ABSTRACT
When I was growing up in the 1950s, nearly everyone had an old uncle, an odd friend, maybe even a parent, who lovingly clung to a fountain pen in that clean new age of the ball-point. Perhaps the signature of the fountain pen had more personality than the ball-point’s output, but the flow of the fountain was in just about every other way less reliable and efficient. It required constant refilling from bottles or cartridges that were always in some real danger of tipping over or breaking open; its inscriptions, even though advertised as “quick-drying,” always threatened to smear on a humid day. Its devotees freely acknowledged these and other drawbacks, such as its greater expense, but such logic was no match for an attachment not so much to a cherished specific instrument as to a mode of written expression.
