Fountain Pens, Handwound Watches … Retro or What?

I am writing this with a Gama fountain pen (eyedropper filler; made by Gem & Co., Chennai) filled with Pelikan 4001 Royal Blue ink.  When I wrote this initially as a first draft, I was aware of all the details about my fountain pen; also the fact that I filled it with ink the previous day.  When this piece appears on this space all these ‘facts’ would become irrelevant.  But that is beside the point.  What is or was relevant is the fact that, since the pen is a demonstrator model (i. e., transparent cap, section, and barrel), I could ‘see’ the flow of ink as it courses through the feeder and seeps out of the nib and transforms itself into words on the page.  I can also feel the ever so slight toothiness of the nib as it gives me the perfect grip and release as the nib glides over the page.  I make changes as I write – adding a word or phrase, scratching out another, arrow marks indicating movement, circled words that need a better alternative, or a question mark expressing uncertainty. 

This experience of writing with a fountain pen is what most fountain-pen-lovers treasure.  There is progress and technological development, and that has made life easier.  And you don’t get ink on your hands!!  Fountain pens, which were once the only ink-based writing instruments, have now become niche.  When I use my fountain pen in public, there are varied reactions – Oh, these are still around!  How do you write with these?  Do you get inks for these?

What is the hook on which we fountain pen nuts hang this fondness or this obsession for fountain pens?  Is this just a sort of ‘retro’ thing?  Then I think of my other ‘fad’ – HMT mechanical/automatic watches.  Fountain pen users and collectors are also usually watch enthusiasts too.  Though I began with fountain pens, HMT mechanical watches followed soon enough.  And for most of us in India, both are ‘retro.’ 

I began to think of other things that ‘fad’ me.  I sport a beard, so I only do some facial landscaping around the edges when required.  But I realized I was/am partial to the safety razor, not the cartridge ones.  I took this ‘fad’ a bit further when I started looking for a cutthroat razor.  When I saw that the prices were prohibitive, I settled for a couple of shavettes – very close in looks and similar experience, but not the same as a cutthroat razor.  I followed these clues and saw that I instinctively favoured lace-up shoes over pumps.  A liking for lace-up shoes is surely not retro, is it?  What about those LP records from my father-in-law’s ‘give away’ collection that I had salvaged and conserved in the hope of playing them on my own record player in the future?

This became an interesting topic for discussion one Sunday morning at Abids with my book-hunting friends.  Vinod and I are fountain pen geeks, but Vinod is not excited about watches; while Umashankar is a HMT watch fan, he is not a fountain pen nut.  I was the only one with both fads, plus some more.  One Sunday, when Umashankar was talking about watches, Vinod wondered why people collect watches as you don’t do anything ‘with’ them, you only ‘wear’ them, but with a fountain pen, one could write, use different inks, use different nib widths, etc. 

Now, this was tricky.  I had to defend the watch people and also make sure that I stayed with the fountain pen community.  I had to think of an argument that masked the ‘use’ factor, and one that went beyond ‘use.’  A liking for ‘retro’ was a good argument, but didn’t seem a convincing one.  At that time the word ‘ritual’ came to mind.  I told my friends that there is a certain ‘ritual’ or ‘ceremony,’ if you like, involved in the use of these things.  If you own a mechanical watch, you wind it up every morning before you strap it on to your wrist; if you use a fountain pen, the filling of ink, wiping, once-a-fortnight flushing and cleaning, drying, all are steps in a ritual; those who use a cutthroat razor know that the stropping of the blade, the quality of the strop, the angle of the blade, are all vital if you don’t want to slice your throat; the tying of shoelaces every morning is itself a mini ritual. 

Something that binds all these ‘fads’ that I have is not only a liking for the ‘old things,’ but something that is redolent of the ‘old’ – like ‘old times,’ a little bit of leisure, a little less stress, not so much ‘what,’ but ‘how,’ a little bit of care and attention and a little bit of love for the simple day-to-day things that one does. 

Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks … the whole set and some random thoughts …

It is a little more than five years now.  I had picked up Past Reason Hated and A Dedicated Man at the biannual Best Books Sale at YMCA Secunderabad in September 2011.  I had never heard of Peter Robinson or his ‘Inspector Banks’ series of novels before.  The covers of these two novels actually reminded me of the covers of Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels.  I read the blurbs, and all those ‘praise’ words, and finally, the covers decided it for me.  I was a bit apprehensive.  I started reading one, finished it and felt that I could do more and then started the other one.  A Dedicated Man happened to be the second in the series, so I felt I was not too far away from the beginning.  But it was only in 2013 that I could get a copy of Gallows View, the first in the series, and two more Inspector Banks novels.  Abids and the Best Books Sale were my usual hunting grounds and I would find an Inspector Banks novel now and then. 

