Writing Instruments: A Technical History & How They Work
This was the last book I read in 2007, making it number 22. I fell short of my goal for the year by a full thirty books! Clearly in 2008 I need to spend more time reading.
You’d probably have to be a pen nut to finish reading this book, originally a paper titled An Engineer’s View of Writing Instruments, but as I qualify for the title of pen nut, I enjoyed reading this quite a bit. It answered some of my questions about the mechanical workings of fountain pens, confirming some and dispelling other notions I had about how ink gets from inside a fountain pen to the paper. Roe covers much more than fountain pens here, though. He provides a overview of the entire history of writing instruments and the development of different types of pens and pencils as well.
The real treat here was the section where Roe (who holds a doctorate in fluid dynamics from Cambridge) explains the relationships between the surfaces of a pen’s nib and feed and an ink’s viscosity and surface tension. I’m still pretty far away from a practical understanding of the dynamics at play, but his overview was clear enough to demonstrate the principles to a layman like me, even if the specifics were beyond me.
Writing Instruments: A Technical History & How They Work
Goeff Roe
6/10
http://www.booksaboutpens.com/covers/Writing_Instruments_Roeb.jpg
Self-Published Paperback, 1996. 41 pages
