Category Archives: Pens

Racks of Temptation But Little Fun

I only reached for my credit card twice but I ended up not buying anything.

Well, maybe it was three times.

Today was the 6th World Fountain Pen Fair at Maruzen Books in downtown Tokyo. After work, I rushed down to Tokyo, cameras in hand, hoping to get some useful material for this site. When I arrived at Maruzen, I was surprised to see the fair was taking place in the basement.

When I got to the basement, the first thing I did was look for the Nakaya table. (Note, For those who don’t love fountain pens and therefore have no soul: Nakaya pens are one of the Holy Grails of fountain pens.) (Second Note: in this case “Holy Grail” is Japanese for “Really F@#king Expensive Pen”). They are sought after because they are handmade by experienced artisans and manage to be both simple and beautiful.

Unfortunately, Nakaya didn’t seem to be anywhere in the basement. Instead I looked around at famous production pens like Pelikan and, oddly, Platinum, which is the company Nakaya split from. The entire fair could have been mistaken for simply another department in the store as there was nothing special about it. While I was there, I tried out a Pelikan Souveran 800 and started reaching for my credit card. I do not claim this was a sane act but I did it. Luckily, I remembered I was looking for Nakaya pens so put my credit card back.

I then went to the 3rd floor to check out a rare and antique books section and found a new must-have item for work: a fake dictionary that houses a bottle of whiskey and a shot glass.

On the way back downstairs, I suddenly stumbled across the Nakaya table, which was set up practically in the foyer next to umbrellas. It was a terrible location where casual shoppers met pen addicts in a small traffic jam.

Today was especially interesting for Nakaya fans because Mr. Shinichi Yoshida, the nibmeister for Nakaya, was at the table adjusting nibs for newly purchased pens. The cheapest pen I saw that I liked was just over 59,000 yen or 491 US dollars. Oddly, this is a decent price for a Nakaya with a nib modified by Mr. Yoshida so I started to reach for my credit card. I then realized that I was like the 10th person in line hoping to even get in line so I put my credit card back.

Mr. Yoshida works on the youngest man at the show's new purchase.

The Nakaya table. Mr. Yoshida (right) works on the youngest man at the show’s new purchase.

Right next to the Nakaya table was the Ohashi-do table. Ohashi-do is a Sendai based fountain pen maker who also makes everything by hand. Or, maybe, by foot.

I neglected to write down the name of the artisan, but he was busy working a foot-powered lathe to make a pen and I didn’t want to interrupt him. The line for the table was short and I started to reach for my credit card, but I was more interested in watching the man with no name work.

The man with no name works using his feet. He has really cool socks.

The man with no name adjusts the lathe with a small mallet. You can see how long the orange acrylic rod is.

All in all, I find that Japanese pen shows are lacking in energy. The Nakaya and Ohashi-do tables were fun, but the rest was boring clerks in suits. I’ll go to the 16th Mitsukoshi Fountain Pen Festival next week. I hope it’s more fun.

I probably better leave my credit cards at home before I go. I don’t know if I can survive temptation twice.

Eighty Pages but Nary a Pen That Works

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I like the idea of the Eighty Pages notebooks, but as soon as I got my hands on one I knew there would be issues.

Sometime in December or early January, I was roaming through my various pen addiction enabling websites and a number of them mentioned a Kickstarter project by Eighty Pages, a “small batch” notebook company based in New York City.

I liked the look of the notebooks and because the price was right I joined the Kickstarter and just a few days ago got my notebooks and being an addict, the first thing I did was take pictures of them and the Eighty Pages swag that accompanied them:

Well-made and gorgeous.

On the surface they look great. They are 3.5″ by 5.5″ or about the size of a Field Notes notebook, but I like that they come with more pages. They have thick card stock covers that are hand-stitched to the paper and are embossed with “made by” information on the back cover. Each comes with a serial number. The first number tells you the volume; the second tells you where in the production yours was made. It looks great, but I really don’t care about that information. The stickers are a nice touch but the golf pencil is already at the state where I used to throw out my old pencils back when I still used wood pencils.

