I swear my grandmother or dad or somebody told me tales of some boys dipping girls' hair in inkwells. Alas they are both long departed now so I missed out on those details.
I swear my grandmother or dad or somebody told me tales of some boys dipping girls' hair in inkwells. Alas they are both long departed now so I missed out on those details.
calamus (January 23rd, 2020), fountainpenkid (June 19th, 2020), Jon Szanto (February 1st, 2020)
Yeah, I saw that done. The inkwell was in the upper right corner of our desks, and a few smart alecs would stick the girl in front of them's hair in the inkwell. The nun teaching us would them make them write some line out 500 times. Didn't help the girl out, though. Some real jokesters would fling ink off of the pen points. Really inconsiderate.
fountainpenkid (June 15th, 2020), Scrawler (February 7th, 2020), welch (June 18th, 2020)
I am not that old but our school building was historical and some grades were in the "old building" and they left a lot of the older stuff in the old building including desks with inkwells. Every once in a while we would actually use them for things. It was kind of wild. The thing I remember most was the tunnel connecting the old building to the new and how ornate the furnishings were in the old building including those old classic highly decorated brass or (bronze?) door knobs. If you grew up in NYC and went to public school you might know what I mean.
welch (May 3rd, 2020)
Another trick was to soak a piece of blotting paper in ink, squeeze it into a half inch ball and then flick it from the end of a wooden ruler.
guyy (June 15th, 2020)
I'm pretty close to being a cradle. I started in 7th grade, using Sheaffer school pens. It was a bit of a bear as a left-hander, but without any guidance I figured out how to underwrite and did pretty well after that. Continued use all the way into university, which then saw me branch out as i had to do music copying (first for my own assignments, eventually for a bit of side-work). I continued using pens like Sheaffer No-Nonsense with the italic nibs, as well as Speedball dip pens. Some of this was fp ink on paper, some was india ink on onionskin for reproduction.
There was one significant lacuna after undergrad school, as I became a performer and had less... paperwork to do. After about 10 years I went back to school for a different set of skills and picked the fps back up, and when I got my first job in that field I got my first decent pens (Waterman Phileas, Sheaffer Targas). This was around 1990 and has continued unabated, though the actually collecting aspect of it didn't happen until about 10 years ago. And now I have them coming out of my ears.
A few years back, while clearing the parent's house, I found what amounts to my earliest existing example of my fountain pen use, which was certainly a Sheaffer school pen with Sheaffer Skrip blue (note: the trip was fictional):
"When Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick;
and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter."
~ Benjamin Franklin
fountainpagan (May 2nd, 2020), fountainpenkid (June 15th, 2020), guyy (June 15th, 2020), Sailor Kenshin (February 9th, 2020), welch (June 18th, 2020)
Very cool! Only partial credit because you bypassed Belgium?
Regards, Chrissy | My Review Blog: inkyfountainpens
welch (June 18th, 2020)
"When Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick;
and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter."
~ Benjamin Franklin
FredRydr (February 4th, 2020)
I went to a brand-spanking-new public school from 2nd - 6th grade with new woodgrain formica and gray steel desks, so we had no inkwells on our desks. Before that, we had pencils. After that, ballpoints ruled the day.
My first fountain pen was a cheap Parker Vector to write letters in freshman year in college. In the '80s, I bought a 146 from the sloppy display cabinet of the local office supply store (MB boutiques and the MB luxury lifestyle were unknown) just for signing letters and legal documents. I wasn't bitten by the FP bug until I had to have the 146 unclogged, and I ended up at the former downtown Baltimore branch of Bertram's Inkwell, where the late Jim Rouse got me hooked as I watched him repair and reassemble my 146. Then Jim sold me the Optima, then the Wall Street, then the vintage this and that, and so on.
Last edited by FredRydr; February 4th, 2020 at 11:38 AM.
Jon Szanto (February 4th, 2020), Ray-VIgo (February 13th, 2020)
Thats quite funny. I had missed the point about this being a fictional trip and had your school trip planned in my head with you landing in London, picking up a coach and then travelling through northern Europe just after the worst of the snow had gone, I was thinking of the route the driver would have taken and whether certain mountain passes would have been open, I was really getting into it. Thinking that you really missed out on dipping down into Italy.
Jon Szanto (February 4th, 2020)
In school, (K was 1972, in northeastern USA) we started out with the large diameter kid-compatible pencils and really didn't switch over to pens until middle school (5th and 6th grade) those were mostly Bic stic or PaperMate disposibles and as such terrible... At home I got to fool with an assortment of dip pens, but didn't really *write* with them, so much as serially make small messes and some "art".
Then somewhere in the 10-12 year old range I spotted a Sheaffer pen and pencil set at a flea market in Maine, it was like $6, a huge purchase for me at the time, but I had the money in my pocket and it was a captivating red striated celluloid, it was all down hill from there. That first set was a 1940s Triumph nib, vac fill, with celluloid cap and the matching pencil. The pen was stollen out of my school locker in 8th grade, but I still have the pencil After the theft, I bought a slim, all stainless PaperMate fountain pen as a replacement, it has a smooth writing German made medium nib and aside from the gold plating being worn off the nib (which means it finally matches the pen!) it still performs as good as new. That was followed by a stainless Sheaffer Targa that got used constantly through the 1980s until it was packed away while moving and "lost" for 20+ years in the bottom of a box of odd bits... it too still writes perfectly to this day. Some time after the Targa was lost, I decided to rehab an Esterbrook J that a friend had given me in high school, which led me to the then quite new, fountain pen forums, it was REALLY all down hill from that point.
