A Problem: Shared

I now know the true meaning of anarchy.

Forget Bakunin -- all you need to know can be found at a birthday party populated by one-year-old children. Several days ago we took Baby Ink to a gathering called to celebrate the first birthday of one of his friends. I hate parties more than just about anything else in the world -- unless, that is, Elaine Benes is dancing -- so I was not looking forward to the event. Above all, I was dreading having to talk to the other fathers, with whom I have nothing in common but successful sperm. Please don't misunderstand me: I don't think that I'm better than les autres papas; I simply know in advance that they will want to talk sport, drills and hammers, miles per gallon, horsepower, beards, beer, and the safest way to grab a crocodile. None of them ever wants to talk ink.

I decided, then, to hide behind Baby Ink and watch how he interacted with other children of a similar age. (Come to think of it, as I'm supposed to be interested in culture at a professional level, the gifts taken to the party are probably tax-deductible. Note to self: go through the bins to find the receipts.)

It was a feral affair. At the age of twelve months, children have no sense whatever of social convention, of how to behave towards others. Culture is, as Louis Althusser once put it, still lying in wait for them; its rules have yet to sink in and do their work. One of the ways in which this anarchic condition manifests itself, I noticed at the party, is in the blissful absence of the concept of sharing. If another child was playing with a toy that caught the eye of my untamed son, he would simply grab it for himself, enjoy it for a few moments, and then watch as it was snatched away by another toddling animal. At one point, perhaps fearing that a no-holds-barred wrestling bout was on the verge of erupting, one of the mothers (the dads were in the kitchen, huddled around the radio for the latest cricket score) shouted out, 'Share! Share nicely!'

I suppose that I will need before long to sit Baby Ink down, get out a copy of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and talk about why it's good to share. But how will I explain that it's not always appropriate, that sharing is good only sometimes. I find the rules of polite society puzzling at the best of times (I think that this is why I adore Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, as each relentlessly exposes the inexplicably arbitrary nature of social conventions), so I'm probably not the best person to be entrusted to explain the nuances of sharing to an anarchic infant.

I'll need to tell him, for instance, that sharing fountain pens is not the done thing. Personally, I don't really mind if someone trustworthy uses one of my precious objects to jot down a line or two -- I always think of the act in terms of a possible conversion for the church of ink -- but many people seem to view sharing their nibs as unthinkable. (Was Lévi-Strauss wrong? Is the prohibition against 'inkcest', not incest, the universal rule?)

Ink fact, the Inkette's younger sister, the Medinkette (so named because she is training to be a doctor), reported this week that she had noticed precisely this prohibition against sharing nibs during a meeting with one of her tutors. When the moment came for her to make a note of something, the Medinkette made it known that she didn't have a writing instrument with her. Empty-handed, she glanced longingly at the fountain pen held by her teacher, as if to say, 'Could I just borrow that for a second?' The tutor, sensing the bold attempt to cross a forbidden line, asked her if she was aware of the fact that he was holding a fountain pen. Sharing, he implied, was simply not an option.

Sharing, in other words, is sheared in two. (It's no accident that sharing and shearing share a linguistic root.) Any decent human being, the story goes, would share his or her last bottle of water if stranded with another person in the desert. Or, to invoke another scene from Seinfeld, it's polite to spare a square. But when a fountain pen is involved, a violent prohibition against sharing raises its head.

How will I ever explain this strange inkonsistency to Baby Ink? How will I incite him to share, to learn that only wild animals like lions keep everything for themselves ... but also, when ink is inkvolved, inkcite him to keep the lion's share for himself?

Ink not shared with anyone else today: Noodler's Aircorp Blue-Black.

Post-post Post

I realize that I have already entertained you with a post today, dear readers, but the post arrived in the mailroom not long after I had posted, and I was astonished to receive the envelope displayed above. It came from Egypt, where it evidently costs a lot to send a letter to the UK, for the whole of the back of the envelope was covered with stamps, as you can see. If it's going to be that expensive, I'm not sure that I'll carry on awaiting silent Tristero's empire. I have nothing inktelligent to say about the item; knowing that many Ink Quest readers are obsessed by stationery, I simply wanted to share the remarkable object that has left its stamp upon my day.

Oneirink

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

Well, Santa Cruz, actually, but Daphne du Maurier's inkipit sounds so much better. (She also has a lovely inky image in the final paragraph of Rebecca, and colleague and honorary Penquod crew member Daphne has just pointed out to me that the entire novel is filled with references to handwriting.) As I have mentioned in previous entries, I lived in California for a year in the early 1990s. While I have visited Arizona, Illinois, and Nevada since that time, I've never made it back to the 'Sunshine State'. In my dream last night, however, I was back in Santa Cruz, the city that housed me for twelve months. And I was looking for ink. The only problem was that Santa Cruz no longer looked the same.

A little pre-oneiric background is necessary at this point. When I arrived in Santa Cruz in the summer of 1992, the downtown area was something of a building site, as rebuilding in the wake of the devastating Loma Prieta earthquake of late 1989 was very much still underway. Even though nearly three years had passed since the quake (the epicentre of which was just nine miles away from the city), some of the town's shops -- the magnificent Bookshop Santa Cruz, for instance -- were still housed in giant makeshift tents. (I didn't, inkidentally, know the full story of the bookshop's move until I read this newspaper story a few minutes ago.)

I understand from photographs and a recent conversation with a former resident of the city that the Santa Cruz of 2008 looks rather different from the Santa Cruz of 1992-3, and I've often wondered what it would be like to return after so long to the streets that I once knew so well, inevitably to find that my memory is no longer an accurate guide to navigating the town. (One of the clearest markers that time has passed, I think, is that whenever I now picture Broadway, a street along which I walked every day for a year of my life, the traffic is driving on the left; for the first few years after I returned here, it stayed in its correct position on the right-hand side of the road. This must be what Don DeLillo means by 'the film fade of memory' or what, perhaps more appropriately, Nabokov had in mind when he referred to 'terrific skiddings on the frozen road of time'.)

