Living Boldly – Wherein The Author Tries Acclimating To A Fat Tip Pen

I just bought some new ballpoint pens. Yes, I know – Big Whoop! But hear me out. My new pens are a major shift in my pen-buying habits, and I am considering their effect on my pen-using habits. And I write this not so much for you, but for me – have I done the right (or write?) thing? Is my choice of a bold tip a finer thing than my longtime choice of fine tips? Click through and we will both find out together.

Why is a pen so important? My answer is that pens are how we express ourselves. We jot notes, fill out forms, and even occasionally write letters. OK, perhaps only those of us over the age of, well, let’s not go there. I will freely confess that I am one of those humans in that unnamed age demographic that relies on a pen for all of these tasks. And due to a recent purchase, I am in the midst of a drastic change in my penmanship.

Who remembers learning penmanship in grade school? I recall the great excitement when we, who had theretofore been restricted to No.2 pencils, were given pens to learn how to write IN INK. Writing “in ink” is still a thing in my mind, though I don’t know why because I have not picked up a pencil (No. 2 or otherwise) in eons. I think we began by writing cursive ovals between the lines in the paper (lines that were much closer together than before) and progressed to letters and words.

Did you know that the pen dates back to around 3000 B.C., when Egyptians used sharpened reeds to write on papyrus? I didn’t either until I just looked it up. By 100 B.C., the technology had advanced to sharpened quills (bird feathers).

Where it seems to have stalled for about the two millennia between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the U.S. Constitution. The one lesson I take here is that the finer point of the quill was seen as an upgrade from the coarser tip of the reed.

Some random Roman guy experimented with a metal tip pen in the days of Pompeii, but all he got for his trouble was a lava bath courtesy of Mt. Vesuvius. Possibly because the committee of Roman gods preferred reeds and quills. History proved them wrong because the metal-tipped fountain pen ruled from fairly early in the nineteenth century until halfway into the twentieth, when the ballpoint pen became a thing.

Did you know that the first patent for a ballpoint pen dates to 1888? Unfortunately (or is it fortunately?) there was not a decent one until a Hungarian named Laszlo Biro got an English patent in 1938. The secret to Biro’s design was an oil-based ink derived from the kind used by printers, which solved the leaking, skipping and smearing that had dogged earlier designs that used the water-based inks used by fountain pens. Biro’s design was first made in Argentina (as the Birome) and in England (the Biro), but not in large numbers.

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An American named Milton Reynolds came across the Argentinian Birome and made enough changes to get his own patent in the U.S. Reynolds’ design was the first to sell in large numbers, beginning at Gimbel’s Department Store. That $12.45 Reynolds pen in 1945 would sell for about $225 today. After an initial burst of popularity, the ballpoint pen faded in the 1950’s. But a decade later, the Bic pen was developed (from the Biro patent) and the inexpensive ballpoint came to rule the pen world.

When I was growing up, ballpoint pens were all I knew. There was an old fountain pen nestled into a pod set in a marble base on my mother’s desk, but she never used it. I am unsure if she never used it because there was no ink or if there was no ink because she never used it. It is also possible that one of her small children ruined the tip when trying to scrawl some important note. But I admit nothing.

Through high school, Bic “crystal” ballpoints were the workhorse pens that got me through countless essays and filled innumerable spiral notebooks with jottings necessary to get me through the periodic tests. I never paid any attention to them, but can now tell you that the French pens were introduced to the U.S. in 1959 for 29 cents (about $3.20 today) with the slogan “Writes first time, every time.” I had no idea the Bic ballpoint was such a recent thing and certainly did not think about alternatives.

Actually, I did develop one preference as I got a little older – I liked fine-point pens. These went well with the “college ruled” notebooks I preferred. I, you see, physically write in a very compact way. There are those whose pens blather all over the paper with all the finesse of a hippo. A real hippo, not the elegant cartoon version that wore ballet slippers. My writing looks more like that of an engineer, with small, somewhat angular letters made by half printing with some cursive flourishes where necessary to speed things along. Narrow lines and a fine-point pen made for just the kind of economy in paper usage that an engineer would appreciate. A nearsighted engineer, at least.

