Fountain pens & XyWrite

["J.L. Gordon" jgordon@xxxxxxxx]

I've just now read the fountain pen exchange between Tom Hawley
and others. As someone who has always used fountain pens and
always hated ballpoints (known as biros [after the inventor]
outside the USA), I have to add my comments. The only connection
to XyWrite is that some may remember that the XyIII+ box had a
beautiful cardboard wrapper showing a fountain pen that looked
like a Shaefer. My favorite pen is the Mt Blanc Meisterstuck
149, which is a truly great design. I bought one in Hong Kong in
the late 70s (it was not a fake). For everyday work, I
frequently use a Lamy 2000, and I have several Lamy Safari's for
travel (lightweight, durable and cheap to replace). My Rotring
600 is solid brass and built like an M1 Abrams tank, while my
Waterman Expert is also very solidly made and writes
beautifully. The Parker 51 was mentioned in previous posts. My
dad had one, and he gave me a Parker 61 as a graduation present.
I lost it during my grad school days in Cambridge Mass; I was
riding a bike and it fell out of my pocket. While on my first
fieldwork in Indonesia, in 1972, I was delighted to find that
Hero, a Chinese company, had produced a nifty copy of the Parker
51. I bought several for what was then less than a dollar each.
The one I still have writes beautifully, though it sometimes
leaks. Recently, I read with interest that both Parker and
Waterman (now a French company) are owned by Gillette. For
anyone interested in fountain pens, there is a delightful
pocketbook in the Italian Bello Cosa library series. It's called
*Fountain Pens* and is by Alex Fortis and Antonia Vannuchi (US
publishers: Chronicle Books of San Francisco).

Cheers,
John Gordon



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J.L. Gordon
Department of Anthropology
University of Western Australia
Nedlands, WA 6907

phone: +61 8 9380 2850
fax: +61 8 9380 1062
e-mail: jgordon@xxxxxxxx
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