Half a century is a long time to defy progress, to swim upstream, to celebrate what had been.
In the beginning, Andreas Lambrou was just a schoolboy in Nicosia, Cyprus, when he started tagging along with his uncle, who happened to sell everyday writing pens. There was something about these instruments and the way they felt in the hand.
As Lambrou grew up and moved to Britain, he couldn't shake his fascination. He accepted that he was a "weirdo." He collected pens, repaired pens, designed pens and made friends of like-minded inky antiquarians from around the world. Ultimately, he wrote the book on pens. Fountain pens, naturally.
Now living mostly in the United States, with his hair gray and the years lined on his enthusiastic face, Lambrou finds himself unexpectedly in the best of times: The past, at last, has caught up with the future.
At 60, Lambrou is an industrial artist, a businessman, an authority - and still a good part schoolboy. From an apartment office on the west side of Los Angeles, he commissions some of the most exquisite fountain pens ever made. Or, foun-TAINE pens, as he pronounces it with his lingering Greek accent.
Fountain pens are no longer remembrances, as they were a generation ago. Nor are they simply faddish symbols of resistance to technology. That counter-trend peaked a few years back. Today, this old and stylish implement has achieved an uneasy peace with the ballpoint and the keyboard.
Pens are deployed less often these days, true. But this makes them all the more important. At least that's the rationale behind the lively and mostly under-noticed global enterprise of quality 21st-century fountain pens.
"The fountain pen is one of our most personal possessions - very, very personal," Lambrou says. "They are part of you. They are a means of expressing thoughts. You give the same pen to 10 people and you'll get 10 different expressions of writing. You give the same wristwatch to 10 people and all of them will tell the same time."
In the apartment that is part living quarters, part shipping office and part cluttered showcase, Lambrou unscrews the cap on a chunky, cigar-sized pen. It has a polished barrel of marbleized acrylic in green, vermilion and ebony.
The 21-karat gold nib, spear-shaped, was individually tuned by a craftsman with 57 years of experience. It is one of 100 limited-edition fountain pens made by Sailor in Japan in conjunction with British-based Classic Pens Ltd., of which Lambrou is a founding partner and designer.
With hands smudged by ink, he presents the instrument across the coffee table, retaining the cap so that a visitor doesn't "post" cap atop pen and thereby spoil its balance.
"I wanted a pen that writes like 100 years ago," Lambrou explains.
Contemporary Americans have no respect and barely any understanding of the past. That's what they say about themselves, but it's not quite true. Rather, Americans tend to be highly selective about matters of heritage - and boundlessly enthusiastic, too. There are Civil War buffs, antique-car fanciers, vintage-movie fanatics. Nostalgic avocations absorb millions, and don't tell them about disregarding history. The fountain pen and ancillary accouterments, like fine paper and fashion-color inks, not only represent fascination with yesterday but also answer imperatives of today.
First, technology has not begun to eliminate the ink pen in its many forms, despite bamboozling predictions of obsolescence for all things manual. According to the Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association, about 6.1 billion of the reliable and handy word-processing devices were sold in 2000, 16 million of them fountain pens.
Second, e-mails, laser printers, form letters and all the rest devalue and depersonalize written communications. Messages written by hand, therefore, increase in value according to their scarcity. Just ask any number of executives or public figures, who understand that a thank-you note is worth many times more if penned by hand. The law may recognize the electronic signature, but an autograph hound won't.
"Computers? As efficient and practical as they may be, they aren't very personal. For many people, when they want to write something or sign something, they want their personality to show through," Lambrou says. "The only way to do that, I think, is with a fountain pen."
Classic Pens' Nagahara pen, named after the craftsman who produced its nib, may or may not duplicate the feel of writing a century ago. Who can attest to such a thing? But in a way that, say, a game of computer Minesweeper cannot, this pen astonishes, moving across paper left to right as if assisted by gravity. "Direction" is the term used in the trade. As you might expect from a pen that costs $595, the nib seems to glide on its own narrow cushion of ink, utterly without resistance.
