Pens: The How and the Why (An Epic Saga)

An innocent bystander made the mistake of asking me a seemingly-simple question recently: 
How did you get interested in pens and ink?
Buckle up, kids. This is going to be a long ride. Everyone got their snacks? Bathroom break out of the way? Excellent. 

"How did you get interested in pens and ink?"

That’s a hard question to answer because it’s almost like asking me how did I first get interested in reading and writing. They’re all intertwined for me. I’ve always been into stationery of all kinds, for as long as I can remember—notebooks, pens, markers, etc. My first fountain pen was a cheapie little Parker Vector at my local CVS for like four or five dollars, circa 1994 (the linked pen is not that pen. That is an overpriced, tarted-up version that Parker’s selling because it wants to kill my childhood, much like George Lucas). It came in black and with two black Parker ink cartridges, and it was mine. I was only 10 years old but I was hooked.

I should back up a little and explain that I started keeping a diary/journal at age nine but was already particular about what kind of pen to use in it. I would use whatever pen was handy but if left to my own devices, I would prefer some old rollerball I’d found in the junk drawer because the ink looked more like “old fashioned” ink (fountain pen ink; dip pen ink). Also, for reasons unfathomable to me even now, I could even pretend it was an “old time” pen by pretending to dip the pen’s tip into the cap like it was an inkwell, as I wrote.**
(…I should probably point out that I was a very, very strange child. I think the only reason 1993 Me wasn’t diagnosed with Something Serious is because it was 1993 and not 2012).

From the time I was 10, until I was about 15, I used Parker Vectors, never realizing that there were other fountain pens out there or that you could put bottled ink in the Vector (luckily, CVS also carried the refill cartridges). This was before the Internet. We didn’t know these things back then. Eventually CVS stopped selling the Vectors and I didn’t know where else to find them (again, pre-Internet. It was a different time). I switched to rollerballs and gel pens because around this time (1999), those Sakura “Jelly Roll” gel pens were a big hit over here. Anyone who was anyone had them in middle school and later, high school. Pardon my French but they were the sh*t.

Then it was 2001—summer, to be exact. I was starting college in the fall. In August, my family and I were going on vacation to Ocean City, Maryland—our first time back there in a few years and also the first time we were taking two whole weeks. The day before we were supposed to leave, my dad (who had just been feted by his company for his 31^st anniversary as an employee) got the call: they were closing his office come September-ish. They were closing a lot of offices and either he could take the early retirement package now or they could put him out on the street in six weeks. So that’s how we started that vacation. But while there, the condo had some magazines and catalogues that the owner (and previous renters) had left behind. One such catalogue was from Levenger. Inside that Levenger catalogue, was the True Writer fountain pen in Periwinkle.

I don’t know what attracted me to the Periwinkle True Writer, other than the fact that it was purple. I wasn’t even as into pens as I used to be. At that point, I was keeping my diary on a Word file on my laptop (yes, I still have the file somewhere. No, I can't open it). My handwriting was definitely suffering, even more so than usual. Maybe I was unconsciously responding to the topsy-turvy of my dad being out of work right as I was about to start college, my brother was starting graduate school, and my youngest sister was starting eighth grade. But I wanted that pen. Oh, how I wanted it. I finally saved and bought it just before classes started and many a homework assignment was written with it (that’s when I found out that you could still buy fountain pen ink too! Because Levenger also sold ink! I could get purple—Levenger Amethyst—ink to go with my purple pen! Why did I not know of such things before?!) 
(Because this was before the Internet).
(Also, my dad did find a new job before 2001 was over)

So thanks to those sneaky bastards at Levenger, I was back into fountain pens. But again, I didn’t venture much beyond Levenger’s offerings. I picked up a few more pens from them but would switch back to gel pens, fancy ballpoints, etc….

Now it’s Fall 2004, Winter 2005, Spring 2005. I’m getting ready to graduate college, so I have my senior “thesis” capstone project. My “internship” at [Redacted] Newspapers (also a senior year requirement) had become a regular, part-time job (even though I was doing full-time hours. Stupid [REDACTED]). I had a full course load in English literature, Communications, Video Production, and some other crap that I don’t remember now. I was writing all the time. Sounds great, right? I was even being paid for some it! That should be awesome, right? And it was, for a time. Until my right arm tried to fall off.

            As much as my left arm and shoulder have hurt over the last two years, I can promise you that it was still not as bad as the fiery, burning pain in my right shoulder and arm, from the top of my shoulder, all the way down to the tips of my fingers. I had to skip a class one night because I could not hold a pen in my hand anymore. My newspaper coworkers doled out carpal tunnel tips and gadgets like candy (and surgery horror stories, complete with matching scars). Oh God, the pain. It hurt. Even the memory of that pain, seven years later, still makes me wince. Even worse, it was my dominant hand. At least when my left arm acts up, I can compensate because I’m already right-handed. But when my right arm seriously toyed with the idea of falling off, I was a bit stuck. I couldn’t write, whether it was on a computer or by hand.

            At that same time, I found an old Levenger fountain pen in my car, a Levenger Prima with a silver barrel and translucent purple cap. I’d bought it back in 2002 or 2003 and would use it off and on until it somehow wound up in the glove compartment of Blue Bandit. It was a pen so obscure that even today, the only mention of it online includes my own message board posting from 2007, but no photos at all. Maybe it wasn’t even called the Prima.

            Anyway. I found the pen, cleaned it up, inked it up, and started writing with it everywhere—school, work, home. By the time I graduated college, my arm was fine. It didn’t hurt anymore. Holy shite! At this same time, I discovered the crack and opium den that is the Fountain Pen Network message board. Wait, you mean fountain pens were still being made, like all the time? From a variety of companies, including Parker, Waterman, and some crazy German brand I’d never heard of, like Pelikan or Lamy?? And you could buy all kinds of ink for them too?! I…where...what….why? I think I went into ferret shock that day.

That. Was. It. Since 2005 proper, I’ve been using and collecting fountain pens and ink on a regular basis. The hobby has played right into my OCD like the Germans in Mata Hari’s camp (…yes, that makes sense…). That I fancy myself a “writer” has only exacerbated things—I can’t not write, and since I need tools to write with, and I want those tools to work, and be pretty too…and that’s how you wind up on Hoarders in 30 years.

And that's how I got into fountain pens and ink.

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**And I JUST realized why I was trying to make a dip pen out of some cheap-ass rollerball I pulled out of the junk drawer (besides me being a freak). It was seeing the “Felicity Learns a Lesson writing playset” in the American Girl catalogue, which included a quill pen, inkwell, and even a “ponce sander” (fake). The Pleasant Company debuted the Felicity doll and accessories in one of the 1991 catalogues so I would have been about eight years old…yes, this is totally how the idea of writing with a dip pen got into my head, among other reasons (again, we cannot discount the “Kate was just a freak from the beginning” theory).