The lost magic of the fountain pen

Mankind now makes most things better. There are some possible exceptions: much music and art, perhaps, and maybe also functioning liberal democracies. Culture and politics aside, examples of material regression are less evident. One can think possibly of Roman marine concrete, in some ways superior to its modern incarnation, or the sound of a Stradivarius, which continues to defy ready reproduction.

The fountain pen is one of these rare examples. From the late 19th to the mid-20th century, it served as the ultimate in handwriting technology. Unlike the quill or steel dip-pen, it did not require repeated replenishment in the manner of an exhausted monastic scribe. It allowed words to flow as fast as one’s thoughts. Portable, containing its own inkwell, and requiring almost no pressure against the page, the fountain pen could help make the act of writing a physical, as well as an intellectual joy. ‘To sit at one’s table on a sunny morning’, claimed Winston Churchill in 1908, ‘with four clear hours of uninterruptible security, plenty of nice white paper, and a [fountain] pen – that is true happiness.’

Between roughly the 1920s and the 1950s, in an age of mass literacy and ubiquitous handwritten correspondence, the fountain pen reached its technical apex. The quality and variety of nibs made then have never been surpassed. Today, enthusiasts hunt down ‘vintage’ models, often lovingly restored, not just for their historical interest but for the pleasures of their delightful ‘stub’, ‘oblique’, flexible or italic nibs, along with the pens’ arcane filling-systems, which drink ink out of the bottle in ingenious (and sometimes messy) ways.

By the mid-century, however, the fountain pen faced competition and, eventually, replacement, at the hands of the newly invented ballpoint. Although it required more hand-cramping pressure and produced a rather sticky and uninspiring line on the page, the ballpoint’s ink was waterproof. It also did not leak, even at altitude or on aeroplanes, and was typically cheap, reliable and disposable.

The fountain pen endured, but most readers above a certain age will remember the usually charmless tools they encountered at school: too often with narrow, uncomfortable ‘sections’ for the fingers, prone to leaking at the worst possible time, loaded with cartridges containing insipid ink in mandated, uniform shades of black or blue. Many younger readers will have been denied even that. Today, handwriting itself is an increasingly archaic skill, with many unable to write in even inelegant cursive script, their penmanship limited to the occasional awkward printing of names or scrawling of signatures on an official form.

The decline of handwriting, along with that of the fountain pen, naturally correlates with the decline of handwritten correspondence. Although it can come over as somewhat fusty, a handwritten letter usually feels more significant to its recipient than an email or text message. It was an effective way of signalling both mental and, to an extent, a physical connection with someone else perhaps far away – or at least it was before the increases in the price of postal delivery made sending letters both much more expensive and much more unreliable.

Something else is lost with the disappearance of tangible handwritten letters and records. The historian knows the thrill of learning to decipher the handwriting of someone long dead and learning, too, to decipher the thoughts captured on the page their hands now hold; as well as the shock of recognising a familiar hand from one country’s archive suddenly appear in that of another, like hearing a friend’s voice far away from home. Future historians of our age will be denied this sense of knowing an ancestor in this concrete and emotional way. Almost all written composition is now digital and soon that, too, may become essentially de-skilled and dehumanised by the universal use of large-language models, which will effectively correspond with each other.

For those still willing or weird enough, the fountain pen can remain a source of great delight. The endless pleasure of seeking not only the ‘grail pen’ but the ‘perfect’ permutation of pen, paper and ink, aided by a growing online community of fellow obsessives who catalogue their experiments with dozens of notebooks and writing papers, hundreds of modern and vintage pens, and thousands of shades of ink – some of them enclosed in beautiful glass bottles worthy of luxury perfume, or sometimes made of ‘iron gall’ that, as with historical ‘blue-black’ inks, slowly cures and darkens as it oxidises on the page. ‘Pen shows’ are where members of this strange but generally amicable tribe gather to buy and sell their wares or show off their collections. The pens and inks accumulate until you acknowledge that you, too, are becoming a fellow ‘pen addict’. The next stage is to serve as a ‘penabler’, introducing friends, family and colleagues to the habit; gratifyingly, some of them then go on to gain additional converts of their own. As well as the aesthetic and ergonomic benefits of the fountain pen, these new acolytes can preach of cognitive benefits, too: some research suggests memories are retained more effectively by handwriting rather than typing notes.

In their modern incarnation, fountain pens are dominated by brands from a cluster of countries whose national stereotypes are manifest: the German firms with their solid ‘workhorse’ pens; some beautiful but often unreliable Italian models; while arguably the finest are Japanese, hailing from a country that specialises in perfecting foreign inventions and which still valorises the analogue, the artisanal and everything paper-based. Although they will generally not match their forebears from the mid-20th century, it is possible to buy a good contemporary specimen for less than £30; much pricier pens are often bought as a collector’s item or corporate gift never to be used. Cost does not necessarily correlate with quality.

Nibs made not of steel but of softer gold tend to shape themselves to the style of their owner’s handwriting. The associated fantasy is of owning something individual and personalised, despite its being born in a factory. For those further down the rabbit-hole, it is possible to find a ‘nibmeister’ who can adjust or tune one’s nib to write just the way one wants.

All this may be understood as an affectation, perhaps correctly, but it also represents an analogue enclave in a digital age. At a deeper level beyond the craving for things non-pixelated, personalised and permanently tangible, this hobby affords opportunities for indulgent identifications with ancestors and artists. Online obsessives debate how to reproduce, for instance, the exact composition of the intense blue and ‘shading’ ink used by Sigmund Freud in a 1925 letter, or the (now discontinued) blue-black iron gall ink favoured by Oliver Sacks. (In the case of the former, ironically the artisanal ink-mixers of Tokyo, who offer to create custom blends based on any colour, artistic or emotional inspiration, somewhat missed the mark, while artificial intelligence agreed with my closest approximation using modern shades – the ‘KWZ iron gall turquoise’ handmade by a Polish chemist.) Both Freud and Sacks were prolific writers: Freud’s Montblanc is still displayed at his final home in London; Sacks would scribble in his notebook at concerts, his thoughts refracted by the music, and claimed that when on a writing-binge he finished a bottle of ink every few days.

It is delusional to imagine that any purchasable object could confer writing talent, just as those who buy pricey Leica cameras hoping to channel Henri Cartier-Bresson will be disappointed. Freud himself might have had something to say about those who are obsessed by and seek creative potency through the pen. On the other hand, Freud’s friend, the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, identified the link between phallic or sexual creativity and all human creativity more broadly – so perhaps this can be forgiven.

For the fountain pen is indeed a creative technology: one invested with emotions and aspirations, representing a desire to connect with others both dead and alive and to preserve something precious of an earlier age. It symbolises, and in some small sense seeks to defy, a loss that is both material and cultural.