Pens in Literature

[ashbridg]

The protagonist, a nine year old runaway, feels threatened by social workers in a bus station when one of them displays some papers and a fountain pen. The boy describes them:

 

“[T]here was two ladies in fur coats and their faces already painted. But they still looked like they had got up in a hurry and they still never liked it, a old one and a young one, looking down at me.”

 

A few paragraphs later:

 

“The young one set down on a bench by me and opened a hand satchel and taken out a artermatic writing pen and some papers.”

 

Later that morning the boy is less concerned when he meets another woman who looks similar but carries no pen or papers:

 

“[A]nd then another lady came in, old, too, in a fur coat, too, but she smelled all right, she never had no artermatic writing pen nor no case history neither.”

 

Faulkner uses the fountain pen as a symbol of oppressive authority to intimidate a runaway boy. The woman brandishing the pen interferes with the youngster’s plans, while the pen-less lady feeds him dinner and gives him a ride in an automobile. What are some other instances of fountain pens in literature?

 

Ashby

[Julio]

Nice. Thank you for sharing. We should have more of this type of posting rather than the mundate.

[jBeckett]

From the Discworld universe, Olaf Quimby II was killed by a poet while testing the phrase "the pen is mightier than the sword". Due to his death the axiom was officially changed to include "only if the sword is very very small and the pen is very very sharp.".

 

A character in Stephen King's Cell is killed by a fountain pen.

 

Seems I can only think of terrible examples. Yours was much better.

[Oggie]

In The Innocent by Ian McEwan, at the beginning of chapter three:

"Twenty minutes later he was sitting at the dining room table filling his fountain pen. He wiped the nib with a rag he kept for the purpose. He squared a sheet of paper in front of him."

[larsbj]

[... ]What are some other instances of fountain pens in literature?

 

Ashby

I just finished Patti Smiths autobiography (or is it a biography of Robert Meplethorp?), and in the first paragraph she refers to picking up her fountain pen and starting to write the biography. Very nice. And a very interesting book from a great artist, well worth reading.

[jaysongo]

I just came across this topic and thought I'd add some fountain pen references I've read in the past few months.


"M. gazed into space for perhaps five minutes. Then he reached for his pen and, in green ink, scrawled the word Action? followed by the italic, authoritative M."

- Ian Fleming, "The Man With the Golden Gun"

"Then I saw the letter on the dressing table and I went and sat on the bed and read it. It was written on motel paper from the writing desk. The writing was very clear and even, and he had used a real pen and not a ball-point."

- Ian Fleming, "The Spy Who Loved Me"

"He straightened his Mont Blanc fountain pen, which was slightly askew on his desk, and glanced at his Breitling watch again...Then he picked up his fountain pen anyway and threw it at him. He aimed for the man’s eyes, but missed. After Aalbaek’s thin corpus had closed the door behind him, Ulrik picked up the Mont Blanc and put it in his pocket. 'Finders keepers,' he said, laughing."

- Jussi Adler-Olsen, "The Absent One"

"I participated in a mystery authors panel at the New York Public Library recently, and, as usual, it was the opening question. An aspiring novelist in the front row wanted to know about my habits. Did I write in the morning or evening? Use a pen or a keyboard? Auto spellcheck on or off? I gave my standard answer: I don’t have any habits. In fact, as I sit here now at dawn’s first light, filling my Hemingway Montblanc (medium nib) with Noodler’s Baystate Blue, a stack of thirty crisp, blank, annotation-ruled, twenty-two-pound Levenger sheets ready on my slant-angle editor’s desk, I’ve got to ask, where does a question like that even come from?"

- Richard Castle, "Frozen Heat"


The last one really gets me. I know it's a fictional person with a fictionalized pen, but the idea of Baystate Blue in a Hemingway makes me wince.

[aderoy]

A bit of a sidestep: an author who uses fountain pens for writing, will using one for his next novel.

 

Michael Jecks

http://www.michaeljecks.co.uk/newsletter/index.html

 

Bit of discussion on MTN/Diaries etc.

http://writerlywitterings.com/2015/11/30/diaries-and-paper/

 

Having trouble finding his books in the local stores, must order online which is sad.