It might have been as a high school graduation present that I got my first fountain pen. Or maybe I decided to buy it for myself. It was a Sheaffer No Nonsense pen – a model that I now know dated to 1969 and was styled to mimic a design from the 1920’s. Instead of the old designs that sucked ink from a jar into an ink chamber, this one used easily changed plastic cartridges. My black Sheaffer pen (filled with “blue-black” ink) was my go-to for years, all the way through law school and into my legal career.

I loved the way that fountain pen wrote. It was not as fine as the fine point ballpoints I used as a backup, and the mechanics of my writing style changed a little to accommodate the way the pen worked. But I loved it for the way it made writing feel like an elegant craft. Right up until the day a new package of ink cartridges arrived from the office supply store. They did not fit into the pen quite the same and leaked. A comparison between new and old showed very slight changes in dimension, and a comparison of the boxes showed a new country of manufacture.

It took awhile of casting through random pens, but I finally found my new happy place in a Pentel EnerGel fine-tip pen. It had the separate cap like my old Sheaffer and its writing action was an almost perfect cross between a scratchy fountain pen and a smooth ballpoint with a teeny, precision tip. Everyone who borrowed it loved it, and my daughter took to adopting as many of them from my stash as she could lay her hands on.

You will note that I never had a thing for expensive pens. I used Cross pens for awhile in the 80’s (when I needed a ballpoint), but would routinely lose them. I wondered if buying myself a gold one instead of the chrome-plated ones I had been using would make me more careful. But nope, I lost that one too. Was it just so much smaller than my big, manly Sheaffer fountain pen? Was the lack of a screw-on cap something that made pen use so mindless and forgettable that I started routinely forgetting to put it back in my shirt pocket? We will never know.

I retired from a life where those pens helped me earn my living, but I was sure to keep a bunch of my preferred Pentels in my desk at home, where they have remained my favorite pens. But in my new life, there is a problem.

My work day now involves filling out and signing paperwork for loads that I carry (whether in or out) between a large manufacturing company and some area distribution warehouses. Often, this paperwork must be filled out in sub-optimal weather conditions. And I have discovered that my favored EnerGels run and smear like fountain pens of old when the paper gets wet, as happens more commonly than I would like. Also, a separate cap spends a lot of time in my mouth as I fill out paperwork.

After a period of scrounging free pens from my bank, I decided that a more reliable supply was necessary. A recent trip to the store landed me a pack of four Paper Mate Profile pens. I may not have read the package carefully enough, because these boast of a “bold” tip of 1.4 mm (compared to the .5 mm tip of my Energel). Did I overdo? My first impression is that these feel a bit like writing with a crayon, or maybe a dull pencil. And as a consequence, my printing is much larger than it was. Perhaps, though, my printing needed to be larger.

And large it is! Now I can do a genuine scrawl, with that most American of attitudes, in which there will never, ever be a need to conserve either paper or ink. This thing glides across the paper like it was the Buick of pens. I may not love Buicks, but for the present I kind of need a Buick of pens. So for now, I will continue to (to paraphrase Martin Luther) go forth and sign boldly.

54 thoughts on “Living Boldly – Wherein The Author Tries Acclimating To A Fat Tip Pen”

  2. The Paper Mate pens you mention at the end have been my go-to pen for a long while. All must have the beefy 1.4 mm tip; I picked up a mongrel 0.5 mm yesterday and nearly threw it in the trash. It was like trying to write with a sewing needle.

    You are correct in the Buick analogy and the 1.4 mm tip also plays well with those who don’t stay inside the lines – much like the Buick driver who wants to explore other lanes. Plus, like a Buick, these will continue to write, even poorly, long after others have quite writing entirely.

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    • I still sigh with some longing in my voice for that 05 mm tip. I know it is not fine enough to copy the Declaration of Independence onto the back of a business card, but I know I could make a pretty good attempt at it. For someone like me practiced in tiny writing with a fine tip, the Buick pen is a challenge. But I am warming to it.

      Also, my old cartridge fountain pen reminds me how I continue to be amazed at the spelling variations on your last name.

