Low Tech: A Man with a Slow Hand

A CEO explains why, in the day of high-tech computing, he still uses a fountain pen, albeit with his laptop.

When the communications age starts to feel impersonal, Steven Leveen seeks comfort in his favorite anachronism: the fountain pen

When I pull out my fountain pen in public, people look at me the way they look at guys who still wear bow ties or listen to vinyl records -- as if to say, "Look at that sad fellow trying to hang on to the past."

I'm thoroughly modern in other ways. I have a cellular phone and a notebook computer. I'm proud to say that my computer has one of those little telephone jacks in back that allows me to send and receive faxes. I even have the contents of my Rolodex on the hard drive, and I can program the computer to dial my phone. I show that off to visitors whenever I can. It's my version of "Speak, Rover!"

So why am I attached to old pens that became obsolete in the 1950s? I've got several reasons.

First, I like the way fountain pens lay down real ink on paper. Real ink is liquid ink, not the pasty compound used in ballpoints. It sloshes around in the pen, and when you touch the nib of the pen to paper, it's a bit like painting. Contrary to popular opinion, fountain pens do not need to be scratchy. A good fountain pen, which usually has a gold nib, can produce the smoothest writing there is.

I like the ritual of filling my pens either directly from an ink bottle, which is easier than you might think, or with cartridges. (Nearly all fountain pens these days let you do both.) Even when I'm using cartridges, I like to dip the pen in ink before I begin writing, to lay down a coat of ink. Doing so also conjures up the past, when all pens needed to be dipped in inkwells.

Most of all, I like the way fountain pens make horizontal lines thin and vertical lines broad as the nib first contracts, then spreads. Such graceful variation is possible only with fountain pens, and it's nice because it allows your handwriting to be more expressive and personal.

I also like the permanence of fountain pens. Sure, you can buy classy, expensive ballpoint pens, but at their heart they are disposable. It was the disposable Bic, introduced in the United States by Marcel Bich in 1959, that popularized the ballpoint pen and transformed writing. For centuries inventors had sought a pen that carried its own ink but didn't leak or dry out. The Bic did all that, and it was cheap. For the first time in history, a pen was as reliable and as disposable as a pencil.

The ballpoint pen gave us what we'd asked for, but we lost a lot in the bargain. We lost some of the expressive variations of writing and the small rituals associated with the task; we also lost touch with the pen as a personal object. A fountain pen actually adapts to you: its nib wears down at a particular slope that works better for you and less well for others. It becomes your pen. A disposable ballpoint is unyielding, anonymous, common property.

Fountain pens aren't perfect. I've had pens leak on me, and occasionally I still get an inky finger. But do you stop driving a stick-shift car just because you grind the gears once in a while? Of course not. Because you know how great it feels to shift at just the right moment. You can't get that sensation with an automatic.

There was a time when fountain pens were leading-edge technology. At the turn of the century, as natural bird feathers gave way to the steel-nibbed pen, the same magazines that were covering Edison, Ford, and the Wright brothers were featuring advertisements from pen companies touting their products' latest innovations, just as computer companies do today. (The headlines promised benefits such as "pressure-less touch," "leakproof," "self-filling," and "double reservoir.") But the switch from plumes did not come easily. Old-timers held on to their quills with the same tenacity I reserve for my fountain pen. Platt Rogers Spencer, the man who taught America how to write in the days when penmanship mattered, never used a steel-nibbed pen. On his deathbed he asked to hold, for one last time, the feather pen that had made him famous. His sons, being modern men, carried on with steel-nibbed pens.

Americans may be practical, but we're nostalgic, too. We believe in progress and the new tools it produces. But perhaps we also need to believe that the years our forebears spent mastering the old tools count for something. That belief makes it easier for me to accept the fact that my 4-year-old son handles a computer mouse better than I do. And it gives me an excuse to pry him from the computer and put his little arm to low-tech work, cranking out some homemade ice cream.

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Steven Leveen is cofounder and president of Levenger, a mail-order company in Delray Beach, Fla.