In last night's dream, ink fact, I recognized nothing. I can't remember the finer points of my reverie, but I do recall that I had just a couple of hours in the city before I had to leave for the airport in San Francisco. And I was faced with a dilemma: should I seek out my old haunts, or should I hunt down a pen shop and look for some interesting ink? In typically excessive fashion, I decided that it would be possible to do both.

I was not obsessed by fountain pens during my actual time in Santa Cruz, so I have no idea what, if anything, the city had or has to offer in terms of writing instruments, but in the dream I had a name of an apparently thrilling establishment jotted down on an index card. The street on which the shop stood was familiar to me, and so I set off to search for ink before paying a brief visit to my old house.

This is where the problems began. Because I had been dropped off in the centre of the reconstructed Santa Cruz, absolutely nothing looked familiar to me. The street names were the same -- Front Street, Soquel Avenue, and so on -- but they ran in different directions, looked completely unlike the roads I had known a decade and a half ago, and featured none of the landmarks from the good old days. Even though the Californian sun was beating down, I began to run frantically through the alien streets, shouting deliriously at bewildered residents, 'Ink and my old house. I need to find ink and my old house. In that order. The colours must come first'.

I awoke feeling anxious, exhausted, and melancholic. Anxious because what should have been familiar was unfamiliar. (Freud's uncanny, in other words.) Exhausted because I'd been running in my dream, and my refusal ever to run in real life must have come into collision with the oneiric me and caused some sports-related hormone -- dormant in my body since the early 1970s -- to flex its muscles. Melancholic because I always feel that way when periods of my life that are irretrievably lost feign graspable presence in my dreams.

When I recovered, however, my thoughts quickly turned to a topic that's related to the theme of my ramblings from 30 April, where I wondered about the being able to live parts of a life over again. What would be it be like to return to familiar places that I have not visited since the ink obsession blossomed?

I ended the previous entry with a quote from 'Unpacking My Library', Walter Benjamin's delightful essay about book collecting. Ink fact, the very first Ink Quest missive, from way back in September 2005, also referred to that piece (but to the part where Benjamin discusses how he, an obsessive collector, has become acquainted with strange cities while in search of books). What Benjamin doesn't discuss, however, is the phenomenon of going back to a town which is familiar, but which was explored only before an all-consuming quest developed.

The closest I can come to imagining what such an experience would feel like, I think, is to reflect upon my last few trips to Paris. (Newcomers to Ink Quest can catch up by reading this fairly recent post and then this older one.) On my first few visits to the city, I was not an inkthusiast, and so my list of places to visit did not inklude pen shops. Yes, dear readers, I wasted many hours in the Louvre, climbing the Eiffel Tower, and strolling along the boulevards in awe of le style haut when I should have been on the trail of le stylo. I have been back to Paris perhaps three times since the ink obsession developed, and so these later trips have taken me to parts of the city where I may never have ventured were it not for the inkthusiasm.

But the analogy doesn't quite work, for Paris has never been home to me, and, while I now know my way around fairly well, I'm always discovering new parts of the city. Santa Cruz, however, was my home for a whole year, and I did a lot of wandering around in those twelve months (mainly in search of books, burritos, and coffee). In all that time, I cannot recall seeing a single fountain pen or bottle of ink on sale (because I wasn't looking for them, of course), and I can only remember making one visit to a stationery shop. American readers will probably think that I am making the following anecdote up, but I am telling nothing but the truth when I say that I actually strolled into a stationers -- on Front Street, I think -- and, without remembering to switch to American English, actually asked where the 'rubbers' could be found. (British English must have become even more Americanized in the last fifteen years, as 'eraser' has become much more common, and 'rubber' has started to sheathe itself, so to speak, in the American sense.)

I still don't quite know what I would actually do if I had a limited amount of time to rediscover the city in question. Would I retrace the steps of the former me, or would I simply let the quest for the perfect ink guide the contemporary me? Would I go in search of lost time, or would I blot out the past with new wanderinks?

Inks in use today: Noodler's Aircorp Blue-Black; Noodler's FPN Tulipe Noire.
Ink in use thirteen years ago today: Probably some kind of hideous rollerball gloop.

Also Starring

Extra, extra -- read all about it.

Thanks to a complimentary remark about this blog made by a member of The Fountain Pen Network just over a week ago, the number of people visiting this humble website has rocketed in recent days. I'm surprised that the Blogger server has been able to handle the extra traffic, as it's my understanding that the esoteric Ink Quest has always been served by a small potato-powered abacus in the corner of abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of town.

Before the blog is bought by Warner Brothers and turned into a big-budget action movie, I must quickly fulfill a request made by another member of The Fountain Pen Network who added a comment to the thread that launched a thousand new visits to my site. 'Can you please list all of your pens?', asked this person.

I certainly can, dear reader, and your request suddenly made me realize that pens have, with a few exceptions, always played a fairly minor role in the unfolding epic/tragicomedy/drawing room farce that is Ink Quest. In one sense, this is perfectly understandable -- I'm much more interested in inks than pens -- but where would the former be without the latter? In an attempt to restore the balance, then, I have taken a photograph of all of my fountain pens in their case. (As I'm working on a borrowed PC with skeletal software, I'm afraid that I haven't been able to correct the colour and sharpen the focus using my customary iMac.) Beginning in the top left-hand corner and working downwards, here are the biographies of the forgotten cast members, the marginalized extras, who have offered a home to all of the inks who have played leading roles in the tales of the Penquod:

Parker 61 Custom: The one that started it all. See my posts of 4, 6, and 7 May for the full story.

Two Parker Duofolds: The noisiest writing instruments that I own: the nibs on both of these pens make squeaking noises when in use. As the university library is usually populated by students having barbecues, drumming, and riding motorbikes, this isn't really a problem. For the story behind the red Duofold, see the entry of 13 October 2006.

Two Parker 45s: The black model was bought for something like £3 in a charity shop in Cowbridge. The other (a Flighter?) came free with the red Duofold mentioned above. I know that 45s have a cult following, but I really can't get on with the model.

Parker Vacumatic: A lovely pen, bought for £10 from Cardiff's legendary Jacob's Antiques Market a few years ago. The filling mechanism works well, but the nib is damaged, and I keep forgetting to find someone to repair it.

