Essay/Review

Learning What I Like (and My First Vintage Pen)

Posted on by Shawn Mihalik
Myk Daigle helps me find my first vintage pen.

At the end of the first day of last year’s California Pen Show, because I had about $600 left in my budget for the weekend, I impulse-bought a Sailor Cylint. Listen: it’s a fine pen. Really. It’s shiny, sleek, classy, very black. It feels good in the hand. It has a nice ionized 21k gold nib. It writes well.

And I’ve regretted buying it ever since.

While it’s a perfectly good pen, it turns out it’s not for me. Two years into this hobby, I’m finally accepting that I’m not a Sailor guy. I’ve bought three very different Sailors now, and I never use any of them (in fact, I’m looking to sell them all).

At that same show, I bought a Montblanc 146 in Glacier Blue, and I love it. For months, I used it nearly every day. The only reason I’ve been using it less the last few months is because late last year I went to the Wes Anderson-designed Montblanc pop-up on Rodeo Drive and bought an 100th Anniversary Origins Edition 149, which I use all the time, and which was the only pen I bought between February of last year and February of this year. Turns out, I’m a Montblanc guy, not a Sailor guy. Trust me: my wallet wishes it were the other way.

It’s not because I personally find it boring that I’ve for the last year regretted purchasing the Sailor Cylint, though. I’ve regretted it because I bought it on the first day of the three-day show, and on the last day of the show, I fell in love with another pen. I don’t remember now exactly what it was, but it was red and vintage and restored by the wonderful Myk Daigle, who had added to it a handmade sterling silver snake clip made by Andy Beliveau (who has no web presence). Man, I wanted that pen. I kept returning to Myk’s booth to stare at it, hold it, write with it. But it was $300, and I had nothing left in the budget—because I had impulse-bought a pen I would go on to not love.

Fast-forward to this year’s California Pen Show just this past weekend. I had a much smaller budget than I did last year: about $300. After first spotting, trying out, and then mourning one of my grail pens (the Montblanc Homage to Victor Hugo, which having tried in person I now know I do really like and will acquire someday), I made a beeline for Myk Daigle’s booth. I’m not sure whether Myk remembered me, but he remembered the pen I didn’t buy last year. Sure enough, that pen was gone. No surprise there. But wait! He did have one—and only one—Andy Beliveau clip with him. Not a snake, but a beautiful mermaid.

Instantly, this mermaid clip called to me even more strongly than the snake clip had. Snakes and pens go hand in hand, and they’re pretty easy to find. But mermaids?! Listen: I know something can’t be more unique on account of “unique” being an absolute adjective, but in a way, this mermaid clip is even more unique than the snake clip, because the snake clip, being handmade, was unique, while the mermaid clip is both unique and a rare thing to see on a pen. End of grammar digression.

Needless to say, I was going to buy that clip. All it needed was a pen to live on.

So Myk helped me find my first truly vintage pen (I have a couple of pens that were made in the 1980s), a Conklin Crescent Filler. After doing some research, I’ve been able to narrow down the manufacturing period to sometime between 1913 and 1920. This pen is over 100 years old! And since it was just recently restored by Myk, it of course writes beautifully, with a lovely flexible gold nib that, as a lefty overwriter, I can unfortunately take only limited advantage of.

The clip cost me $60, the pen was $220, and I was able to get a bottle of Waterman Tender Purple and a pack of Galen pocket notebooks with my remaining cash (okay, I went like $10 over budget, all told).

I wasn’t sure I was going to be a vintage pen guy. I like big, girthy pens, and vintage pens are rarely if ever those. I also like modern pens that have a sleek, classy look, like my Pilot Vanishing Point and my 100th Anniversary 149. But it turns out I don’t like all sleek, classy, modern pens—sorry, Sailor—and I should not impulse-buy them. It also turns out that I do like vintage pens—or at least, I like this one. A lot. So far, I can hardly put it down.

And I have a feeling my vintage pen journey is just beginning.

California Pen Show selfie with my partner.
Link

The Field Notes Thing — 512 Pixels

Posted on by Patrick Rhone

The Field Notes Thing — 512 Pixels

At the end of every year, I publish a photo on Instagram cataloging the Field Notes notebooks I used over the previous 12 months. Here is the most recent picture.

Every year, I get questions about this. I wrote a bit about the topic in 2014, but I thought I’d do it again here. So, uhhhh, here’s an FAQ.

Super fascinating.Lots of interesting workflow details. I love getting a look into what and how other people do things.

Uncategorized

One New Desk, Three Modes

Posted on by Shawn Mihalik

For the last few years, I’ve worked at a simple white Amazon Basics sit-stand desk. When I bought it, I was still deeply into the whole “minimalist” aesthetic, but as I renewed my love for fountain pens and paper, and as I started establishing firmer boundaries between time spent offline and online, I  began to desire a desk that better embodied this way of doing things. So for the last year or so, I’ve been keeping an eye out for an antique writing desk.

A couple weeks ago, I finally found one for a great price at a yard sale in Burbank. My partner and I were driving past, and I just happened to spot it out of the corner of my eye. It’s beautiful, and it fits my workspace in our new apartment perfectly. I’ve come to think of it as having three modes: closed, analogue, and digital.

When it’s closed, it looks like this:

Analogue mode is where I prefer to spend most of my time—journaling, reading, hand handwriting fiction. That looks like this:

Alas, I can’t spend all my time in analogue mode. I still need to log on to the Internet, check my email, and do research. I’ve also been writing screenplays and scripts lately (in a surprising career shift), and the bulk of that work needs to be done in screenwriting software, like Scrivener, rather than by hand. Digital mode looks like this:

That’s right, I’m using an Apple Vision Pro as my main computer these days (I also use it to watch movies regularly; I’m currently working my way through every film in Quentein Tarantino’s book Cinema Speculation).

