Penspotting

It’s pretty clear to me what my old-man trainspotting hobby is going to be. You know how that happens, how crossing the line into being officially “old” often includes picking up some bizarrely specific, seemingly pointless, and completely obsessive hobby, be it actual train spotting, stamp collecting, or what have you. I know my fate now, and it’s fountain pens.

The seeds of this were sown several years ago when I started keeping a journal on paper. The problem I have with writing on the computer is that it’s so easy to edit. Even now, as I’m putting this down, I can’t stop myself from going back over sentences and re-wording them. Worse, I’ll decide I don’t like the flow of something and go back and re-write whole paragraphs. I’ll tweak the phrasing of something earlier, and then realize that it requires re-writing some later section. This is all well and good if I were doing it as a proper revision step, but I do it compulsively and repeatedly as I write. I have trouble leaving well enough alone and just getting the words out, waiting until that’s done to go back and edit. To try to break that habit, I started writing on paper in ink. That way, I can only go forward.

Writing on paper also has the advantage of being mostly internet-proof in two different senses of the term. First, it creates a significant barrier to sharing. This is a good thing. It lets me explore ideas without worrying about the judgement of the world. (If some of your brilliant ideas don’t look really dumb in hindsight, you’re kidding yourself.) It also lets me clear out a lot of introspective drivel. A lot of the bogeymen in the back of my head evaporate when exposed to the cold light of day. Paper is also a good burial ground for words said in anger, things that you need to say or you’re going to explode, but which it’s better that nobody else hears.

The other sense in which paper is internet-proof is that of focus. When you’re writing on paper, there’s no internet there. Writing on a computer, there’s always internet. It’s far too easy to distract yourself. You stumble on some fact or quote that you’re not sure you’re remembering correctly, and the next thing you know you’ve lost half an hour surfing Wikipedia. Or you just get stuck at some point in your writing: It’s probably good to watch Youtube for five minutes to give your mind a break, but that turns into an hour. And this all assumes that you’ve disabled email alerts, chat clients, and all that other crap. I don’t know how you get anything done if you haven’t done that.

Once I started writing a lot on paper, I started caring about pens. Ballpoints are a problem because you have to press down on them, which means you have to grip them fairly firmly; enough that it tenses up my whole hand and makes my wrist hurt after a while. As Neal Stephenson pointed out, repetitive stress injuries are the black lung of my profession, so I don’t want to do that if I can help it. Gel pens are a lot better, and I used those for years. Eventually, it occurred to me to try fountain pens. My dad had a collection of them which we’d inherited and was just sitting around at my mom’s house, so several years ago I picked out a few of them to try.

In practical terms, they work. They take almost no pressure to write with; with some, the weight of the pen does all the work. But there’s also a cultural and emotional side to them. I think they share something with antique roadsters, a cantankerousness which requires attention, a complexity which invites obsession, and some tactile sensory quality that’s appealing but hard to define. They’re artifacts: pens that aren’t disposable. Like elderly senators, they acquire a certain status and a patina of respectability just for having survived, for being a relic of an earlier time. One of my dad’s pens is engraved with its origin: “W.-Germany”. That brings me up short every time I notice it.

They can be a little fussy. You pretty much have to write in cursive: Keeping the pen in contact with the paper keeps the ink flowing smoothly. There’s still something about the way I write - some angle of my wrist or fingers, too much pressure or too little - that causes some pens to skip a bit on the initial downstrokes of words. There are subtleties in the interaction of pen, ink, and paper. Cheap paper (or inkjet printer paper of any quality) will suck ink out of the pen and give you broad, spidery-capillaried letters. On less absorbent paper, some inks go down wet and can take a minute to dry.

If you’re the type to do so, there are all these factors you can play with: different types of nibs, pens of different weights, grips, and materials, inks of different colors and viscosity, paper of varying weight and smoothness. You get that little rush you get from mastering the intricacies of a tool, from gaining arcane (if trivial) knowledge. The depth of that rabbit hole can be measured in tens of thousands of Youtube videos. Part of the fascination is that something so seemingly simple embodies such complexity and craftsmanship.

There’s also an artisanal quality to the writing they produce. As you write, the nib doesn’t move across the paper at a perfectly constant velocity; it zips and pauses, creating variations in the amount of ink laid down. With some inks, this produces noticeable shading, gradients of color, appealingly idiosyncratic. Some nibs flex in response to minute changes in pressure, causing the tip to spread and widening the line of ink laid down. Italic nibs can be trickier to write with, but make anything look classier.

Thankfully, my fascination with fountain pens is limited to their functional aspects; I actually want to write with them. This needs to be mentioned because they’re also a classic executive gift/status item, where their role is sit on someone’s desk and look expensive. Collecting that kind of pen is a vastly more expensive hobby. Even ordinary-looking pens can cost a few hundred dollars; the ones that actually look fancy can run to several thousand.

On that scale, my pens are cheap. I have one which I got as a birthday present that was about $80. I have a couple of my dad’s which are probably around that. He also had one of the top shelf $500 pens, but I don’t care for the way it writes (I think it’s mostly designed for signing legislation) so my brother’s got that. The rest are under $40: One at $35, three at $25, two at $10, one at $5. Saying that, it feels like a stupid amount of money to spend on pens, but it’s a hobby, and cheaper than most.