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