The fountain pen occupied a prominent place in history—until the ballpoint came along.

No one knows quite how to account for the well-established shops in Vancouver, Toronto and other cities that deal exclusively in fountain pens and fine fountain-pen accessories. Looking at their merchandise, which begins with Sheaffer products and hurries up the price scale to those by Cartier and Visconti, one is reminded of the concurrent vogue in places dealing in hand-rolled cigars. Are such businesses dens of conservatism, catering to certain people’s nostalgia for plutocracy? Or are they a sign of resistance to the accelerating pace of greedy modern life? Or merely a mild attempt to pretty up the surface of our daily routines without altering the substance? As a non-smoker, I can’t speak to expensive cigars. But as a writer of sorts, I certainly can’t deny that the heft of a fountain pen, or perhaps the way the ink flow seems to adjust itself to the speed of one’s thoughts, restores a bit of dignity, a note of quiet elegance, to the act of composing sentences. Yet I’m also sure that fountain pens, some of which cost thousands of dollars, aren’t a protest against materialism. Rather, they’re a protest against the ballpoint—which is to say against the headlong rush toward awful efficiency.

In 1884, the fountain pen, with its self-sustaining ink-bag or reservoir, the work of L.E. Waterman of New York, made the hand-dipped pen obsolescent. The date seems perfect if you think about it: fountain-pen technology must of course be contemporary with the