Conway Stewart 75: Recently rushed into intensive care when the ink sac disintegrated. Still awaiting transplant. Bought from the open-air Walcot Street flea market in Bath.

Conway Stewart 475: The oldest pen in my collection? Bought from a dealer on eBay a few years ago. Polished and fitted with a new sac by the good people at The Writing Desk. Part of the cap has started to fade, but the nib is soft, flexible, and a joy to use.

Levenger True Writer: Acquired for the Penquod in the Levenger store on Michigan Avenue, Chicago, in 2005. While this is a fairly basic pen in mechanical terms, its striking pattern has attracted more comments than any other pen in my collection.

Aurora Hastil: The 'size zero' of the pen world. Worryingly skinny; could do with a few slap-up meals. Achingly modernist. Bought from an eBay dealer a few years ago for something like £30. When I later had problems with the feed, the UK distributor of Aurora products repaired the pen without charge. The woman to whom I spoke on the phone was amazed that I'd even heard of the Hastil. 'We never get asked about that one', she said.

Sailor 1911: Because this has a fine nib (M-F, actually, but Japanese nib grades are renowned for running finer than their Western counterparts), it's almost always used for marking students' essays. Taken to the operating theatre a few years ago when the rubber 'O' ring came apart, fell onto the floor, and was promptly eaten by one of my cats. The UK office of the Sailor company was good enough to post me a small packet of replacement 'O' rings without charge. The pen itself was bought from the Petts Wood branch of Webster's, where Sailor had sent it for me to try out during a short stay in London. I took the train from London Bridge out to the suburbs in the middle of a heatwave, and I felt close to collapse by the time I arrived in Petts Wood. The shop was like an oven, and my hand was too slippery to hold the pen properly. I bought it anyway, and I've never looked back. On reflection, I'm pretty sure that the ink shelf in Webster's was piled high with old boxes of Penman ink. (I didn't know what the packaging looked like at the time.) I could have paid for the pen by purchasing all remaining bottles of this rare ink and selling them on eBay.

Pilot Custom 74: A long, long pen. When placed upright in an open space, it picks up Radio Moscow as clear as day. This writes very nicely, but I find the Pilot converter, with its little floatation device, annoying, so the pen doesn't come out of the case very often. For the full story of its acquisition from Belgium, see these two posts from April 2006.

Sailor Sapporo: In use almost every day. Effortlessly reliable. Equipped with a delightful Music nib, which makes flamboyant, operatic scribbling impossible to avoid. (As if I've ever tried to avoid such a thing.)

Visconti Van Gogh Midi: My travelling pen. The clip can be pulled back and clicked against the cap in a most satisfying manner. Good for signalling 'I'm bored' in Morse code during dull conferences.

Stipula I Castoni: Queen of the castle. Blue Beauty. The most elegant (and ridiculously flamboyant) pen in my collection. The 1.1mm italic nib is thrillingly smooth. Has become a bit of a Howard-Hughes-like creature in recent times, however, as I've become a little scared to take it out of the house. I made myself extremely anxious by taking it into work last week: while writing with it in the library was a joy, I was constantly afraid of dropping it or knocking off the little blue jewel on the end of the clip. Perversely, I spent most of the time pushing the jewel to see if it had come loose. It probably has now.

Lamy Safari: If the Stipula is the Queen of the castle, this is the ox in the field. Cheap, simple, stubborn, and allegedly impervious to nuclear attacks. I bought this over a decade ago, when the limited budget of a graduate student ruled out anything higher up the ladder. Always filled with Noodler's bulletproof Lexington Gray and waiting to address envelopes (its only real purpose in life these days). Never fails to start.

Pelikan M200: Like the Sailor Sapporo, this is one that I use almost every day. As any M200 owner will know, these quietly elegant creatures are gloriously reliable. One of the few pens in my collection that Baby Ink likes to grab for.

Sheaffer Admiral: A pleasant little creature with a sharp nib. Rarely used, though, because the Touchdown filling system both baffles and terrifies me. It is said that failure to follow the instructions correctly results in the death of a small, furry animal somewhere in the world.

Cross Townsend: Shiny. Heavier than a wet elephant. Bought when I was first starting to take an interest in fountain pens. Perfectly reliable, but I wish I'd known at the time that £100 can buy something much nicer than a Cross.

Aurora Talentum: Along with the Sapporo and the M200, this always goes to work with me. Equipped with a lovely italic nib. Miraculously survived being dropped (with the cap posted) during an important meeting at another university last year. On reflection, I think that the weight of the cap meant that the nib was facing upwards when the rest of the pen hit the floor.

Thus ends my hymn to the unsung heroes of Ink Quest. Some of these precious creatures rarely step outside the case in which they are stored, but I'm not worried about this. As Walter Benjamin puts it, in his brilliant essay on book collecting:

Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, ‘And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?' 'Not one-tenth of them. I don't suppose you use your Sèvres china every day?'

Inks in use today: Omas Sepia; Noodler's Walnut.
Pens hovering in the background today: Pelikan M200; Parker 61; Sailor Sapporo; Aurora Talentum.

Laying it on the Line

Some people just don’t know when they’re out of line.

In Spellbound, one of Hitchcock’s early Hollywood films, the sight of parallel lines drives Dr Anthony Edwardes, played by Gregory Peck, into strange psychotic states. It could be marks on a tablecloth or tracks left in the snow -– if they’re lines, you can guarantee that the disturbed doctor is going to freak out.

As I write these lines, dear readers, I’m recovering from two Spellbound-like incidents that have scored their way into my week. First, I was delighted to discover yesterday morning that the university library has just received a new copy of a book that I reported as missing some months ago. I made my way to the appropriate shelf, located the crisp volume, and started to make my way to the issue desk. As I was walking down the stairs, I flicked, out of curiosity, to the copyright page in order to find out precisely when the library catalogued the replacement copy; the stamp read 7 April 2008.

Moments later, however, I nearly fell down the stairs when I noticed that someone had, at some point between the first week of April and the present moment, underlined numerous passages in the book and made many marginal annotations. In ballpoint pen.