I've corrupted a few "normals" along the way as well and brought them over to our side, most recently I gifted a friend's 9 year old daughter a PenBBS 308 and 494, she was already a pen fanatic, but now she has been introduced to *real* pens
David-
So many restoration projects...
welch (June 18th, 2020)
Include me as a cradle fountain pen user. Before I could write or even knew the alphabet, I used to sit at my parents', grandmother's, and great aunt's desks and play with their fountain pens. I would make marks on a piece of paper, pretending to write as I had seen adults do.
My elementary school was in an older building. The wooden desks had holes where inkwells had fit, but the inkwells were long gone. Each desk also had a horizontal groove at the top where I suppose a dip pen had rested when not in use. We put a pencil in the groove when not writing with it. When I began first grade in 1959, we could use only wooden pencils. The same was true in second grade when we learned cursive writing, called script in the US in those days. The next year, we were expected to use only script when we wrote and to do our final copies of assignments using the cartridge pens our parents provided for us. They were mostly clear Sheaffer cartridge pens in colorless, green, blue, or red. They had rounded silver-color caps and rounded barrel ends in those days. My pen was green. A few students had Wearever cartridge pens. Wooden pencils were used for all arithmetic work.
We could not use ballpoints until seventh grade, the beginning of junior high. The last day of sixth grade, my friends threw their Sheaffer cartridge pens in the classroom trash can because they were eager to use "adult" ballpoints when school resumed in September. That day, I went dumpster diving for the first time, and went home with an additional 4 or 5 cartridge pens. Each summer, I took a Sheaffer cartridge pen to camp with me because we were required to write our parents at least two letters each week. I have several clear Sheaffer cartridge pens from that era though they are not the original ones from elementary school. Throughout junior high, high school, college, graduate school, and when I worked, I always preferred and used a cartridge pen or bottle-filling fountain pen whenever it was convenient.
Now, in retirement, I sit at a desk and play with fountain pens, just as I did long ago.
Last edited by Barry B. Gabay; February 8th, 2020 at 01:31 PM. Reason: grammar errors
grainweevil (February 9th, 2020), guyy (June 15th, 2020), Paddler (February 9th, 2020), Robert (February 8th, 2020), welch (May 3rd, 2020)
While I was in high school, it became very popular among many of my more easily amused classmates one year to amuse themselves in the cafeteria by removing one end of the wrapper from a soda straw, sliding the wrapper up about 1/2" or 3/4" from the other end of the straw, wetting the bit of protruding wrapper by dipping it into a glass of water, and then blowing through the straw, launching the wrapper towards the ceiling. (I guess this is off-topic since they never dipped their wrapper ends in ink, so far as I can recall. Consequently, I weep bitter crocodile tears of feigned remorse.) Anyway, the wet end stuck to the ceiling, and the wrapper wouldn't fall down until it dried out, at which time it would come fluttering down, often landing quite unexpectedly atop some unsuspecting person's head, or in their soup or mac and cheese or tapioca pudding. Often there were dozens, even scores of soda straw wrappers dangling from the ceiling at one time. It made quite a sight.
Quid rides? Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur. — Horace
(What are you laughing at? Just change the name and the joke’s on you.)
Ghastly. Amusing, though, and brings back a lot.
I am very glad I learned to use dip pens and fountain pens early in school, though. I have had a lifetime of pleasant writing and doodling with them. You have made me remember being regaled by those wild and crazy classmates.
I actually had a school desk with a hole for an inkwell. It was empty at first as we used pencils, but I could write when I went to school so soon advanced to having an hole with an inkwell. We used dipping pens at first, but when we got to a certain skill with copperplate, we could use a fountain pen. My sailor dad got me a green marbled Conway Stewart made in Canada. I have used mechanical pencils and fountain pens all my life. I'm 73 yo.
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welch (June 18th, 2020)
I had my first fountain pen when I was 5 years old. A Pelikan 120, I still have. That is the pen I learned to write with. Later I got others, and used them more.
Pencils were only allowed for arithmetics, and art class - it was the same in highschool and university, only arithmetics was replaced by mathematics.
Couloured pencils and markers were for art classes - more drawing and coloring than art, actually.
I have never stopped using a fountain pen. I started using rollers and ballpens for urban sketching only, never to write with.
I’m so happy to meet someone else not only in his/her 70s but who knows what a grade school fountain pen was like and the messy fun learning how to form letters on paper ever so carefully yet....possibly having the public shame of a sudden blob of vicious ink on clean paper...then the sudden voice of a stern teacher who let everyone know what childhood faux pas had caused a well-meaning lanky girl sit in frozen fear and (gasp!) total class recognition! I thought the teacher was going to put me in the corner or get her heavy wooden ruler out. The one that causes PAIN...
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welch (June 18th, 2020)
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