in that era that I thought to myself “I love the paper in these notebooks! I will buy five of them!”. I’ve heard that some people didn’t notice a difference; I am definitively not one of those people. I could not use that paper. ↩

21. OK, but yes, every one of those dozens of blue inks is unique and special and absolutely necessary, thank you very much. ↩

22. Duh, this is exactly how you use a pendulum. ↩