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  3. Pens! And pencils! Nothing like a good pen, my favorite is Uniball Signo. I got through graduate school with cheap mechanical pencils. My son found a land deed written for a many great grandfather in southern Ohio written in the most beautiful cursive about 1822 with a quill pen. My dad went through college with fountain pens and then was thrilled when the ball point pen came along. I too lose pens…

    Best regards, Peter Miller typopete@gmail.com 330-376-9992

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    • Thanks, Pete! I had never much thought about it, but the modern ballpoint pen has to be one of the greatest engineering feats of the 20th Century. I still love the luxurious feel of a fountain pen, and one of those always goads me into signing something with what I call my Sunday signature, as opposed to the economical scrawl I have defaulted to in day-to-day signatures.

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    • My understanding is that the Uniball Signo is one of the few readily available pens that have ink that is truly safe for check-writing. Nearly all other ink can be washed out by “check washers”.

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  5. I have teetered back and forth between Pilot G2 and Uniball Vision pens for years. I generally find that the Pilot G2s write smoother, although the Visions that I wind up with tend to be finer point (even though I go for the .5 mm Pilot points). I love to write small, and therefore love very fine point…except I also tend to be a bit heavy-handed and therefore too fine a point ends up digging into the paper.

    I was fascinated with fountain pens as a kid and my parents had some around, so I got to try them. Sadly, I never mastered using one given my left-handed tendency to drag my hand across freshly-written text and therefore producing a smeary mess. This also hindered my use of the favorite pen of 4rd graders in my school in 1972…the Bic Banana. These and “Flair Pens” were at the start of the felt-tip pen mania (at least it seemed to be mania at the time…times were simpler) and every elementary school kid seemed to need them for the new school year. I quickly learned that I could not produce sufficiently smear-less writing with them, and was humiliated when teachers sent a note home saying that “Jeffrey needs to be provided with a standard ball point pen”.

    The solution there was to send me to school with one of the literally dozens of pens littering our household that were marked “US GOVERNMENT”…as both of my parents were Federal employees and regularly brought home Skillcraft (made to this day by the National Industries for the Blind) pens. My mom was a bit worried that she’d get reported for her kid using official government property that had clearly been swiped – albeit unintentionally – from work. But she got over that. I still have those Government pens that turn up now and then in old boxes of stuff.

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    • I think using official U.S. Government pens would compensate for the problems with left-handedness. That would have been cool. Especially with sunglasses.

      I had forgotten all about the Bic Banana, but remember what a big deal felt-tip pens were for a time. You were right, a schoolbag just wasn’t complete without them for a year or two. But even for this rightie, the novelty soon wore off.

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  6. Who remembers penmanship class in grade school? Me! Catholic grade school in Chicago, and we HAD to do it with a fountain pen! Smeary trouble for a left-hander! But, by that time, my mother noticed my interest in the written word and had given me a small Speedball lettering set to practice all types of type styles. Kept me busy. Last time I had a staff, I was still hand addressing and writing Christmas cards and birthday cards, with a chisel tip fountain pen.

    Now-a-days, I letter envelops and notes with a chisel tip ZIG Calligraphy II (sort of like a Sharpie on steroids, but with multiple tips available, from Kuretake in Japan). Archival and pigment. Available, with a whole lot of other stuff, from Marker Supply in Nashville (or a good local art store if you have one). Other writing and notes with an Ultrafine Sharpie. For real writing (and checks), I have been guided to a Uniball Signo 207 pen, which I prefer in blue ink, by a pal in the mutual fund business. These are pigmented ink pens that allegedly cannot be “washed”, in case your post office box is “jacked” by criminals for check alteration to themselves; A huge problem in Milwaukee. Gel pens are certainly wonderful to write with, but a criminal can take a check, cover your name with a light tape, and wash the payee and price right off of it, easy as pie, and replace with their own name and any price they want. The easier a pen is to write, the more “washable” the ink is probably going to be!

    As for Speedball? Still fighting the fight!

    https://www.speedballart.com/shop/calligraphy-illustration/markers-fountain-pens/

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  7. Ah memories… Seeing that Bic pen reminds me of classmates, who would often be spotted with a huge ink stain on their shirt because their Bic pen ‘exploded’. Never figured out how that happened.

    We recently moved and downsized, and during the process I uncovered a box filled with literally hundreds of pens – accumulated from my many jobs during my career. At first I tried to see which were still usable, but finally just decided to donate them to a local school. My favorite – Uniball Gel pens. I must have some sort of fetish for pens – during our closing, the title company supplied very nice pens, and I swiped one.

