From sheets of paper to the battlefields. When history is a stroke of the pen

Almost eighteen thousand comic strips, all drawn with the same nib. For half a century, Charles Schulz drew Snoopy and Charlie Brown with an Esterbrook 914 Radio, and woe betide anyone who tried to make him change it. If it went out of production – he had assured everyone – he would have stopped. So, when that risk became a reality, he bought up all the remaining stock. Schulz was not the only one who never wanted to change his pen. From the mid-1950s, an Esterbrook was also used for signing documents at the White House. That model – as Simon Garfield recounts in "Pen: A Human History" (published by Saggiatore in a translation by Alessandro Vezzoli) – was used by Ike Eisenhower and John Kennedy, and even ended up in the hands of Lyndon Johnson on 2 July 1964 to sign the Civil Rights Act. Except that he didn’t use just one. In a tradition that continues to this day, presidents sign important laws with multiple pens, to be given as gifts to those who helped pass them; in that instance, Johnson got a bit carried away: to write three lines (signature, date and place), he used more than seventy. One pen for every letter, sometimes even for a hyphen. The result, Garfield observes, looked as though it had been written by a man with a blindfold on, or a drunk, or someone who’d only learnt the alphabet two weeks earlier.

Not that it was any easier in the past. For many centuries, to sign one’s name, one had to find an oak tree infested with wasps: the growths in which the insects lay their eggs (known in botany as galls) were the main ingredient of the ink used to write "Hamlet", "Les Misérables" and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Garfield cites a recipe far older than those masterpieces (it dates back to 1483): one had to crush the galls, add ferrous sulphate and gum arabic, and then wait two weeks, stirring every day. However, the drudgery of the inkwell remained: whether made of goose quill or steel, the pen had to be dipped back into it every two words. The most obvious idea then emerged: placing the ink directly inside the pen. So obvious, in fact, that it occurred to several people, and the fountain pen ended up with more than one ‘baptism certificate’: France, 1827; Iowa, 1867; Missouri, three years later.

Perhaps the most enduring founding myth is that of Lewis Edson Waterman, an insurance agent whose pen spilled ink onto an important contract in 1882. Before he could redraft the documents, a mysterious rival snatched the deal from under his nose; so he shut himself away in a relative’s barn and invented the perfect feeding system. A story almost certainly invented after the event, notes Garfield, “in such a sweet, American tone that, over time, even its protagonist would have been led to believe it”. Just over sixty years later, in France, a fountain pen saved a life.

During the Metz offensive in 1944, a rifleman had his windpipe severed by a piece of mortar shrapnel and could no longer breathe. Private Duane N. Kinman, aged nineteen, had nothing but a small pocket knife with him. He took the wounded man’s pen and said to him: “I don’t like doing this, but it’s the only way to save your life”. He then carved a slit, inserted the tip of the fountain pen into the windpipe, and his comrade began to breathe again. “The brand of the pen was not disclosed,” notes Garfield, with the typical regret of a collector. That pen did what every fountain pen should do: let something through, in just the right amount. It is the same definition that Garfield hears from Geoffrey Parker, great-grandson of the founder of that Parker company, who quotes his grandfather Kenneth: the fountain pen, he says, is “a controlled leak”.

And today? The figures read like an obituary: in the United States, 94 per cent of state schools use laptops and tablets for learning. Yet the number of exhibitors at trade fairs is on the rise, and twenty-somethings are returning to Manhattan’s stationery shops. “These days, pens are, in theory, no longer necessary,” says Theodora Helgason, who runs a specialist shop in Nolita, “and I think that’s one of the reasons why people like them now.” Schulz, after all, had realised this early on: rather than mourning them, it’s better to buy things that are about to disappear in bulk.