The mere sight of these lines drove me into a state of furious psychosis, and not just because I urgently need a clean copy of one of the annotated pieces in the volume. I regularly underline in pencil key sentences in books that are my own property, and some of those texts that I use on a regular professional basis have mini-essays added by my hand to the margins. (Someone once remarked, I think, that the annotations made by Louis Althusser in one of his copies of Marx’s early writings are almost as important as the passages to which they refer. Mine are wholly prosaic, but I do think that a book on readers’ annotations needs to be written. It should have wide margins, of course.) But I will go to my grave believing that annotating -– whether in pen or pencil –- library books is a crime for which people should have the book thrown at them, so to speak. While I’m relieved that I don’t live in a place like Texas, where a malfunctioning windscreen wiper seems to be sufficient to earn the offender a trip to death row, I’d happily see the death sentence restored in Britain for anyone found guilty of defacing library property. (Fountain pen users would get a life sentence with the possibility of parole for good behaviour, of course.)

Enraged by the lines of ballpoint ink, I pointed out the crime to one of the librarians. She shared my pain and fury, but sadly informed me that nothing could be done, as the culprit might have perpetrated the felony in the library itself, without ever actually borrowing the book (and thus leaving a vital clue in the computer system). I considered offering to fund the hiring of a graphologist to compare the offending scrawl with samples of handwriting belonging to all 26000 of the university’s students, but the librarian looked rather busy, and I’d already undoubtedly caused great offence by addressing her in English when she’d just been talking to a colleague in Welsh, so I took my scarred book and left.

I doubt very much that anyone who finds it acceptable to scribble on library books in ballpoint pen is a reader of Ink Quest, but I will none the less say this: if you are reading these lines and have, at some point in the last month or so, wilfully defaced a pristine copy of Writing the Image After Roland Barthes, be it known that your monstrous, unforgivable actions lead me to think of the final verse of Bob Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’ when I picture you dragging your inane plastic writing instrument across the untouched pages.

It’s hard to imagine that yesterday could have gone downhill after this. It did.

When Baby Ink comes home from nursery every evening, he brings with him a little sheet that reports on how his day has unfolded. There are spaces for information about what he has eaten, how his mood has been, which toys he has played with, and so on. (In the latter category, ‘Tea set’ has been ticked every day since he started at the nursery. It’s good to know that he’s inherited my ultra-masculine tendencies -- tendencies, ink fact, that led my colleague Carlos to ask this afternoon, shortly after explaining the meaning of 'Karl' in Old Norse, ‘What exactly would you know about being manly?’)

Yesterday evening, however, the form looked slightly different. In the bottom right-hand corner lurked some strange scribbles. In biro. (They're pictured above.) An explanatory note, penned by one of the assistants, stated that Baby Ink had been helping to complete the paperwork by adding a few lines of his own.

Et tu, Baby Ink?

Will he be treated differently if I now write to the manager of the nursery and ask that he be allowed only to write with a fountain pen and real ink? I remember a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses who were in junior school with me. Whenever any religious passage was to be read out in assembly, they were given the nod and would place their hands over their ears to block out the words of the infidels. Could Baby Ink be permitted to cover his eyes whenever a biro appears in nursery? Would the assistants understand that ink is my religion and that I’m doing my best to raise my son in the Inkish faith? If he must add his own thoughts to his daily report, could I provide a fountain pen for him to use? There are already photos of some of the children on the wall in the feeding area, upon which phrases like ‘No eggs’ and ‘No strawberries’ are written. Could a picture of Baby Ink with the commandment ‘No ballpoints’ be added?

Without my guidance, without my bringing him into line, who knows what will become of the boy? Left to play with biros, left to scribble in the margins with a ballpoint whenever he wants, he will perhaps grow up to be the kind of person who leaves indelible lines in library books. I must act quickly: his future is on the line.

Ink in use today: Noodler’s Walnut; Noodlers FPN Tulipe Noire; Diamine Royal Blue.

Ink That is Solid Melts into Air

Modern at last.

It's not often that I feel ahead of the times or even vaguely up to the minute. Life, I feel, is best lived with little regard for the latest fashion. I don't want a mobile phone that is also a camera, web browser, MP3 player, and portable cinema; I simply need something that will let me ring or text one of the handful of people in my electronic address book. I don't want to update my computer every year, just to keep up with the latest processor speed, resolution, and memory size; as long as I can use Word and access the internet to update Ink Quest, I'm happy. And, of course, I have no interest whatever in hi-tech disposable gel pens with names like Zaxar; I have my fountain pens and bottled inks, thank you very much. I have my back to the future.

On Saturday, however, carrying a fountain pen in my pocket marked me out as a trail-blazing figure of modernity who, as Marx and Engels once put it, melts all that is solid into air. In fact, I was centuries ahead of the times, for my writing instrument was simply too new to handle the ink that sat on the shelf before my eyes. Defenders of fountain pens often fear that a model or a spare part will be phased out, but I was in a world where fountain pens had yet to be phased in.

I was in the gift shop at Tintern Abbey, where we'd taken Baby Ink for the afternoon. (Now that he's found his feet, all he needs to be entertained is a wide open space, towards which he can be pointed, primed, and unleashed. With this in mind, I'm currently looking into holiday accommodation on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.) Honorary Penquod crew member Daphne mentioned to me recently that she'd seen some unusual ink for sale in the medieval ruins, so I couldn't leave without taking a closer look.

Daphne was absolutely right. At the back of the shop I found a display of what was identified as 'medieval ink'. Several colours were on show -- blue, green, yellow, and black, if I remember correctly -- and the labels featured a rather attractive medieval image. The only problem was that nothing on the packaging explained whether or not the ink is suitable for use in fountain pens. As the bottles were positioned next to a stack of quills, I concluded that the fluid was designed for dip pens, and so I left empty-handed.