    And after reading about Papermate, I’m singing along to an old Johnny Brown commercial. Write on Brothers, Write on, with the Papermate Write Brothers pen!

    Yes I admit, I’m a bit strange.

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    • I was thinking about that Write Brothers ad! I thought of mentioning it, but wondered if anyone else remembered it.

      All of the ink stains on my pockets came from forgetting to put the cap back on the business end of my Energels, then clipping the butt end to my shirt pocket so that the ink wicked from the exposed tip into my shirt. Ugh, I ruined more shirts that way than I like to admit.

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    • I remember that jingle as well! Although I recall that at least one version referred to it as the “19-cent Write Bros. pen”, probably when it was first introduced.

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      • You are right Brad. Theres at least 2 videos on YouTube of Johnny Brown’s Papermate commercials. I always liked him – I realize he’s an actor, but he always seemed to be having the time of his life during his perrformances.

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  8. In 3rd grade, we all learned “script”. I thought script writing was fascinating and beautiful. I looked forward to each new day where we would learn a new letter. We started with the lower-case letters: “a”. Then we found out that a “d” is an “a” with a line added up top. And so on. Then we got to the exciting part: Capital Letters! These could be hard but I mastered all of them.

    Then in 7th grade we studied calligraphy, with the Speedball pens. C-1, C-2, C-3, etc. I liked writing in Olde English.

    I later decided that the standard style of script we were taught was too plain and boring (especially the Capitals). So I looked to other, historical examples and developed my own style based on them.

    Below: I wrote this with a LePen Fine Point. Also this is how I think numerals should be written:

    J.P.'s Blog

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    • Stephen, your excellent penmanship has reminded me that when I worked for the Census in 2010, we had to spend time talking about and being taught to write numbers that would not be confusing to the optical scanners they used. Peoples penmanship had gotten so bad, that the number 3 and 8 could be confused by scanner if they were sloppy (we had to make 8’s as your illustration instead of a small oval over a bigger one), as well as “closed top” 4’s being confused as 9’s, and 5’s and 3’s could be confused as well. I wrote 2 as a flat line bottom for years, but on the census, I had to go back to a lower loop 2, as per your example!

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      • I remember some printing and numeral instruction in a drafting class I took in 7th grade – one of the industrial arts options for boys. I’ll bet nobody has taken a drafting class in 40 years, and I remember nothing from it besides how to make really precise numerals.

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    • I love the note! The “E” reminds me of my mother’s writing, which was beautiful. She got extra practice with the capital E because her name was Edith.

      My own writing is more utilitarian, and I now wish I had been taught calligraphy.

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  9. That was a terrific read, J. P.! Pens and pencils! I love ’em. I have enjoyed (and not) many different types and brands over the past, um… let me see… six and a half decades or so. 😉 The tales of my relationships to writing instruments would be a long and winding road, for sure. For a while as a teenager I favored ‘felt-tip’ pens in various colors. My school supplies for most of my school years included a cartridge fountain pen. These days, I favor medium point black ball-point pens (Bics, usually) for writing in my journal; but I do have a pet pen… a hand-turned wooden pen with a Cross refill ink chamber. But I mostly stick with Bic. Buy ’em by the dozens from Staples or Office Depot.

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  10. In grade school, when we were first given pens, they resembled the submarine in the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea TV show. Wish I still had one. Anyway if you gripped your pen too tightly, the teacher (ok the nun) would come along and try to grab it out of your hand. If she couldn’t free the instrument, you were in trouble.

    For some 40 years now my preference for taking notes into my logbook has been to use a 0.5 mm Pentel P205 mechanical pencil. If in pen, I have been using a Pilot Hi Tech Point 0.77 mm tip pen. I like the sharpness of each.

    We all grew up using Bic pens, they were everywhere. I did try my hand at a Fountain pen, but found it would dry up at the tip if not used every day, regularly. Even if used often, sometimes it would skip parts of the letter. The one I tried was a Bettoni collection pen.

    My handwriting is nowhere near the artistry of Mr. Pellegrino, who I congratulate. But the nuns would have caught him up in not staying within the lines :-).