I slipped the seal off the red one to fondle the paper because, well, yeah, that’s what you do.

I was immediately worried. The paper is thick, which is nice, but it’s rough. In fact, it reminded me of watercolor paper or the paper that comes in sketch books. It’s designed for pencils, not pens.

I confirmed that by breaking out my fountain pens and doing a little test. Every pen, including those with the widest nibs, scratched and skipped across the paper. The best thing I can say about that experience is there was no show-through or bleed-through at all. A Pilot G2 ballpoint with a .5 mm tip also had trouble. Yeah, that’s right, even a ballpoint pen was scratchy on the paper.

Only the Tacticle Turn Shaker I won in a drawing last year wrote smoothly, mostly because it has a wide Schmidt refill.

Today, I broke out an old drawing pencil I still have from decades ago–see kids, this is why you should never throw things out–and did a quick sketch of something apocalyptic on a back page. The sketch was crap but it confirmed that this is paper for pencils not fountain pens.

This was just a couple passes with 6B. It looks great, for a sketch book.

This was just a couple passes with a 6B pencil. You can see how rough the paper is.

In the end, I like the idea behind Eighty Pages more than I like the notebooks. I’m glad I bought them, although they may get passed to the girls. If you’re looking for a small sketchbook, they might be worth trying out. If you like pens, though, they aren’t worth it.

I hope, in the future, the makers experiment with different types of paper that are more pen friendly. If they do, I’ll probably be first in line to try them.

Cleaning Out The Old Or Students’ Revenge

Bigfoot, The Pen Detective, and the Knife Store

Great International Customer Service Sight Unseen

The Temple of Pens and Paper and Stuff

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I’ve said before that Japan is the Mecca of stationery and things to write with. For part of today, I got the chance to head down to Tokyo to visit Itoya, the central temple of that Mecca. I was mildly disappointed by the trip.

I’ve also mentioned my affinity for places that are both grandiose and kind of creepy. When I first moved to Tokyo, Itoya met both those criteria. Behind it’s signature red paper clip sign was seven floors (and one basement level) of office supplies fountain pens, ball-point pens, paper, and every office gadget imaginable housed in a thin building that looked kind of worn out and felt vaguely dangerous, as if you’d had to go to a store in the bad part of town (instead of just a block from what used to be the most expensive property on Earth). It had low doors and I had to pay attention as I moved from floor to floor. I was immediately smitten by it all and started spending. If I had nickle for every dime I spent there, well, I’d have someone else writing these posts whilst I studied mathematics.

Part of the fun is that, because the Japanese also have an unhealthy interest in office supplies, Japanese stationers have pens and other items that never make it to the West. Some of the items aren’t worth sending, but the ones that are seem subject to the whims of the manufacturers who may decide that the pen or pencil won’t sell well overseas. When you house it in a creepy building it’s even better.

Unfortunately, the creepiness is gone as the Itoya main building is now a construction site. The basic pens and paper have been moved to a six story building around the corner that lacks the red paper clip any character.

Clean but lacks character.

Just down the alley is K. Itoya,which used to be a satellite of the main store, and now houses the fountain pens and art supplies. It also lacks any character, but I like the fountain pen sign.

Nice sign. No character.

I’m also convinced that the new stores have less stuff than before. Part of the charm of old Itoya was that you could roam around for an hour discovering stuff that you didn’t know existed but suddenly couldn’t live without. The new store is too clean and compact. It’s like replacing the XYZ Shopping Mall with a large convenience store but still calling it the XYZ Shopping Mall.

I hope the new building gets its creepiness and sense of danger back. If it doesn’t, I just hope it has more stuff.

Copy This Scribble That Feel the Pain

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Because I have, perhaps, an unhealthy interest in pens, it was only natural that after I came to Japan I would start playing with brushes.

Through a Japanese colleague who piqued my interest, and because I thought it would help me learn Japanese, I began studying shodo, or Japanese calligraphy. This involved acquiring some equipment (which the teacher was more than happy to sell me). I needed brushes, a couple felt pads, a weight, some bottled ink, some ink sticks, a grinding stone and a lot of Japanese paper.

