Low-tech Skilcraft pens endure in a high-tech world
For more than 40 years, standard black pens have cluttered the desks of thousands of federal employees, hung on a chain at post offices across the country and slipped into the pockets of countless military personnel. Yet few have realized that this government-issue pen has a history to rival that of any monument.
Absolutely fascinating. I had no idea. Now I want to get my hands on some of these pens. Need to talk to some friends in Dot-Gov.
Taking note: Some Criteria for Buying a Fountain Pen
What would be some of the criteria you should employ? Well, it seems to me that they should (i) either be piston fillers that draw ink from an inkwell, or fountain pens that allow you to use a converter. The first are few and far between nowadays, the second are plentiful. Almost every fountain pen that uses a cartridge can also use a converter. And (iii) it should be a fountain pen that allows you to change the nib or nib section easily and without any fuss, so that you are not stuck with the nib you with which you bought the pen.
On that last item, some very good suggestions are made. Worth checking out. Especially if you are new to the world of fountain pens.
The trick to a daily diary is to “record, don’t recall”. You’ll forget things that you wanted to remember, so take notes and organize them later. That’s how I’ve managed to keep my diary going.
— Masazo Takenami, a man in his nineties who has kept a sketch diary for sixty years.
Talking About Tools – Chase McCoy
Are you using the best pen for you? What about the best notebook? I come at this from the perspective of a writer, but the tools are anything that helps you to do the work. Ignoring our tools will only do us a disservice. However, spending too much time evaluating them takes away from the work.
It’s a difficult balance to find. Heck, I had the perfect “inexpensive-yet-good always in my pocket don’t even have to think about it” pen up until a couple of weeks ago when I encountered something I like even more. The danger comes when you spend so much time always seeking something better, that you don’t settle on good enough and get to work.
BBC News – Writers’ notebooks: ‘A junkyard of the mind’
A full notebook potentially contains the rest of your writing life. Or nothing of value at all. It is transitional. Work passes through it on the way to becoming something else.
I love everything about this essay by author Lawrence Norfolk. He really captures the spirit of the place that a notebook fills in the life of a writer.
Filling a Notebook – Sanspoint. – Essays on Technology and Culture by Richard J. Anderson
It might not be a complete portrait of my day, but it’s still a great aid to memory, and when I settle down to journal in Day One at the end of the day, I have reference, and something that will last long after all the stuff in Day One has become unreadable due to the march of technology.
I find it always a good feeling to fill a notebook and start a new one. Like beginning a fresh chapter on life.
by Patrick Rhone
Let’s get the basic facts as they stand today out of the way first: The Mod Notebook is a paper notebook that, for the price of purchase, comes with a pre-paid envelope and special code in back that allows one to send it in, have it scanned and made available “in the cloud” — with the option to either have the notebook itself sent back to you or recycled (i.e. not sent back to you).
The reason it is important to start there is that there is a lot of mis-information, confusion, and misconceptions surrounding this product. Most of it of the company’s own making. I won’t go into great detail here. It is an interesting story though — one worth reading. It’s an example of how a good idea can be so poorly thought through, launched, and communicated that — even though you address and fix nearly every mistake — it may just be too late. Most people go on believing what they heard the first time — that you subscribe to get this notebook, fill it up with weeks/months/years of stuff, send it off for scanning to get it “in the cloud”, and never see it again.
The company goes to great lengths to shed a good light on where they were and where they are now (while kind of glossing over what a complete mess they made of a product launch) in these two posts:
So, with that out of the way, I really want to get to the heart of what truly matters to me and the only thing I can evaluate right now: How does it work as a notebook?
Basically, it’s OK. It’s not great. It’s not terrible either. What I’m about to say below might make it seem terrible, but I have used worse. I’ve also have had (and still have) lots of way better notebooks too. This is on the high end of the low end.
If one were to ask me how it feels I would say it feels like a better than average knock-off of a Moleskine (with my personal benchmark of Moleskine being a “good enough” notebook). This is not something that screams quality or even does a great job of faking it. I had to press in the center of the pages to get it to lie open flat. Though it is stitched bound it felt glued. The cover feels like the stuff three ring binders were made from when I was a kid. Even the bookmark ribbon feels like average dime-store ribbon. The elastic closure will probably wear out, break down, and lose elasticity as fast as all elastic generally does — if not faster.
The paper is OK, if a little scratchy. I drafted this using a Lamy Studio with an EF nib that writes perfectly smooth on really good paper. It was not as smooth on this paper. But, hey, some might like a bit of tooth. No bleed through though (I bought the blank/unlined version). So, that’s a plus.
The size is OK. They claim it is the same dimensions as the iPad. It’s close but not quite. Close enough I guess…
Overall, I feel just so very “meh” about it. And, maybe that is OK for some. I mean, who would want to take a really nice notebook that they have poured their life into and stick it in the mail to people they don’t even know with the promise they will have it scanned and returned safely? Maybe you want a “meh” notebook for that. But, here’s the rub…
It’s $25.00 (!).
OK, I get that they are doing a fair bit with that $25.00. You get the (meh) notebook. You get the prepaid shipping. You get the scanning and cloud app that syncs with Evernote, OneNote, and Dropbox. You even get it returned if you want it. But, at the end of the day, I’ve spent $25.00 and received a notebook that feels like a $5.00 (and I’m being generous) notebook.
Now, I’ve only just started it so I have no idea how well the other aspects of this product work. The digitization, app, and all of the rest may be worth the remaining $20.00 to some folks out there.