Selling medieval ink for fountain pens would, of course, be strikingly anachroninkstic. The patient inkthusiasts who laboured within Tintern Abbey's scriptorium would have written with quills, for the sharpened feather, as Joyce Irene Whalley notes in her history of writing implements, 'was to remain the instrument used by nearly all writers, professional or amateur, from the early medieval period until just over one hundred years ago'. (Whalley penned those lines, perhaps with a quill, in 1975.) There is a vast body of literature devoted to the art of creating and preserving a quill. Giovanni Battista Palatino's Libro nuovo d'imparare a scrivere, which dates from 1540, for instance, contains a fascinating passage about the best way to keep a quill clean and why putting it beneath hot ashes is not a good idea.

The Middle Ages knew nothing of what we now call fountain pens, in other words. Tintern's scribes would only have been familiar with ink that remained on the outside of their writing instruments. (Okay, I accept that a small amount would have crept inside the end of the feather, but it wouldn't have lasted long.) Regular dipping was the order of the day. It took quite some time for ink to make its way inside: Whalley reports that a primitive form of fountain pen was developed in the 1720s, but that the real breakthroughs which allowed ink to flow freely from an internal reservoir didn't come until the second half of the nineteenth century.

I've often wondered if ink's gradual creeping towards the interior of writing instruments was its fatal mistake, for the contemporary world is one in which people are so accustomed to having no contact whatever with the fluid that the existence of ink in bottles or -- the horror! -- an inkhorn or inkwell strikes most as risky, shocking, threatening. The liquid could go anywhere! These are precisely the cultural conditions upon which the disposable ballpoint thrives. Your pen has run dry? Don't risk getting your hands dirty by refilling it; just throw it away and buy a new one. You need never come face to face with ink itself.

While exposing myself to fountain pen ink on a daily basis usually marks me out as a nostalgic freak (the Inkette's preferred term), in Tintern Abbey on Saturday afternoon I was impossibly modern with my Pelikan M200 packed close to my heart. The gift shop sold only ink whose primitive formula would have clogged my futuristic writing instrument with troublesome solids. What, I wondered, would the medieval scribes have made of my Pelikan? Would they have embraced it, or would its cold modernity, its easy everydayness, have struck them as the end of the rarefied, sacred, authentic art of inscription? Would my writing instrument have been seen as a writing sinstrument? All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned...

For a few moments before the the grizzling of a tired Baby Ink signalled that the hour of departure had come, I was an avant-garde pioneer with a fountain pen that marked me out as an embodinkment of the future. For once I stood before an array of inks and could touch none. All that is solid in medieval ink made me melt back into the future with empty hands.

Ink in use today: Diamine Washable Blue. (I've been trying to distinguish this colour from Diamine Mediterranean Blue for the last couple of days, but they seem to be virtually identical.)

L'Homme sans Pomme

All working computers are alike; each broken computer is broken in its own way.

All is confusion at Ink Towers, dear readers, for my precious Apple iMac -- ma petite Pomme, comme j'appelle mon Apple -- has broken for the second time this year. I have been forced to write these words on the ugly, clumsy PC that lurks in my office at work, and it's likely, unless I can borrow a laptop from the computer technicians here, that Ink Quest will fall silent, or partially silent, until I can find out what is wrong with mon Mac. (Yes, dear French readers, I realize that 'mon Mac' has decidedly seedy connotations, but I really do feel as if the beautiful white machine has been exploiting me comme un mac in recent months.)

The only moment of brightness in this infuriating, gloomy day is the ink with which I have filled my Sailor Sapporo. Honorary Penquod crew member Anna sent me some weeks ago, along with some magnificent coffee beans, several vials of ink. In a totally uncharacteristic manner, I have been delaying instant gratification and overload of pleasure by opening just one vial per week. This morning it was the turn of Noodler's FPN Tulipe Noire, which turns out to be a delicious, free-flowing member of the burgundy family. I doubt that it will topple Herbin Poussière de Lune from its throne, but it's a stong contender. As long as I have Noire, la vie n'est pas noire.

Inks in use today: Noodler's FPN Tulipe Noire; Diamine Royal Blue.

'I knew these people...'

It’s easy to forget just how good some things are, but it's hard to remember just how some good things are.

I say this because I went to see Paris, Texas at Chapter last night. While it doesn’t have the glorious inky opening of one of Wim Wenders’ later films, Wings of Desire, it had a huge impact on me when I first saw it over twenty years ago. (I’ve tried to reconstruct the precise date when it leapt out at me from a Wenders season on late-night television, but I’m having trouble pinning things down. I think that it was late 1986 or early 1987; I had the soundtrack on tape for my birthday in May of the latter year, so it must have been before that.) I’ve seen Paris, Texas hundreds of times on video and DVD since then (once an obsessive, always an obsessive), but until last night a big-screen encounter had always eluded me.

I have not yet quite recovered from the experience, and I don’t really have words to articulate the event. At first, I felt as if I were a teenager again. As soon as the opening scene began and the sound of Ry Cooder’s slide guitar filled the cinema, I involuntarily left the ravaged grey wasteland of thirty-somethingness and became petit Marcel again, but all the while with my frail, crumbling older self looking on in a state of melancholia and sweeping nostalgia. For a long time I went to bed early and watched Paris, Texas, and those teenage years had suddenly returned to haunt me.

Stranger still, though, was the experience of watching the narrative unfold. I know the plot like the back of my ink-stained hand, but I felt last night as if I were seeing things unseen in every one of the hundreds of previous viewings. It took me a while to understand what was happening, but the pieces of the puzzle soon fell into place. As many of you undoubtedly know, dear readers, Paris, Texas tells the tale of Travis Henderson, a troubled man who disappears into thin air several years before the film begins, leaving behind his wife, Jane, and young son, Hunter. Hunter is adopted in Los Angeles by Travis’ brother, Walt, and his wife, Anne, while Jane flees to Texas. At the beginning of the film, Travis is suddenly found in the Texan wilderness and brought back to California by Walt. Hunter and Travis are reunited and, without informing Walt and Anne, set off for Houston to find Jane. The film ends with mother and son embracing each other in a hotel room, while Travis drives off alone into the night.