Each lesson started with me pouring some liquid ink on a grind stone and then darkening it with an ink stick. When it was ready, my teacher (whose name I’ve completely blanked on as I sit down to write this) would hand me the day’s lesson. I would then force myself into something resembling seiza and begin my practice. (To understand what it’s like to use a brush, hold a long pencil with a proper grip, but up by the eraser. Then hold the pencil straight up and down and try to write your name.)

I started with a kids’ book but she quickly realized I was serious and I moved on to higher level characters. For example, I might have these four characters: 雪山千里. I would copy them, using proper stroke order and technique (the first character has 11 strokes and starts at the top.) My teacher would then take out a brush loaded with orange ink and mark my mistakes. If I was correct, she would circle it. Eventually I’d do a test version that would be sent off to some evaluation committee that would rank me in a way similar to karate ranks.

Early on, I asked my teacher what a certain group of characters meant. She basically asked why the hell I needed to know what they meant; I just needed to copy them. 雪山千里, for example means, Snow Mountain Long Distance and apparently comes from a poem, but I’ll never know. This left me in the odd position of focusing on language simply as movement and form but not as meaning. Wondrous philosophical, that. Useless in getting a date with a Japanese woman, though. (Check it out, sweetheart, I can totally scribble the hell out of this piece of paper.)

Eventually I moved on to the cursive, or KANA, version of the characters. There was a small version, but my favorite involved a meter long piece of paper and a lot more pain as I crawled around on the floor. The cursive characters look a lot like the start of a Jackson Pollock painting when he was only dribbling black paint and cigarette ash. I still like this version the best because it has more flow and style than the block letters. Unfortunately, for all their apparent haste and sloppiness, they are no less precise than the block letters and my teacher spent a lot of time marking them up with orange ink.

In this style, I eventually earned a ranking. I even adopted a pen (er, brush) name and got an official stamp. My “official” name was 旅人道延, or Tabibito Doen (the latter pronounced very close to Dwayne). It stands for, more or less, “The Traveler’s Road Stretches.” (Another post that.)

However, after several cancelled practices on both our parts, I started attending a second night of karate instead and stopped studying calligraphy. I still have better handwriting in Japanese than I do in English. It just has no meaning.

Inspiration So Pure So Smooth So Precious

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One of the things ordinary, normal people don’t get about writers is our affinity for notebooks. Not the digital carry it with you and send email kind, but the kind made from wood pulp.

To a normal person, a notebook is a thing used to record things, like notes. For a writer, a notebook is inspiration. It is precious and has magic powers. Like the new running shoes in Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Summer Running”–which the narrator is convinced will make him run faster–a notebook contains the purest form of all writing: the things we hope to write before we actually sit down to write them. There are no awkward sentences, no under-developed characters, no plot holes. Everything is perfect–well, at least until the first marks are made on the page.

To understand the effects of this, you have to understand how normal people and writers buy notebooks and then what happens after. A normal person buying a notebook will pay the money, say something like “Thanks, I really needed one of these” and immediately start scribbling notes. A writer buying a notebook will suddenly grow twenty feet tall like Galadriel in the film version of The Fellowship of the Ring and announce “Within these mighty pages are a great novel/epic poem and all that is necessary for me to reveal it is for me to leave white the things that are not a great novel/epic poem and lay marks upon the things that are. All shall love me and despair!”

The normal person behind me then says “Hurry up, moron, some of us have places to be. Oh, and you know Galadriel was a chick, don’t you?”

Basking in the glow, we get our brand new notebooks back to our writing space. There’s then a few moments whilst we arrange the space properly and then break out our pen. That’s when the problems hit. The shinier, more perfect the notebook, the less likely we are to begin writing in it. The ultra-smooth, fountain pen friendly paper of our Apica Premium CD Notebook is too smooth and pure to be ruined by the horrible scrawls we are about to inflict on it. It is the paper for something that people will be studying 300 years from now. It is not for the notes of a crap action novel or the notes for some pathetic blog. It deserves better. Hell, I don’t even have a proper pen for it.

