I have a childhood penchant of curating fountain pens. My father used to use fountain pens a lot when I was a kid and I have this childhood evocation kindled anytime I spot a classical fountain pen. Yesterday, I happened to see a well-made video on fountain pens on Gentleman’s Gazette website. The pen in the photographs here is a pen that my father used to write with during my childhood days. Recently, I started using it as my daily writing instrument and favors it over ballpoints. I do a lot of hand sketches and other technical illustrations as a part of my work and overall, fountain pens are found to be a better experience. If we ponder about it, we are living in a world we rarely write something with our hand and in this age, all of us have the same handwriting with fixed type sets in a Whatsapp message or an email. I don’t know if I’m bitten by the traditionalist bug, but in general, these days I have a feeling to have a signature and a personality to subtle things and that includes the way we pen ideas as well. Flora Watkins writes,
“Elegant, ornate and adaptable to each individual hand, nothing beats writing with a fountain pen“..Memories of inky fingers and smudged exercise books meant that the fountain pen fell out of favour for decades. However, the modern heritage pens that discerning customers seek out today are a far cry from the scratchy implements of the older generation’s schooldays.
“A pen transmits the voice of the soul.”
― Fennel Hudson, A Writer’s Year – Fennel’s Journal – No. 3