When I first saw Paris, Texas, and when I watched it repeatedly throughout my teenage years, what appealed to me were the beautifully photographed images of American streets, landscapes, road signs, and buildings. (I have posted a still of one of my favourite moments above.) All I wanted at the time was to escape from the smallness -- in every sense of the term -- of South Wales. And I wanted to escape to the American spaces of Wenders’ film. When I finally did, in 1992, everything I saw around me in California looked like something out of Paris, Texas. Even now, a couple of decades on, I cannot visit the United States without seeing the cities and, above all, the open spaces through the lens of Paris, Texas. (This may, of course, simply because no one is better than Wim Wenders at capturing what American space looks like to European eyes.)

Last night, however, I barely noticed the images that so seduced my younger self; all of my attention was focussed on the relationship between Hunter and Travis. I gradually understood what was happening: I have not seen the film for a couple of years, which means that I was not yet the father of Baby Ink when I last watched Paris, Texas. The person who sat overwhelmed in the cinema last night was not the person who first fell in love over twenty years ago with the image posted above. Only the still is still the same.

Don’t worry, dear readers: Ink Quest is not about to get all sentimental and lost in moist-eyed mysticism about the miracle of life. This remains an inhuman realm of cold, misanthropic misery, and Larry David's golden rule for Seinfeld -- 'No hugs, no lessons' -- will always be the mantra of this blog. I have told you about my viewing of Paris, Texas simply because ink lies at the end of the tale.

When I got back from the cinema and prepared my pens for today's spell in the basement of the library, I found myself instinctively reaching for a colour that I have not used for some time: Omas Sepia. The ink, moreover, has decidedly nostalgic significance, for it was the mythical colour -- the Great Brown Whale -- with which Ink Quest was fascinated when it began in 2005. I was, in other words, filling my pen with the origin, the shade that launched a thousand ships, just as, in Wenders' film, Travis buys a vacant lot in Paris, Texas, because he thinks that his life can be traced back to that particular place, where he was apparently conceived.

After my brush with Time in the cinema, I was relieved to see that Omas Sepia still looks the same, still flows beautifully, still shades delicately. Paris, Texas may no longer be the film that I once knew, but the elusive ink from Bologna, Italy, stands firm and offers something unchanging to which to cling when all other sands have shifted. I can cope with an existential trauma, but I don't think I could handle an inksistential crisis.

Ink in use today: Omas Sepia.

A Study in Purple

It was just another day at the Inkterton Detective Agency. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved, and sober, and I didn't care who knew it.

In Camera Lucida -- a sad, beautiful book about photography, loss, and mourning –- my great hero Roland Barthes recounts an incident where he suddenly found himself looking at a photograph of which he was the subject. He could, he notes, remember nothing about the scene depicted –- what he was doing, where he was, and so on -– but, he concludes, the moment must really have happened, for it had been captured on film. The image is proof of the event.

I had a somewhat similar experience yesterday, dear readers, but at the heart of the mystery lay ink. (As I have noted in previous entries, Roland Barthes was obsessed by ink and fountain pens, and once confessed to having bought sixteen bottles in a single afternoon; he would, therefore, probably appreciate reading about my inkident if he were still alive.)

Convinced that a day in the library would be more productive than one spent trying to write at home –- where an espresso maker, a large collection of ink, and my copy of Fountain Pens of the World constantly conspire to distract me –- I retired to the basement of the university’s esteemed house of knowledge and managed to scratch out several pages of an academic book that no one will ever read. Before going home, I called into my office to file away my work. As I was doing so, I came across a sheet of notes written in a rich purple-ish/aubergine-ish ink. The handwriting was unmistakably mine, the subject matter was familiar to me, and the date at the top of the page – 13/2/08 – was the time at which I was working on the topic to which the notes referred. I knew straight away, in other words, that I was the author of the lines.

The ink itself, however, was a complete mystery. At first I thought that it was Noodler’s Violet, but I quickly realized that I didn’t acquire a bottle of that colour until my journey to Montréal in late March. I ran through the other suspects, mentally reconstructing the contents of my overcrowded ink box. Private Reserve Burgundy Mist? No, the words on the page were too dark. Besides, I didn’t come to own that ink until my Paris trip a week or so after 13 February. Rohrer and Klinger Alt Bordeaux? Again, too dark. Caran d’Ache Storm? Hmm, could be, I thought ... before I remembered that I don’t actually own that particular colour (which is not to say that I haven’t looked longingly from afar).

I have since been through every bottle, vial, and cartridge in my collection, and I simply cannot work out which colour I was writing with on 13 February. I have also checked the little Clairefontaine notebook (the Book of Ink) in which I keep written samples of each colour with which I fill a pen, and I’ve found nothing. Honorary Penquod crew member Daphne came up with a brilliant idea when I stuck my head around her neighbouring office door this afternoon to report on the inkident: why not check Ink Quest itself to see if an entry from, or close to, 13 February identified the colour? (I always sign off by noting the ink or inks in use on that particular day, of course.) This stroke of genius came to nothing, though, for I remembered as soon as I loaded the blog that my iMac was out of service for some time during the crucial month, which led to Ink Quest falling silent betweeen 8 and 20 February.

It is clear, dear readers, that I no longer have control over my inks. I now possess so many colours that I have lost the ability to remember all of their names (and even, it would seem, where some of the bottles are stored). The autistically ordered world of the Penquod is imploding. It’s inktropy!

Any sane person would probably take this inkident as a sign that enough is enough, that the compulsive, impulsive purchase of ink has to stop. I, however, decided to push on, to exploit the crisis. (When faced with difficult situations, I usually, as I have noted in the past, ask ‘What would Cary Grant do?’, but I appear to have turned to Lenin on this occasion.)

Yes, I bought more ink. I didn’t mean to; it just happened. As I was walking back to the railway station after the inkounter with the mysterious sheet of notes, I called into my local pen shop to buy a new Clairefontaine notepad. As soon as I entered the store, however, I was distracted by a special display of bottled Diamine inks in a part of the shop where Diamine inks have never previously stood. Strangely, they were all reduced to just £1. Before this remarkable bargain could fully register, I spotted that the shelves where Diamine colours usually dwell were groaning beneath the weight of curious little bottles that I did not recognize. Knocking other customers out of the way (Seinfeld fans should picture George Costanza fleeing from the children’s party when fire breaks out at this point), I bounded over ... and found myself face to face with the new Diamine bottles.