When I’m working, I see something like this:

I have an iPad Pro for when I need to do digital work on the go, but for the most part, I work at this desk, and I love how the Vision Pro allows me to put even the largest screens in a drawer when I’m done with them so I can focus on analogue writing, and my beloved analogue tools, without distraction. It’s very Star Trek: Picard.

Opinion

I Write Novels with Fountain Pens

Posted on by Shawn Mihalik

Ricardo, over at Extra Fine Writing, asks the question “Does anyone actually use a pen to write a novel?”

When I hear that some famous author drafts their novels with a fountain pen, or when I see that in film or TV as a visual trope, my immediate instinct is to absolutely believe that they are lying.…

Do any of you actually do this?

Like, do you sit down with an unlined, blank piece of paper and start writing the first line of a novel, longhand, perhaps at an ornate desk in front of a fireplace? Do you crumple it up and throw it out when you don’t like what you’ve written and start over with a fresh sheet, because you have an endless supply of both time and paper?

I do. Of the seven novels I’ve had published in the last twelve years, one of them, The Assured Expectations of Things Hope For, was first-drafted entirely by hand. Granted, it’s probably my shortest book, at only around 17,000 words. But about a month ago I finished a new novel, also entirely first-drafted longhand, with a fountain pen (mostly a Pilot Custom 823), and I intend to write long-form prose this way for the rest of my life (although the pen, at least for the foreseeable future, will be the exquisite Montblanc Meisterstück 149 100th Anniversary Edition I recently acquired).

Ricardo writes:

I did use pens—and used them heavily—to plan, organize, and manage the work. I used them for creating characters, connecting plot points, doing research, laying out timelines, making to-do lists for revisions and edits, sketching cover designs, and so on. I have pages and pages and pages of this stuff; some days this was all I did. Literally everything related to the book except actually writing it was done by hand, because that was heavy-duty, nonlinear thinking work that benefited from slowing down.

Actually drafting the book, though? I like the idea of doing this by hand a lot, but I gave up after a couple days of trying. It was tiring enough to do on a computer, and the computer has the benefit of a “find” feature for when you decide a character’s name is not dumb enough and change it in the middle of revisions.

I think drafting the book—that is, crafting the sentence—is the part of writing that benefits most from slowing down. Sentences should not be rushed. They should be carefully, delicately considered—“word by word,” as Verlyn Klinkenborg put it in his excellent book Several Short Sentences About Writing. Plus, more importantly than ever in this era of AI-generated slop, writing by hand allows us writers to show our work.

Of course, if you write your first draft by hand, you’re probably going to need to type it up at some point. But this is great. This is not extra, unnecessary work. This is the work, because this is where you get to make your first edits. Don’t want to type a sentence up? Then don’t type it up! Leave it out. This is where you get to make your first deletions and rewrites: in the transcription process. If you write your first draft by hand, on paper, and then transcribe your second draft, you’re likely to create a much stronger second draft than if you started at the computer in the first place.

And if you can’t bring yourself to sit down and transcribe your handwritten writing, if that sounds too exhausting, then it probably wasn’t compelling work in the first place.

Link

Seeking ‘Warmth and Personality’ in the World of High-Priced Pens

Posted on by Shawn Mihalik

Seeking ‘Warmth and Personality’ in the World of High-Priced Pens | New York Times

Nice write-up about the London Pen Show in the New York Times:

The consensus among these attendees was that putting pen to paper is more meaningful than typing on gadgets. “I feel more disconnected from the information that I’m trying to capture when I’m typing it versus when I’m writing it,” Ms. Staton said.

The pen dealer Roy van den Brink-Budgen, 40, said there is “real warmth and personality” to writing by hand. “I think even if you don’t submerge yourself in it from a collecting point of view, I think writing with a fountain pen adds maybe that extra few percent to even the most mundane writing.”

Agreed. Wholeheartedly. However, I do have to disagree with the following:

Mr. Minhas, 53, has been collecting pens for more than 25 years and owns so many he is known by some in the international pen community as “the one-man pen show.” He believes that some pens are meant to stay on display, preserved as heirlooms for the next generation. “Pens of this quality you don’t really write with,” he said. “This is art of the highest quality.”

I love Sarj Minhas’s collection (and I came this close to buying a couple Montblancs from him at the California Pen Show earlier this year—and plan on actually doing so next year, because, seriously, his collection is beautiful), but I have to respectfully disagree with him here. All pens are for writing. Even the most beautiful, artistic, expensive, hand-crafted ones are still tools for writing. Pens are for writing.

Uncategorized

Crosswords

Posted on by Shawn Mihalik

A few months ago, my partner Mallory and I somewhat accidentally started doing the New Yorker crossword puzzle together. Fairly quickly, we were hooked, and now we do the New York Times crossword together most days. It’s been a fun way to get our dopamine hit—much better than scrolling social media or binging Netflix, neither of which hold much appeal for either of us. It’s a particular kind of rewarding seeing ourselves getting better at solving with each passing week (we can solve Monday through Thursday puzzles fairly easily now; Friday through Sunday still require some assistance).

We solve the NYT crossword digitally (I’ve tried getting the paper delivered to my door, but in the apartment complex where I live, it turned out, sadly, that neighbors couldn’t be trusted to not steal it before I could grab it from just inside the gate, even though I’m up at 5 a.m.), but we still solve the New Yorker crossword in the print magazine. So it was with no small measure of joy that I found the following Retro 1951 Tornado pencil at FLAX Pen to Paper yesterday:

Needless to say, purchasing it was a no-brainer.