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    • I was going to mention the Pentel P205! I love those and have used them for years. I graduated to those after using “Scripto” mechanical pencils in elementary and high school. I loved that translucent plastic they were made of. There was something wonderful about “mechanical” pencils (I’m guessing it’s just because they were proudly mechanical) that grabbed me as a kid and never let go.

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    • Two things I learned from my accountant when I first started running my own businesses: 1. Always use blue ink, so that you can see where you made remarks (difficult to do with a black pen on a xeroxed piece of paper)…and 2. Always use a mechanical pencil for columnar ledgers, because the line weight doesn’t change and you don’t have to keep resharpening.

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    • I went through an infatuation with mechanical pencils, but I never used one enough to make it a habit. About the time I would get close, I would be out of leads or the ones I had were broken.

      You now remind me of those plastic pencils with maybe 15 sections, each with a pencil tip. When one wore down, you pulled it off and pushed it into the back end, which forced a new sharp one out. They were great until you lost one of the sections.

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  11. Fine point all the way for me since high school and maybe even before (and certainly Bics), although a skinny medium point is acceptable in a pinch. Nowadays I seem to have a mix of standard ballpoint and roller-tip gel-style points, still stored in the topless Leinenkugel’s and Point beer cans I used in college.

    When I graduated high school my grandparents gave me a Parker ballpoint with the adjustable calendar on the barrel. Sadly, I’ve since misplaced it but I still have the silver Cross pen I received after college. When I use it now it feels almost to small in my hand.

    I also like a harder pencil, #2.5 minimum with #3 preferred. As a lefty I’ve found that like fine-point pens they’re less likely to smear.

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  12. I still have my mom’s fountain pen but the ink bladder is stuck and cannot be removed from the pen, so I can’t use it. Mom wrote a lot of letters to friends and family after we moved to the States. It was a painstaking and messy process to fill the fountain pen so I can see why using click pens or Bic stick pens became so popular. I remember getting those Bic stick pens for about a dime apiece. You can also use Sharpie fine point markers and they are waterproof. I had been using waterproof fine-line markers I bought from an art store for my ink-and-wash paintings, but this is a cheaper option and available at my Meijer, so maybe they are at your Meijer too!

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      • Yes they do – it sounds like a chicken scratching on the paper. Years ago I bought a set of calligraphy pens thinking it could be a fun hobby. They’d run out of ink in no time and you’d have to replace the cartridge. My mother said “well I could have told you that hobby would go nowhere fast – you saw me messing with the fountain pen enough times.”

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  13. Funny I remember using fountain pens with the leaky cartridges in grade school when we learned cursive, but only for a few years as then ball points came out, and they were cheaper and more convenient.

    I prefer fine point pens too, but absolutely hate those gel pens which seem so popular, because they smear even if they say non-smear. . I struggle to find a good pen, lately at the dollar store although sometimes when you get one you like next time they don’t have that brand. I have also tried a number from Staples where you can buy bulk in of ten….and then find out you hate them.

    I had a fancy gold Cross pen when I graduated – it was a graduation gift and I guess the intention was I would sign off on my prescriptions with it, but I only used it for about a year and never bothered with the refills, as I didn’t like the way it felt. Then when I got my 15year hospital pin, I got another fancy pen, same thing, only silver this time. Later, I started to sign off with lavender pens as the ink stood out. (Nothing was more frustrating than going to counsel on a Rx and seeing that it had not been signed off on, or the scrawl was so bad you couldn’t even tell who had checked it.) Then I couldn’t find lavender pens anymore, except for the gel ones, so I figured it was a good time to retire!

    I wonder if kids even use pens anymore, now that they don’t teach cursive in some schools.

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    • Joni, the last big corporate advertising department I worked for, people started to define themselves by pen color. So many colors available, that people would pick one and always use it, and then you could say: “…well, I know Joe looked at this because it’s initialed in his purple.” Got to be a “thing”, and we all liked it. I’m sure everyone knew it was you when something was signed in lavender…

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      • Yes it was distinctive. The hard copy of the Rx was always so marked up with notations and check-marks from the techs, that it was sometimes hard to see if and where the pharmacist had signed off at the end. A few years after I retired they changed the whole system to a paperless one, the Rx would be scanned in, and no hard copy/paper produced, and everything was signed off on the computer, with individual scanner codes on cards. Heaven help you if you lost your scanner! I’m not sure I would like that, as it’s easier to spot mistakes on paper than on a screen and anyone else could grab your scanner code? So it’s probably a good thing I retired!