In fact, I would likely be all in on the idea if they offered just the service/app part for any notebook you already owned or preferred to use. Say, for instance, if for that price you could print off a pre-paid shipping label, send them any notebook up to a certain size, they scanned it and made it available in their app, and then sent it back to you. That, I might buy.
In all, I would only recommend this to a very specific person. Someone who cares less about the quality of the notebook and more about the service, app, and the possibilities that might provide. Because, that is what you are really paying for here. If you are looking for a great notebook that also has the rest of that stuff attached to it, well, you’ll have to keep waiting (or hope they read this and adopt the free good idea I just gave them above).
I came across this interview with Paul Schweitzer, owner of Gramercy Typewriter Company, from 2012. Paul sold me my Smith-Corona last year. His shop is the size of a postage stamp, but so much history has been squeezed in there over the last several decades and I’ve been waiting until I can afford to go back and buy an old Underwood or Royal.
And be sure to read WNYC’s interview with Paul from 2011.
The Importance of Writing by Hand
Should I lose all my important writing, I’d prefer being able to say it died in the flames of an unquenchable fire, or the merciless gusts of a tornado, or rapids of river water beating down the front door during a flash flood. If the writing matters at all to me, it deserves something a little better than, “I forgot to press Ctrl-S.”
J.D.’s wonderful companion piece to his Penmanship guest post here.
by J. D. Bentley
Before this week, my penmanship had stayed slow, stagnant and terrible for the entire two decades I’ve known how to write. I never thought to improve it. I never even thought it could be improved. I figured I was predetermined to have terrible handwriting.
First of all, around the age of ten I developed a love for computers that had me trading pen and paper for keyboard and mouse whenever possible. That I could type quicker than I wrote and that it was always legible gave me all the reason I needed to abandon handwriting altogether.
On top of that, I’m a man. All but a few of us are destined to have shitty penmanship, I thought, and I certainly wasn’t the exception. I’ve heard that the quality difference between female handwriting and male handwriting can be accounted for by girls having more finely tuned motor skills at the age handwriting is taught. I don’t know if that’s true, but a quick glance at my unevolved chicken scratch seems to confirm it.
The older I get, though, the less appealing the computer is. As the digital world gets bigger, more social, more crowded, I have gotten far less interested. I use the machine mainly to write in Ulysses, read a few of my favorite writers and manage my homestead. But back in September, my hard drive bit the dust and I was left computerless for nearly three weeks. In that time, as a paper notebook became more appealing than ever, I began to wonder for the first time in my life whether or not I could make my handwriting not only more beautiful, but also more natural and effortless.
My handwriting is heavy, clumsy, and (as you might expect) cramped. Every stroke carries so much weight and is made with such incredible deliberation that it somehow looks completely faithful to the intended shape and also horribly deformed. When you write as I do, there’s only so much time you can handle it. The muscles in my hand get tighter and more sore so that the already ugly words I manage to spit out of my pen get even uglier and less legible.
I was recently taking handwritten notes for a great book I’m reading—The King’s County Distillery’s Guide to Urban Moonshining–and I could barely make it thirty minutes. There was plenty to write, and I was slow and tense enough to make it all a miserable chore. But these were notes I desperately wanted to take, and not on the computer. They had to be taken and they had to be in a physical notebook. This was around the time I first heard about The Cramped. This site and my need spurred me to attempt to fix my handwriting. It could be faster and more practical, if not more beautiful.
After hours of writing and rewriting the same few phrases, testing different styles for each character, different techniques for the strokes, and a variety of other things, I think my handwriting is fixed. I happen to think it’s much prettier now than ever. I might even go so far as to say that with a little more polish it will be the exact handwriting I’ve always wanted.
But whether or not you agree with my aesthetic sensibilities, this new handwriting is fast, painless and legible, which is all that really matters to me.
Here are a few of the ways I improved it:
I’ve always recognized my terrible penmanship, which is why I’ve always grasped the pen way too tight. I think it was a subconscious attempt to form better shapes, but it only makes it worse. First, because the best handwriting is light, free flowing and effortless. Second, because it destroys your hand. You exert so much effort just holding the damn thing that after a while you abandon it for a keyboard.
Shapes are better when they just happen, not when you try hard to make them happen.
The letters in my writing were always straight up and down. I always hated them. It made it feel boxy and stiff. One of the features of good handwriting, in my opinion, is that it looks like the writer is hurriedly dragging a line across the page, whether it wants to go or not. This results in a bit of a slant to the letters. They bend just a bit into the direction of the writing.
If you think cramped handwriting is ugly and impractical, then simply stop doing it. Start making letters a little bigger and increasing the space between them. Your hand will hurt less and it will be more legible.
Growing up, I recalled that the best handwriters I knew held their pencils funny. They would bend their wrists at a 90-degree angle so that they ended up writing from above rather than hovering over. So, I tried it and it worked. It doesn’t feel natural yet and getting used to it slows me down a bit, but I like what it does for my handwriting.
As with all things, the most important way to improve is to practice. For people so steeped in the digital, like myself, just showing up might prove to be the toughest part when you’ve got that nice shiny keyboard to bang away at. But the more I write by hand, the more I enjoy it. The more I write, the more often I surprise myself by forming lines that are nearly beautiful, which makes me want to write all the more.
In the end, handwriting is becoming more than just practical. It is actionable poetry. It is meditation. And for the first time ever, I like it.
J.D. Bentley writes at jdbentley.com on the topics of tradition, self-reliance, and the strenuous life. Join his mailing list to receive your free daily shot of the good stuff.