Craft

The fountain pen is a small object with a large argument inside it. Every serious pen is a thesis about what writing is for, and no two pens argue the point more cleanly than the Lamy 2000 and the Waterman Carène. Both are modern classics, both have been in production for decades, and both cost roughly the same money. They could not be less alike. One is a German machine that hides its nib; the other is a French yacht that displays it. Choosing between them is not choosing between two pens. It is choosing between two theories of the examined life. ...

The fountain pen is one of the few tools in daily life that can be described, without exaggeration, as a civilizational artifact. It sits at the intersection of engineering and culture, precision and ritual, the mechanical and the expressive. And yet, for most of its history, the story of the fountain pen has been told primarily as a Western narrative — a procession of inventors and patents moving from Paris to New York — with the fuller, stranger, more interesting story left largely untold. That story involves two countries that approached the same instrument from profoundly different directions and produced two of the most distinctive pen-making traditions in the world: Germany and Japan. ...