It is precious.

In my case, at this point my internal editor/heckler–her name is Kimberly–starts snickering. (I’ll tell you more about Kimberly in a future post; all you need to know now is that she’s a snarky, ruthless bitch.) She hears the opening line that’s been rolling around in my head and says “Didn’t that meth lord guy say that on Breaking Bad in like season one or was that like Macbeth? It doesn’t matter, it still stinks. You’re not the one who knocks, you’re the one who stinks. And you can’t even smell. (See, I told you what she was like.)

I therefore put the nice, shiny notebook away and drag out some handmade ones that I assembled several years back out of unused handouts and old student evaluations. Kimberly messes with her hair–her hair is always perfect but she always complains she can’t do anything with it–and says “Changing to crappy paper won’t help. It’s just crap on crap. Stinky, stinky, stinky.” She sighs. “And how much time did you waste making those nasty things when you could have been writing? How many blank notebooks do you have anyway?” My answer to that question is “shut up”. All she needs to know is I now have a moldering stack of old paper held together with rusting staples.

As I’ve been working on this blog I’ve discovered that one of the advantages of computer screens is that there’s nothing particularly tactile about writing on them. You never have that “my words are crap and will despoil these precious pages” moment. (Well, unless you own a Mac, in which case, yes you will.)

Kimberly just laughs at that. “I’ll be here whatever you choose, you loser. I’m precious that way.”

The Glorious Scribbly Scrawls of Madness

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I spent part of the day transcribing novel number two into a computer.

Because I am a lunatic, and an old-fashioned one at that, I tend to write the first drafts of books by hand. This is actually quite convenient as I find it easier to break out a notepad and write on it, even whilst riding on a train, than to drag out a laptop computer and try to position it correctly on my lap. Also, notepads don’t have pre-installed games.

The disadvantage is I also have to have a fairly accurate “book bible” that keeps track of all my settings and my characters and their backgrounds. If I don’t, I end up wasting a lot of time, ink and paper. This happened on book two when I realized I’d spent thousands of words writing about a character’s family and getting his background wrong.

After I declare the manuscript finished, I hide it away for a couple months and then attack it with fresh eyes. I cross things out; cut things out; and tape and glue things in a different order. I call this the “assembled draft”. I then attempt to enter it all in computer, usually making even more changes as I go.

This step, however, is hindered by my handwriting. At a slow speed, my handwriting’s sloppy but legible. Then I begin to speed up. As the ideas and words begin to flow my handwriting becomes semi-legible scrawl bordering on sheer madness. Even I can’t read it and have showed it to other people for their opinion on what word they thought a particular scribble might be. They often scream at this point and flee whilst crossing themselves and saying Sancta Maria mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae but that may be for other reasons than my handwriting.

For an example I offer the following for your consideration. It shows the various steps my handwriting goes through:

Gaze upon the madness.

Gaze upon this at your own risk. (And this is only average madness.)

For the record, the Madness was not an exaggeration. I just quickly wrote the first thing that popped into my head. (And, no, I didn’t think of “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” until just now.)

Now imagine trying to work your way through 600 pages of such Madness.

I’ve tried slowing down, but can’t seem to manage it. I’ve also been, on occasion, doing some handwriting improvement exercises, but again, I have to be going slowly for that to work. Also, the last few months, I’ve been doing my best to work on computers but that requires fully charged batteries and no internet connection of any kind. These daily postings are also supposed to help me develop the habit of thinking on the keyboard (something you’ll notice I haven’t managed to do yet in these postings).

I’m not a luddite. I love having a computer for editing and research, for photography and for just good old fashioned time wasting. Still, there’s nothing like that scratching of fountain pen on paper. (Yes, pen snobs, that means I need a smoother nib or better paper. I know.) And seeing the word count on the screen isn’t as satisfying as seeing a stack of paper grow larger as you work.