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      • This pharmacist was ready to go anyway! We had one physician who wrote his Rx’s in purple, which is where I got the idea. A deterrent for narcotic forgeries. I haven’t looked at school supplies lately, but will take a peek.

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  14. I love the fountain pens in my collection but I just like writing with anything. Two pens I have found that work well in adverse conditions are the Fisher Space Pen and the U. S. Government Skilcraft. The Fishers come in a wide variety of styles and were not, as urban legend has it, developed by NASA at taxpayer expense. The Skilcraft just works.

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    • Sometimes I think about buying another one, but I don’t really have a day-to-day use for it, and I remember that they are not very happy with only rare use.

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  16. I recently returned to Cross pens; I’d had one given to me when I was young and liked it quite a bit… but lost it. I’ve had this one for ~3 or 4 years so far, and probably just cursed myself to lose it. I like a fine point as well… I could fit two lines of text in a college-rule line when I was in high school; my English teacher brought it up in a parent/teacher conference…

    I remember certain pen types not writing well on carbon copies of stuff. Is that an issue with your paperwork?

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    • No carbon forms for me, so I can’t say. Fountain pens never worked with them, I certainly remember that!

      And we welcome another member of the small print fine point club!! Be sure to bring reading glasses to the meetings. 😛

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      • As a member of the “I still write checks” club, I also have checks with carbonless back copies, which I staple to the bills and file. In order to get a good carbonless copy, it’s required that you press pretty hard when writing the check, something possible only with a ball-point, or in my case, the “unwashable” Uniball Signo 207. Carbon copies, especially the “snap apart” carbon plus thin bottom sheet I used to use to write bills on a typewriter when I had a business, are one of those things that went away, that I could use occasionally, like the ease of making mix cassette tapes for pals, or the ease of making VHS copies of broadcasts I would want to rewatch. Sometimes the world changes for the “not so much” better, and it had more to with charging you more than doing things easily.

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  17. An important criteria for me is that the pen itself be fairly thin. I’ve been using my trusty Papermate for decades. I think it was called ‘The Profile’ Double Heart, Red and Chrome.

    At one time I did calligraphy – I loved how the choice of font changed the look of the writing.

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  18. In my early days as a project architect I remember the allure of fancy pens like Cross and Waterman. Back then I bought a Cross but it was more for status than utility (and my paltry salary had no business with such a purchase). Then a lot of years passed, including my transition to the tech sector, where the use of pens was discouraged entirely. I bought another Cross recently (nostalgic urge?) and I have to say it’s a great pen for signatures (which seems to be the only need I have for a pen anymore.

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  19. This essay brings back memories of my fifth grade class at Nancy Grayson Elementary School. Miss Smith was a stickler for good penmanship. We spent at least a half an hour each day on cursive writing, and large part of that was making those ovals. This was during the 1972-73 school year. Miss Smith did not like the style of writing that used a large circle, instead of a simple dot, above the letters “i” and “j.” Doing so guaranteed a lower grade on the assignment!

    I use Paper Mate pens at work, although that is mainly for note-taking during meetings and hearings. At home, I buy whatever pen is cheapest at the Walmart! I don’t even write that many checks these days.

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    • I use my share of free/cheap pens too, but have discovered that I have certain likes and dislikes with them. And I am old enough that I shouldn’t have to put up with unpleasant pens when some pretty good ones are reasonably cheap.

      Your teacher probably wasn’t a fan of the double exclamation points connected with a smiley face, either. 😛

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  20. Last weekend my mom gave me a Pentel EnerGel Pro pen, because she knows I still write checks and she’d seen/read/heard that it’s extremely fraud-resistant. It’s comfortable to use and does a nice job, but has a .7mm ball tip and I’d like it even more if it had a tip around .4-.5mm.

    https://www.pentel.com/products/energel-pro-permanent-gel-pen

    I think it’ll work well when I sign the tab “JP Cavanaugh” and then break for the door.

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