Friday, August 19, 2011
Straddling Technologies
On our recent perambulations, that techno-king, Larry, and I wandered out of the stationer and into the Apple store. The Apple store is pretty good; they have some nifty technological advances housed in there, but if you really want to get your heart pumping, you need to go into the stationer, a.k.a. the fountain pen store.
If you are a certain age, or even older, you remember the excitement of graduating from the big, fat, yellow pencil, and going on to be initiated into the mysteries of the fountain pen. For many of us, just the phrase “peacock blue,” opens an entire mind-movie. You instantly see your youthful self, concentrating fiercely so as not to spread ink all over the portion of creation near you, and especially on you, using your clubby, little hands to dip your pen into the well-portion of the bottle to effect a refill. Then came cartridge pens and it got a little less difficult, but on a really bad day you still could manage to cover several finger-ends with ink.
Accidents with ink weren’t just limited to childhood. Mishaps can jump out and attack you even in adulthood. The British actor, Michael York, (This is my name-dropping segment.) once appeared at Notre Dame with a giant blue blotch over his heart. His beautifully starched and pressed white shirt was stained by an ink mishap. It seems that the pressure changes while in an airplane can cause the ink reservoir, a.k.a.: the bladder, of a fountain pen to explode. (There are fascinating discussions about this online if you care to wander off later to explore them.)
Sadly, online or from catalogues may be where you have to venture these days even to find a fountain pen to purchase. Just wandering into the store where you can admire, handle, feel the heft and test the comfort to your own hand is becoming much more rare due to the dearth of stationers. Here in the U.S. there are fewer and fewer sites, and those that exist tend toward the high-end. Just a quick look through the Fahrney’s catalogue (or a trip to the mother ship store in Washington D.C.) and you will see that there are limited-edition, collectors’ fountain pens on which you can spend amounts of money so large that you have to contact the retailer to request the price. Makes the stuff in the Apple store look bargain-basement priced.
Knowing that those old, in my mind highly-prized, skills such as handwriting and fountain pen use are disappearing, I decided to give each of my grandsons a fountain pen as he entered his double-digit years. However, doting as I may be, I wasn’t prepared to spend vast quantities on this experiment. I had in mind a starting-point something more along the lines of those Schaffer cartridge pens that I had as a “ute.” It seemed that spending too much would be foolish in case they didn’t like them or would lose them or drop them on the nibs. (Why do fountain pens when dropped always seem to land on the nib?!) However, this fine idea came to a giant bump in the road when I discovered that I could find no such thing in office supply stores. Even the trusty internet offered no low-end options—at least not in this country. Enter the ever-faithful Brits. An online store there offered inexpensive, German-made, pens for what they termed “Learner’s.” Designed for either right or left –handers’ clubby hands, the pens are “pressure-stable” and have an “ink level viewing window:” The perfect thing AND with technological advances from the version in my past! Seems that this is so available in the sensible UK, because there children still are required to learn to use fountain pens: probably write in cursive too.
So, don’t think that technology just is advancing the computer age. The Apple store may be stocking OS-X Lion, but that isn’t the only technological advance out in the world. The stationer now is offering a fountain pen with a retractable nib. Consider that and feel your heart begin to race!
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A random pick from more than 460 Michiana Chronicles -- refresh the browser to see another set:
April Lidinsky -- More essays by April
Joe Chaney -- More essays by Joe
Ken Smith -- More essays by Ken
Jeanette Saddler Taylor -- Straddling Technologies / More essays by Jeanette
Heather Curlee Novak -- More essays by Heather
David James -- More essays by David
Elizabeth Van Jacob -- More essays by Elizabeth
Jeff Nixa -- More essays by Jeff
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About the series
Michiana Chronicles is a series of radio essays by Jonathan Nashel, Louise Collins, Joe Chaney, Jeanette Saddler Taylor, Jeff Nixa, April Lidinsky, Ken Smith, Heather Curlee Novak, David James, and Elizabeth Van Jacob.
Michiana is the region of north-central Indiana and southern Michigan roughly centered on South Bend, Indiana.
Michiana Chronicles airs on Fridays at 7:35 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. on WVPE (88.1 FM), the home of public radio in Elkhart / South Bend, Indiana.
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