Mechanical advantage

“Young Woman Writing” by Pierre Bonard (from R/X Museum)

Ok fine, I will admit it — I’ve been stubbornly avoiding learning anything about fountain pens.

In retrospect, my lifetime of resistance to fountain pens is silly and perhaps even hypocritical. I love fine stationery. I plan trips to stationery shops “just to browse.” Nothing brings me more joy than to wander up and down the aisles of paper goods, touching everything that isn’t nailed down. I will compulsively add my scribbles onto the white paper pad, squeezing them in the blank spaces between the jumble of other colorful jotted words, even though I probably have already tested these exact pens dozens of times. Now as an adult with adult money, my mind is blissfully guilt-free as I load up my shopping basket with yet more unneeded stickers and beautifully designed notebooks. I barely batting an eyelash at the checkout price anymore. I then take these purchases home and add them to my piles of other unused stationery, jealously collecting them like a dragon encircling its hoard.

I need someone to help slay my stationery obsession, like Saint George and the Dragon.

But strangely, fountain pens? Not for me for the longest time.

Certainly not for lack of trying from the shops. The best stationery shops in the world like Daikanyama T-Site, Itoya, and Sekaido in Tokyo, Goods for the Study in NYC, and Choosing Keeping here in London all put their stunning collections in the pride of place. Locked glass cases filled with warm wood trays and rows of elegant gleaming metal resting in velvet cushioned inserts. The perfect soft lighting to entice customers to come closer, price tags demurely tucked away to avoid sticker shock and encouraging buyers fall in love with the pens.

The dreamy fountain pen section at Daikanyama T-Site.

My eyes would simply slide off the perfectly designed displays. It was almost an unconscious reaction: my feet would start slowing down, my brain slowly processing the change in luxuriousness of the displays, before I finally registered I was in the fountain pen section. That would be the signal for me to turn sharply back to the safety of other stationery.

Fountain pens were always associated with power and elite accomplishment. It seems to me the only logical place for the iconic Montblanc black and gold fountain pen is gently nestled on a rich mahogany desk of some bank executive or university president. Probably next to a matching embossed gold nameplate, positioned just so to catch the light, intimidating visitors as they walked in.

Woodrow Wilson at his desk in the Oval Office c. 1913.

I personally found it annoying and anti-egalitarian to decide how much money to shell out to even get into fountain pens as a hobby. It felt like an absurd indulgence to buy such an expensive version of an everyday, ordinary item—an obvious and transparent attempt to cosplay at wealth and importance. Surely, my $5 pilot ballpoint pen could do as well as a $500 one.

I also erroneously associated fountain pen nibs with quills. I remember being a child and being taken on a middle school field trip to St. Augustine, Florida to see the first permanent European settlement and oldest masonry fort in the US. The town had a colonial village which did historical re-enactments, such as blacksmithing and cannon firing and beeswax candle-making. At one stop in the tour, we were given large feather quills with the tips carefully trimmed for writing. We were instructed to carefully dip them into small ink vials. Our small, uncoordinated child hands couldn’t figure out the right timing. First we used too much, dripping ink blots everywhere to make thick blotchy letters; then too little, running out of ink so quickly only faint scratches of words were left behind on the paper.

For some reason, I thought fountain pen nibs worked like this too—writing poorly and inconsistently. Using a fountain pen was an act of moving backwards in time, equivalent to choosing other ancient writing instruments like the Chinese calligraphy brush. Of course, beautiful writing can always be coaxed out by masters at the craft, but surely regular people like me would simply produce ugly output! Humans had already invented the ultimate ballpoint technology that could even work in space. Why on earth would we want to use an outdated and fussy writing instrument, I thought?

Fisher Space Pen Co holiday ad.

I was finally corrected recently from my misguided opinions by sci-fi author, Neal Stephenson. In a recent essay on writing by hand, Stephenson shares that he has written every book in his career (with one exception) using pen and paper,

About twenty-five years ago I stopped composing at the keyboard and switched over to fountain pen on paper. Since then I have written many thousands of pages that way. The manuscript of The Baroque Cycle was a stack of handwritten pages 42 inches high, which for a time was on display at the Museum of Science Fiction in Seattle. With the exception of The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., which I co-wrote with Nicole Galland by emailing Word files back and forth, every book I’ve written since then has been composed with fountain pen on paper.

And he immediately goes on to explain that fountain pens can write better than cheap pens because the mechanical qualities combine well with paper. The friction is necessary to remove stress on the hand:

The combination of fountain pens and paper embodies a balance that has been worked out over a long span of time by people who write a lot. This phenomenon is called “tooth” by aficionados. […] Too much friction, and too little friction, are both more tiring than just a little bit of friction, and that’s the balance that is reflected in the fountain pen/paper technology.

To my shock, Stephenson said that he’s never gotten writer’s cramp in the 25 years he’s been writing his books!

I have always loved writing longhand with nice pens but I assumed muscle cramps were a necessary cost of the activity. I thought it was an issue of lack of daily usage and practice, like needing to train my hands to better to endure the intensity of a challenging piano piece. Instead my prejudice against fountain pens was preventing me from having a better writing experience.