True inkthusiasts will probably remember the recent announcement about the company’s decision to start selling small plastic containers of its lovely inks. These aren’t replacing the elegant 80ml glass containers, if I understand things correctly, but are taking over from the old glass 28.4ml bottles. (Indeed, all of the inks reduced to £1 in the shop were in the latter.) While I’m not particularly fond of ink in plastic containers, the sheer novelty (not to mention cuteness) of the little objects on the shelf meant that I just had to buy one. (So that you can see how the bottle measures up to a full-size Diamine and a Noodler’s container, I’ve posted an identity-parade-style line-up above.) The only problem was that the shop was on the verge of closing, so I realized that my choice was going to have to be a quick, spontaneous one. (Weeks of research usually go into such things.) I scanned the dozens of colours, desperately trying to remember what I do and don’t already own. My eyes eventually settled upon Mediterranean Blue.

The shade, it transpires, is too turquoise for my taste – I think that I actually had Sapphire Blue in mind – so it’s unlikely ever to find its way into regular circulation on the deck of the Penquod. Having said that, in the light of the inkident with which I began this entry, I may simply forget that I own the colour until I stumble star-struck upon it several years from now and suddenly discover that Diamine Mediterranean Blue floats my boat.

Inks in use today: Herbin Café des Iles; Diamine Mediterranean Blue.

The Man Without a Past

And then the trail went cold.

After writing yesterday's brief Ink Quest entry, I posted a query about dating my Parker 61 over at The Fountain Pen Network. I soon received a reply which informed me that the mark on the cap is not, contrary to my assumptions, a date code; it merely signifies that one tenth of the weight of the cap shell is 12 carat rolled gold. The respondent went on to add that there is not, as far as he knows, a way of dating a Parker 61. One thing that might narrow the date range down a little, he noted, is the width and style of the gold ring between the section and the barrel: later models had a slightly wider band with a 'V' groove.

My 61 sports a ring exactly like this, so it's evidently a later model. Beyond that, though, it's hard to be precise. A little more research (courtesy of the Book of Books) leads me to believe that my pen was produced between 1966 (when, according to Andreas Lambrou, the 61 Custom model was launched) and 1969 (when the capillary filling system was, as I noted in yesterday's post, discontinued).

The real mystery, though, concerns the year in which my grandfather actually purchased the pen. As I have already related, I was always told that he left it to me -- unused -- when he died in 1974. Until the last few days, I assumed that he bought it in or around 1974, but that is now much less of a given. The possibilities, as I see them, are as follows:

1. The pen was bought in or around 1974, but was 'new old stock' that had been sitting on the shelf of the shop for several years. If my grandfather bought the 61 from the anachronistic little stationery shop that I discussed in my entry of 30 April, this is not an unlikely explanation. What I remember -- albeit from the 1970s and 1980s -- of that store is shelves filled with dusty, old-fashioned items.

2. The pen was acquired by my grandfather at some point between 1966 and 1969, but not with me in mind. It then sat in a drawer somewhere until I was born in the early 1970s, at which point it was accidentally discovered and economically transformed into 'my' special 61. (This would mean, of course, that the phenomenon of 'regifting' was invented by my family, not by Seinfeld.)

3. The pen was acquired by my grandfather at some point between 1966 and 1969 as part of his office supplies. As I believe I mentioned several years ago in Ink Quest, my mother's father was a co-owner of an auction company which dealt mainly in farm animals in the part of the Welsh borderlands where I grew up. After his death, my grandmother sold her share of the business, but for some reason inherited a huge amount of stationery from the office. I remember from my early years a seductive cupboard filled with boxes of pencils, reams of foolscap paper, and sets of baffling drawing instruments. My grandfather clearly knew how to stock (or overstock) an office's stationery cupboard. What if, in addition to the items listed in the previous sentence, he also had a stack of spare 61s for his employees, one of which is now in my possession? This is a little unlikely, particularly because the disposable ballpoint had become the (infinitely cheaper) norm by the mid-late 1960s, but perhaps my love of stationery and fountain pens is a genetic inkheritance. Maybe my grandfather started the ink quest and the war against the biro long before I was born.

4. I am not who I think I am. What if everything I have ever believed about myself were false? What if I am actually several years older than stated on my birth certificate, passport, driving licence, and so on? (This would explain the wrinkles and ever-growing sense of mortality, at least.) What if the 61 were actually given to me on my second birthday in, say, 1967? What if the name by which I am called were really an alias? What if my life to date has been unknowingly spent working deep under cover for some shadowy organization that is based in a bunker miles beneath a desert? What if the real story of my life -- my true identity -- were written in invisible ink?

Needless to say, my persecution complex and love of conspiracy theories draws me to this fourth account. I've always been fascinated by stories of people who turn up at police stations and claim that they have no idea who they are, how they got there, and so on. What really inkterests me, I think, is the fact that all the documents usually employed to guarantee a name, a date of birth, and a nationality have no absolute connection to the body of the individual who carries them. There is nothing inside me that confirms my name or where and when I was born. And as I can remember neither being named nor being born, I've always had to take other people's word for it when they have told me my name (and taught me to say it) and shown me my birth certificate. Identity comes from outside, from elsewhere.

At the same time, I've always been drawn to the fantasy of being without a name, a history, a birth certificate, a sense of identity. Wouldn't being blank be better? Wouldn't floating free from culture be so much easier? And do I finally have the chance to flee? Crucial facts about my past elude me, and, as J.M. Coetzee's Youth puts it, '[w]ithout facts, there is no history'. Has the study of my fountain pen finally opened up a gap in my being, a way out of myself? For sale: one identity. Unwanted gift. One careful owner. Buyer collects.

I ink, therefore I am ... but who am I? This is clearly a job for the Inkterton Detective Agency.

Inks in use today: Diamine Royal Blue; Herbin Poussière de Lune.

The Plot Thickens...

No need for the loupe.