I had a little bit of a difficulty in getting into the world of police procedural crime novels when I started reading Rankin’s Rebus novels.  It took me some time to get used to the painstaking evidence gathering, long periods of stillness, dogged enquiries, and the bleak weather in Rebus’ novels … until something happened.  And slowly I discovered that I liked the police procedural crime novel.  It was around this time that I discovered Inspector Banks for myself.  And later, of course, I met Wallander.  I had only read a couple of Rebus novels and I told myself, ‘why not.’  I am happy I made the decision to pick up the two Peter Robinson novels that day five years ago.  I would read each Banks novel as and when I found one.  I was not in a hurry and then suddenly one day, quite recently, I discovered the used books portals on Amazon and I ended up buying the rest of the Inspector Banks series in a rush.  Not only buying, but also reading them in a rush.  So, here they are …

 

 
Though each book is a standalone story in terms of the specific case and the investigation, reading the books in sequence has its own rewards.  Apart from Banks’ personal life that moves along, as husband, father, and divorcee, we see Banks being recognized also as the father of a son who is a budding rock musician, making a name for himself.  Banks is a big music fan and he can listen almost to anything.  In the early novels, we see Banks listening to music in his car on tapes, and then come the CDs, and then in the recent novels, we see him playing music in his car on his iPod.  His colleagues who travel with him in his car are extremely exasperated by the kind of music he chooses to play.  Peter Robinson, the author, also indulges Banks’ love for music by describing the music being played and gives details about the singer and the album.  Some of the most magical and contemplative moments come in the later novels, when Banks relaxes in the evenings on the wall of his isolated cottage with a glass of wine.  There is music playing out in the background, and the sounds of beck flowing just some distance away, and the occasional bleats of sheep, and the almost ubiquitous call of the curlew.

Charlie Lovett's The Bookman's Tale ... an antiquarian bookseller, a painting, and Shakespeare

Charlie Lovett’s The Bookman’s Tale (2013) is one of the most satisfying and enjoyable bibliothrillers that I had read in recent times.  I had written about the bibliothrillers that I had already read in my 4-part series on the topic, and in the fourth part I had mentioned some novels whose names I had come across, but hadn’t read and The Bookman’s Tale was one of them.  I read some comments and descriptions of the novel and decided to buy it along with two other bibliothrillers that were on my list, Sheridan Hay’s The Secret of Lost Things and Matthew Pearl’s The Dante Club.

The Bookman’s Tale opens with Peter Byerly, an American antiquarian bookseller temporarily residing in England, opening a book on Shakespearean forgeries written in 1796 in a rare book shop at Hay-on-Wye, and finding a four-inches square painting of his wife Amanda.  The trouble was Amanda was dead and buried in America and the woman in the painting couldn’t have been his wife.  The painting had the initials B. B. and nothing much.  A rather dramatic opening and I was hooked.       

The story moves from this ‘present’ to the past where Peter is a shy and introverted freshman at Ridgefield University at North Carolina.  He feels at home in the Robert Ridgefield Library and secures a work-study position in the library and books become his refuge.  It is here that he becomes interested in rare books.  He meets Amanda at the University.  Charlie Lovett narrates their story of falling in love and their love for books at a leisurely pace and it is the most enchanting part of the novel.  There is an interesting back story to Amanda that shapes their future life among books – as rare book lovers and later as antiquarian booksellers.  The lookalike portrait of his wife makes Peter restless and he wants to find out who the woman in the portrait is and the identity of the painter.  This leads him to the ‘book’ and the chase. 

 

The book is Robert Greene’s Pandosto, whose plot inspired Shakespeare to write The Winter’s Tale.  The book in question is the actual copy given to Shakespeare and on which he wrote his comments and notes for his use.  This copy was later returned to the ‘bookseller’ who had given it to Shakespeare to make something out of an obscure book.  And we are taken back to Elizabethan England to see the literary scene there.  We see The Bard and the University Wits and the unscrupulous ‘booksellers’ and agents.  We also get to see lots of carousing and conversations among the Wits in taverns.  Old Bill is clearly not ‘one among them’ for the Wits.  This is the second bibliothriller that I have read after Michael Gruber’s The Book of Air and Shadows that takes the reader back to Elizabethan England to meet The Bard.

The copy of Pandosto which Shakespeare used and marked has survived and its discovery in the 20^th century would put to rest all doubts about Shakespeare’s authorship of ‘his’ plays.  On the periphery are Stratfordians and Anti-Stratfordians, 20^th century literary agents, and literary historians who enliven Peter’s quest for Pandosto.  That copy of Pandosto would also provide a closure to Peter Byerly’s search for the identity of the face in the painting that unexpectedly floats down from a book on Shakespeare’s forgeries written in 1796.