The final nail in the coffin was a correction about the costs. Once I started searching for beginner fountain pens, I found a review of the Pilot Kakuno which raved about the ink quality and smooth writing. It was a pen worthy to keep in rotation for serious fountain pen aficionados, and it was only $12!

The little smiley face on the nib makes me happy every time I uncap the pen to start a writing session.

And I was certainly not disappointed. The Pilot Kakuno is a joy to use for writing by hand. I was able to draft this essay in 7 pages of my notebook without any hand cramps at all.

Channeling my Britishness by drinking tea and writing at the local bookstore.

I am not ashamed to admit how wrong I was about fountain pens. I now exclusively write with the Kakuno and I’m trying to start building up a collection of other pens and inks. I considered buying a converter to use with ink vials but the UK price was more than 2x the cost of the pen itself.

Instead I waited until my most recent trip to NYC where I was able to test drive mid-tier fountain pens in Goods for the Study. I purchased a Teranishi Guitar fountain pen in black and silver for the painful (but not eye-watering) price of $50, along with a really cool Sailor ink in the shimmering Itezora color. I’m still a long way from a true fanatic’s collection, but I already know I’m going to be even more of a menace at stationery stores than before.

Fountain pen display at Goods for the Study in NYC.

I don’t write nearly at the daily volume and intensity of a professional writer like Neal Stephenson. But I do believe in the mental benefits of writing by hand, as someone who always found learning and revising from handwritten notes much more effective than the ones I typed up during lecture. The research also appears to corroborate this conclusion. Studies show that handwriting showing better outcomes for actual understanding compared to surface recall. The title of one paper sums it up well, stating “handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity”.

Handwriting is not fast enough to transcribe information in realtime, which forces the notetaker to listen carefully and decide what matters. In my own writing practice, my thoughts hurtle forward at incredible speed, with little to no organization, plus a generous serving of distraction and anxiety-driven mental detours. The deliberate pace of handwriting helps me settle down to consider the actual structure of my thoughts. A blinking cursor on a blank page in a text editor does not inspire the same kind of measured reflection.

The last unexpected benefit of handwriting is that pen and paper can still be more flexible than digital devices in certain situations.

No one will ever steal your handwritten notes. I can whip out my pocket-sized notebook and pen to jot down a quick thought in Central London without a care in the world. But if I’m using my smartphone I’ll be huddled in a street corner, gripping it with white knuckles as a quickly search directions or fire off a text, before stuffing it as fast as I can into my pockets. I don’t have the same devil-may-care attitude when using my phone downtown, especially after my coworker had two phones stolen directly out of his hands in less than two weeks.

Modern field researchers use computers extensively for notetaking and digital organization. However, they also still heavily use handwritten journals for their field studies. A laptop is all well and good, but it can often be distracting or unusable or dangerous when trying to get work done in different environments.

As Karen L. Kramer writes in her essay The Spoken and Unspoken, from the Field Notes on Science and Nature collection,

Although we take it for granted, our technological gadgetry is a curiosity to people for whom it is a novelty. Digital equipment is a sure way to interfere with the normal flow of activities. Any piece of equipment invites a steady stream of onlookers, drawing attention unnecessarily to the process of data recording itself. Writing is much less obtrusive.

[…]

Many new recording tools and technologies are now available to field researchers. Although field sites often do not have electricity, lightweight, portable, and inexpensive solar panels now make using a gamut of battery-powered equipment feasible. Each researcher has his or her personal preference on how to record field notes. For a number of reasons I favor paper forms and a pencil as the best compromise between enforcing consistency and maintaining flexibility.

George B. Schaller adds in another essay in the same collection,

It may seem anachronistic that I write notes in longhand in this technological age. I do not use a tape recorder to take notes, and the laptop had not yet been invented when I began field work. A machine loses data too easily; it has to be maintained under rugged conditions; it is yet another item to carry; it tempts thieves. However, I do use technology as it becomes available, such as GPS and radio-telemetry, if it enables me to obtain data more easily. I consider all machines mere tools. My main focus is providing a species with a written history, a biography, and for that one must join the animals. Looking at a computer screen, flying over terrain, and plotting locations on a map as relayed by satellite may all add to the mountain of available information. But none provides the pleasure or the knowledge and experience of being with the animals of getting your boots dirty, as they say. Konrad Lorenz years ago bemoaned “the fashionable fallacy of dispensing with description” of an animal’s behavior. Luckily, I have had the pleasure of spending much of my career in the field in direct contact with animals—watching, listening, and writing.

And while I am not in the field observing lions or conducting ethnographic research in tribal villages, I do find myself often using notebooks over my digital devices. If you’re on a flight, for instance, you have to stow away your larger electronic devices on takeoff and landing. There are no such restrictions on pen and paper.

So all this to say: if you have a prejudice against fountain pens, try being open-minded and writing with one. You might change your mind.

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