You actually feel as if you’ve accomplished something. Even if you can’t read it.

A Bad Reputation and Too Many Pens

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I spent part of the day at the 15th Annual World Fountain Pen Festival. Despite the temptation, I didn’t feed my addiction. I was more like an alcoholic walking around a bar picking up glasses and sniffing them.

For this addiction, I can definitely blame my father as he’s the first to slip me the drug. Someone had given him, I think as part of a set, a Cross Century fountain pen. He didn’t want it and I’d never tried a fountain pen before so I accepted it.

The first hit was free. (This is the replacement, though. It wasn’t free.)

It was love at first, er, write. (Something like that.) To use it, I was forced to do the thing that none of my teachers had been able to make me do: hold my pen correctly. I used to have a claw grip. Hold your pencil normally, then pull the tip toward your palm and write with the pencil vertical and the tip directly under your index finger knuckle. Feel free to grip the pencil as tightly as possible. Writing that way gave me impressive calluses on my middle finger and my little finger but didn’t do much for my handwriting.

Using the Cross was more comfortable and, for a while, although it would eventually become barely legible, my handwriting improved. I kept that pen longer than any other pen I’d ever owned but eventually lost it. I quickly replaced it and still have the replacement. Then, while I was in the Peace Corps, I bought a couple cheap Chinese Hero pens, that are direct copies of the Parker 51. I wrote a lot with them, but found the nibs too thin. I still have them and they still work. (Not bad for 15 cents apiece.)

This one's been used. The one in the box has never been taken out of the plastic.

This one’s been used. There’s one in the box that has never even been taken out of the plastic.

Then, while I was at Ole Miss, I bought an early Retro 51 fountain pen (200 series?). It had a thicker barrel and a bit more weight. I used it a while–and still have it, by the way–but then a friend introduced me to fountain pen crack: the Pilot/Namiki Vanishing Point. A fountain pen that acts like a clicky ball-point pen. There’s no cap. You just click it and use it. Let me say that again: you click it like a ball-point pen, but it’s a fountain pen. Genius. I used them so much that the barrels began to break. I still have them, but don’t use them. Instead I use a more contemporary version.

An okay pen that has always felt creaky when I used it. Nice weight, though.

They look like pens, but they are actually coated with a drug that makes you want more. And more. And more.

Unfortunately, about the time I got the Cross, I developed a sudden aversion to lending my pens to other people. Nothing wins friends and influences people more than having a pen in your hand and saying “No” when asked “Do you have a pen I can borrow?” The few times I did lend my fountain pens, the borrowers gripped them by the nibs and got ink all over their fingers. Oddly, they blamed this on me which neither won friends nor influenced people. (Although saying “Don’t ruin the nib you moron” might have contributed to that, too.)

I quickly learned to carry spare pens to loan to the unwashed masses lest they become inky and, well, forced to wash. This led to the spectacle of me holding a pen but saying, “just a minute, I need to find a lesser pen for you to use” (something like that) when asked “May I borrow your pen?”.

I then moved to Japan, which is the Mecca of stationery and pointy writey things. And, of course, I must try them so I can experience Japanese stationery culture, or something. This means I have roller balls and gel ink pens. Pens with glass tips. Pens with brush tips. Actual brushes, and an old brush and ink kit that looks kind of like a pipe.

Also, just about 40 years since my father gave me that first hit of Cross, I have several fountain pens, some of which actually work, with a couple more on order (damn you Kickstarter!) I also have several bottles of ink occupying space on my desk.

As for the pen show, it wasn’t as much fun as the Pointy Stabby Things show because everything was being sold by store clerks and not by the actual makers. (The one maker who was there was constantly busy and I never got a chance to talk to him.) They also didn’t seem keen on photography. Sailor Pens’ relatively famous custom ink blender was there, but there was no other ink for sale. I did get to try a bunch of pens but didn’t buy anything. I am, however, casually checking out the prices on the internet. Just for curiosity’s sake.

I can quit any time I want.

Note: Updated 8 March 2015 with pictures.