After posting Sunday's ramble, it occurred to me that my digital camera has a powerful zoom function, so I now have, as you can see, a photograph of the cryptic marking on the cap of my Parker 61. The only problem is that I can't decode the message. To complicate matters, an internet search for information about date codes used on 61s led me to a page on Richard Binder's website about the history of the pen. While the article doesn't explain the mysteries of the coding system, it does reveal that capillary fillers -- such as the one found in my 61 -- were phased out in 1969. In other words, my heirloom cannot have been made in 1974; it must, rather, date from 1969 or earlier, which makes it older than I am. How much older, though, remains a mystery, for I have not yet managed to find a website that will help me to crack the code. Perhaps an enquiry at the Fountain Pen Network will lead me to the truth. Until then, my identity remains inkomplete...

Ink in use today: Waterman Blue-Black.

The Book of Books

All hail the Book of Books.

I can often be heard complaining about the state of libraries (both public and university) in the United Kingdom. Books seem to matter less and less in such places with each passing year; what really counts these days is endless space for banks of computers with internet access, DVDs, and CDs. Paper space, the logic runs, must be sacrificed so that people can wander in and play around on Facebook or borrow an eighteen-hour boxset of a sub-literate ITV drama. Push back the books. Sell them off. Burn them in public. Rename all libraries resource centres.

As an old-fashioned kind of person (and one much more likely, furthermore, to sign up for Hatebook, the 'anti-social utility that disconnects you from the things YOU HATE', than Facebook), I've always opposed such developments and insisted that libraries are -- the horror! -- for books. I'm not élitist about what goes on the shelves -- there's room for Dostoyevsky and Barbara Cartland in my crazy utopian scheme -- as long as what goes on the shelves is made of pages. (I will, of course, make an exception when it comes to 'talking books' for those with visual impairments.)

As of several days ago, however, I no longer see the need for libraries, for I received as a birthday gift from Baby Ink a copy of Andreas Lambrou's Fountain Pens of the World. This magnificent, epic, weighty tome renders every other text written to date and every text that has yet to be written utterly irrelevant. It is, quite literally, the only book that anyone could ever need. It is the Book of Books, 'an absolute book [...] that includes the others like a Platonic archetype, an object whose virtues are not diminished by the passage of time', 'the catalogue of catalogues' (Jorge Luis Borges).

It is pointless for me to attempt to do justice to the Book of Books here. It is it. I will, therefore, offer just one short account of the kind of thing that can happen when you open and dip into this bottomless, peerless text.

After writing the previous Ink Quest entry, I thought that it would be appropriate to ink up for a few days' use the Parker 61 fountain pen that came into my possession with the death of my maternal grandfather in 1974. (What I perhaps didn't make clear in Wednesday's post was that I was not, in 1974, yet at the age where I could write, and I would -- if Baby Ink is anything to go by -- have been prone to chewing or smashing everything placed into my little hand at the time. The pen must have been kept out of my reach for some years, then, but I simply cannot remember when it was handed over to me. I know that I was given a Parker 25 fountain pen and pencil set for use in school circa 1979, but where was the 61 at this point?)

The Book of Books devotes dozens of lavishly illustrated pages to the history of Parker pens, so I have been able to identify the type of 61 that I am using to write these words. Of the many variants displayed in the pages of Fountain Pens of the World, my heirloom most resembles a turquoise model shown on p. 205 and identified as a 61 Custom from c. 1975. The observant among you will have immediately noticed something rather odd: my grandfather had died and handed down the 61 by 1975. This is why I merely say that the turquoise 61 Custom is the model that 'most resembles' mine; the match is not perfect. Crucially, the distinctive inlay just above the nib of the pen in the Book of Books takes the form of half an arrow; my 61, meanwhile, sports a whole arrow. (Owners of the Book of Books can flick back to p. 95 at this point and consult pen number 17, a mid-1950s 61 Legacy, to see what I mean about the different inlays.)

This discovery has led me to wonder about precisely when my grandfather bought the 61 that now rests comfortably in my hand. It couldn't have been in 1975, but when was it? If I remember correctly, he died quite suddenly, but had suffered a stroke some time beforehand. The pen was unused when I received it -- it still bore chalkmarks and came in a pristine box (displayed above, along with the pen itself, on top of the Book of Books) -- so did he purchase it in 1974, sensing that the end was close? When Lambrou dates the turquoise model that closely resembles my maroon 61 to 'c. 1975', how circa is circa?

The solution to this inky mystery is frustratingly close, dear readers. The cap of my heirloom bears a minute stamp that reveals what I presume to be, in the form of Parker's special coding system, the date of manufacture. I can see the mark, but my eyesight -- ruined, ironically, by years spent hunched over books in libraries that have long since become resource centres -- is not good enough to discern the details, and I do not own a magnifying glass. The truth, in other words, is right in front of my eyes, but my eyes just aren't up to the job.

I am clearly in need of a loupe, but where in a small Welsh seaside town on a Sunday evening is a boy to find such a thing? (Flabby drunk people, non-conformists on their way back from worship in their Sunday best, convenience stores filled with pasties and Sunny Delight -- throw a rock in the air and you'll hit all of these things, but there's not a loupe in sight.) To make matters worse, tomorrow is May Day bank holiday, so most of the shops in Ink Town will be closed. I will, therefore, have to wait until Tuesday before I can visit the jeweller and ask if I can use a loupe to inspect the cap of my pen. (Is there an accepted etiquette in such situations? Should I offer to rent the object for five minutes? Will the jeweller let me actually handle the loupe, or would that be like drinking from another person's bottle of water? Are eyes classed as more or less intimate than the mouth? The latter is involved in kissing, yes, but the former is the window to the soul. Is it true that you can catch lupus from a loupe? This is all way outside my comfort zone. I need to know the rules of engagement.)

As you can see, Fountain Pens of the World has opened up a baffling mystery in my life. My family history and personal past teeter on the edge of implosion. It is told that the Book of Books contains the answers to all of life's questions, but I must first learn to read the code.

Ink in use today: Waterman Blue-Black. (I like to keep things simple and unsaturated in my 61. The mere thought of trying to clean, say, a Private Reserve ink out of the capillary filler is just too much to bear.)