A PROBLEM with carrying fountain pens is that strangers use them as a pretext for conversation. Fa-miliar icebreakers include: “Say, is that some kind of fountain pen?” (meaning: Say, are you some kind of nancy boy?) and “Wow! Can I try writing something with that?” (Answer: “No.”) And at the end of any discussion, you get asked why you use a fountain pen. I don’t really know. But owning one provokes a chain of events that makes one’s pen as indispensable as others’ wallets or watches. I liked my old Waterman “Gentleman” so much that a few years ago my wife got me an even nicer “Etalon.” It seemed heartless to consign one of them to the loneliness of a desk drawer, even for a day. So I decided to fill the fine-nibbed Etalon with black ink and use it for writing, pressing the medium-nibbed Gentleman into service with various colored inks for editing. Just as a woman enters the universe of spinsterdom when she gets her second cat, a man becomes a pen-weirdo when he goes public with his second fountain pen. My pen ownership thus acquired the status of “quirk.” At that point my sister, who works in Germany, found me a truly superb and (now, at least) indispensable product, the Graf von Faber-Castell “pencil extender.” This is an item so recherche that the box doesn’t even have an English translation on it–hochfeinster Bleistiftverlangerer, it reads–and I have to send away to Potsdam for the refills. Ever since I read in a Nabokov book that “a scholar is a man who reads with a pencil,” I have tried never to be without one. And since it protects the pencil-tip, my Bleistiftverlangerer has freed me from the old choice–a sooty shirt-front or multiple stab wounds to the thigh?–that confronts the inveterate pencil-carrier. That’s to say nothing of the way it conceals, in a most 007-like way, both an eraser and a sharpener. This means my shirt pocket is now filled with so much silver and tortoise-shell and gold plate that it is irresistible to my grabby two-year-old daughter whenever I pick her up. (“Hey, don’t touch that! Here. Play with these cigarettes.”) I no longer even wear shirts without pockets, which has led to awkward moments at holidays. “Very nice of you!” I recall saying to my mother-in-law a couple Christmases back, after receiving hundreds of dollars’ worth of elegant-but-pocketless shirts from her. “I won’t wear them, of course, but it’s a nice thought all the same!” My collection also necessitates a range of maintenance purchases: blotters, solvents, and high-quality paper, since the 18-karat Paris-made nib on my Etalon tends to “bite” at cheaper stock. But it’s worth it. The man who uses a fountain pen has experiences denied to mere scratchers with ballpoints. Last week, for example, my wife and I were leaving a dinner party at an elegant townhouse in Georgetown when our host said, “Wait! Sign the guest book!” I looked at the proffered pen. It was hardly up to the splendor of the surroundings: the chandeliers, the Persian carpets, the hand-painted wallpaper, not to mention the tooled leather of the guest book itself, which appeared to have stood up well to the signatures of decades’ worth of guests. So I decided to use my own pen. But which one? “Do I go for the austere, tapered precision of the Etalon?” I wondered. “Or the bold and vivid strokes of the Gentleman?” (Am I the kind of person Madison Avenue dreams of, or what?) I opted for the latter, thinking its blue would stand out more starkly against the gray-black Bic scribble of previous guests. But when I started to write, nothing happened. “Gee, that’s funny,” I said to my host. “Must be something wrong with your paper.” I shook the pen a couple of times to get the ink running, but still not a dribble. So I started unscrewing the barrel. I should have been wary when the pen began to make a soft but insistent pfff sound. The ink had probably been hemorrhaging onto the guest book and the mahogany table for a couple of seconds before I noticed it, because by then it was pouring onto the Persian carpet in an audibly pattering cataract. I threw up my hands (literally) and sent another great big dollop onto the wall, where it immediately began plowing floorwards down the ridges of the handcrafted wallpaper. When I returned from washing up at the kitchen sink, our host was patting the carpet dry with paper towels. I reassured him that my pen would probably be okay. “Don’t worry about it!” he said through a grit-toothed smile. “Don’t worry about it!” (“. . . Just leave!” I could hear him thinking.) –Christopher Caldwell
