Ballpoints, Go Home

This is a cof­feetable edi­tion full of beau­ti­ful pho­tographs of many note­wor­thy foun­tain pens, and accom­pa­ny­ing pages of text out­lin­ing the his­to­ry of the foun­tain pen, the com­mer­cial and tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ments that shaped and were shaped by the pen. As a per­son fas­ci­nat­ed by pens and foun­tain pens specif­i­cal­ly, it was a delight to read. The his­to­ry seemed some­times too super­fi­cial and the tips for col­lec­tors too trite, but nev­er­the­less a valu­able start­ing point for some­one look­ing for the broad strokes overview.

There is enough in here to point any­one inter­est­ed in foun­tain pens toward a more spe­cif­ic direc­tion. Being as broad a his­tor­i­cal overview as it is, it is like­ly to fill in some blanks in even the most atten­tive pen col­lec­tor’s knowl­edge. Era­no’s book has sparked a pre­vi­ous­ly unknown inter­est in Ester­brook pens in me, and I’ve learned just enough about the Swiss Caran d’Ache com­pa­ny to want to know more.

I’d say this is a good spring­board for a begin­ner, but there are cer­tain­ly some juicy tid­bits for any­one with an inter­est in foun­tain pens.

Of par­tic­u­lar inter­est to me was the sec­tion at the end about cus­tom, one-of-a-kind pen mak­ers, artists who cre­ate indi­vid­ual pieces of func­tion­al art. Two men­tioned were also knife­mak­ers, and though ini­tial­ly this came as a sur­prise, I soon found the idea of a knife­mak­er mak­ing pens or a pen­mak­er mak­ing knives to be a nat­ur­al con­nec­tion. The real­ly fas­ci­nat­ing thing about these two, Grayson Tighe and David Broad­well, is that they each brought Dam­as­cus steel into at least one pic­tured pen. Though their styles are quite dif­fer­ent from one anoth­er, I was inter­est­ed to see this com­mon ele­ment in the mak­ers of pens who also make knives. Dam­as­cus blades on their own are quite beau­ti­ful, but sub­sumed into an over­all design the results were stunning.

While I have not found a pho­to online of Broad­well’s Red Storm II, which is a breath­tak­ing inte­gra­tion of Dam­as­cus steel into tita­ni­um and cel­lu­loid, take a look at his Plum Scep­tre, which exhibits some of the same character.

Grayson Tighe’s work is more pol­ished and less ornate, but no less beau­ti­ful. Take a look at his gallery of foun­tain pens. The con­trast between the two artist’s styles is strik­ing but you can see some of the same influences.

As expos­ing me to a broad­er range of foun­tain pens was the aim of buy­ing and read­ing Foun­tain Pens Past & Present, it has done its job nice­ly. As a book it stands on its own some­what less well. I would have loved to trade some of the pho­tographs for greater depth in the com­pa­ny pro­files, and I sus­pect that Era­no knows a lot more than he’s let­ting on with this book. Thank­ful­ly, he left me the bibliography.