[dogpoet]

One that has always stuck in my mind is from Donna Tart's The Secret History. The university lecturer who has gathered a private clade of students keep a mug full of identical Mont Blancs on his desk, which is taking ostentation to a whole new level...

[LuckyKate]

I just finished Patti Smiths autobiography (or is it a biography of Robert Meplethorp?), and in the first paragraph she refers to picking up her fountain pen and starting to write the biography. Very nice. And a very interesting book from a great artist, well worth reading.

 

Patti Smith is a favorite of mine. I just finished M Train. In this book, she visits the graves of several poets and writers, leaving a token at each one. When she visits Sylvia Plath's grave she writes that all she has with her is her favorite pen, a white Montblanc Mozart, which she loves too much to relinquish. In other spots in the book she mentions that she has a lovely fountain pen collection but also writes with uni-balls.

[trun4rth]

From my favorite author ever:

 

“I also felt guilty about the three pens I'd stolen, but only for a second. And since there was no convenient way to give them back, I stole a bottle of ink before I left.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

[jmccarty3]

If any of you are interested in Sherlock Holmes, there are hundreds of so-called pastiches that are written in the same style as the original stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose birthday happens to be today.

 

One of these stories, The Case of Indelible Evidence, by Dick Gillman, incorporates a Conklin Crescent Filler as the murder weapon. It is included in an anthology, the MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories--Part XXIV, available on Amazon.

[inkstainedruth]

Pens and ink figure in one of the Agatha Christie stories about her detective Hercule Poirot.  The plot involves some students in a youth hostel, run by Miss Lemon's sister, where some petty thefts have taken place.  A girl confesses to being a kleptomaniac and then is found dead -- but because she needed to refill a pen with ink, and didn't want to run to the store to buy a bottle of Quink (!), she refills with someone else's green ink.  Only Poirot realizes that the "suicide note" she's supposed left is NOT written in green -- so the note was clearly written by someone else...  and therefore it's actually a murder....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[sandy101]

On 12/19/2015 at 6:42 PM, dogpoet said:

keep a mug full of identical Mont Blancs on his desk, which is taking ostentation to a whole new level..

A rank amateur. One has a mug of Montblancs all of the same colour and a mug of Parker P51s in all the different colours.

[AAAndrew]

The earliest mention of a steel pen I've found in a novel was in the book "Paul Clifford" by Edward Bulwer Lytton. (of the "It was a dark and stormy night" fame, which opened this very book). 

 

It is mentioned during a particularly daring highway robbery. Basically, Paul, the robber, ignores the victim's attempt at shooting him, and instead hands him a pen and ink and demands the victim write out a check. 

 

[welch]

A few years ago -- before Covid -- I helped AAAndrew research the Washington Medallion Pen Company by going to the NYC legal archives and photographing several briefs and judgments. I had my hands on actual documents from the late 1850s and mid 1860s, all written onto what we would still see as legal paper. Each was written in a precise "hand" that looked exactly like the Palmer (Or Zaner-Blauser) Method characters I was taught in elementary school. The characters were as regular as if they had been printed by a typewriter. 

 

Of course, I thought. Each document was produced by a scrivener. Suggesting, of course, the most famous scrivener in American literature:

 

Bartleby, The Scrivener

A STORY OF WALL-STREET.

by Herman Melville

 

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11231/pg11231-images.html

[AAAndrew]

3 hours ago, welch said:

A few years ago -- before Covid -- I helped AAAndrew research the Washington Medallion Pen Company by going to the NYC legal archives and photographing several briefs and judgments. I had my hands on actual documents from the late 1850s and mid 1860s, all written onto what we would still see as legal paper. Each was written in a precise "hand" that looked exactly like the Palmer (Or Zaner-Blauser) Method characters I was taught in elementary school. The characters were as regular as if they had been printed by a typewriter. 

...

 

And because of your help I was able to write this article. Thanks again!  And here's one of the example @welch is talking about. 

 

2022-3 WashingtonMedallion 2.pdf