Fountain Pens In Fiction

January 2, 2015

?

Is it a book about time travel?

No.

January 5, 2015

Thank you, I will look for that author, hadn't come across him before, but sounds like his topics fit in with other interests I have.

I need to get a look at the opening page of Greenglass House again and post it here; something about smugglers and illegal green ink cartridges. I'm still trying to imagine what would make green ink illegal

Here is is:

"Smugglers are always going to be flush with cash as soon as they find a buyer for the eight cartons of fountain pen cartridges that write in illegal shades of green, but they never have money today. You should, if you are going to run a smuggler's hotel, get a big account book and assume that whatever you write in it , the reality is, you're going to get paid in fountain pen cartridges. If you're lucky. You could just as easily get paid with something even more useless."

Greenglass House by Kate Milford

January 7, 2015

No.

:|

Then I'm back to wondering how Victor Hugo get his hands on a Montblanc Meisterstuck.

January 7, 2015

:|

Then I'm back to wondering how Victor Hugo get his hands on a Montblanc Meisterstuck.

Perhaps he only dipped it?

Cob

September 12, 2015

... by courteous but implacable communications from Torrance itself, by what seems an old fashioned stubbed tipped fountain pen by Mr. Shimada, in sky blue ink."

from Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

January 2, 2016

Here's a peculiar entry from the Pulitzer prize winner of 2015, All The Light We Cannot See:

From a section of the book marked January 1, 1941

"After several hours the commandant's assistant calls him in and sets down his ballpoint and looks across his desk as though Werner is one among a vast series of trivial problems he must put right."

January 3, 2016

"Buchanan retrieved a fountain pen and black leather notebook from his coat's inner pocket. Buchanan placed the pen on the notebook's rag paper and wrote feathered into, behind it a question mark. He blew on the ink and closed the notebook."

from Serena by Ron Rash

May 23, 2017

From the first few pages of Jennifer Egan's "A Visit From the Goon Squad" (publ. 2010).

A kleptomaniac (Sasha) is relating a recent encounter to her therapist (Coz):

"But this wish only camouflaged the deeper feeling Sasha always had: the fat tender wallet, offering itself to her hand -- it seemed so dull, so life-as-usual to just leave it there rather than seize the moment, accept the challenge, take the leap, fly the coop, throw caution to the wind, live dangerously ('I get it,' Coz said... 'You mean steal it.').

He was trying to get Sasha to use that word, which was harder to avoid in the case of a wallet than with a lot of the things she'd lifted over the past year, when her condition... had begun to accelerate: five sets of keys, fourteen pairs of sunglasses, a child's striped scarf, binoculars, a cheese grater, a pocketknife, twenty-eight bars of soap, and eighty-five pens, ranging from cheap ballpoints she'd used to sign debit-card slips to the aubergine Visconti that cost two hundred sixty dollars online, which she'd lifted from her former boss's lawyer during a contracts meeting."

May 23, 2017

In Driving Heat by "Richard Castle" The main character Rook has a Hemingway Montblanc he uses and ends up stabbing a bad guy with it. They even have it fixed by Fountain Pen Hospital when the nib get damaged falling of a table.

May 23, 2017

In Driving Heat by "Richard Castle" The main character Rook has a Hemingway Montblanc he uses and ends up stabbing a bad guy with it. They even have it fixed by Fountain Pen Hospital when the nib get damaged falling of a table.

I keep wondering who actually writes those. I know that Nathan Fillion was going to book signings but I don't know if he was signing as himself or as "Richard Castle".

My money is on James Patterson, because he showed occasionally (as himself) as part of Rick's poker buddies, along with some other writers.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

May 23, 2017

I keep wondering who actually writes those. I know that Nathan Fillion was going to book signings but I don't know if he was signing as himself or as "Richard Castle".
My money is on James Patterson, because he showed occasionally (as himself) as part of Rick's poker buddies, along with some other writers.
Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

Some people think Tom Straw writes them. He was on am episode of Castle and to says Richard Castle won the Tom Straw writing award and there is no such thing. No idea who really writes them, but I have enjoyed reading them.

June 1, 2017

Well, since this thread has been resurrected, I can't resist replying to a quite old post.

In the movie "1984", the character Winston Smith finds a notebook and a fountain pen and starts to write, hidding from the telescreen

In the movie "a single man" Colin firth wakes up from a nightmare. He has left his FP uncapped on the blanket and ink has leaked on it.

There is no real close up on the pens so it's hard to identify

In the suppressed movie version, which came out in 1953, Winston Smith starts out writing in his illegal diary. The diary has pre-printed dates in it, and it's a diary for the year 1960. Smith opens the diary to the first page, picks up his fountain pen and crosses out the "1960" and writes "1984" under or beside it. And then he begins his rebellion-by-journal.

I first saw that movie on TV some time in the '50s. It was probably on The Late Show, which aired old movies starting at 11:15 or 11:30 PM, after the day's real TV programming was over. I was fascinated by that early part of the movie. I was a kid and had never heard of George Orwell or of the novel 1984. I was totally fascinated by seeing something I liked on the TV screen though. Using dark ink on paper, and making this something that the camera actually focused on was unusual in my life. I immediately wanted a diary. I'm not sure if I was even aware of what a diary was at the time. I don't recall how old I was when I saw this piece of a movie. But the relationship of the pen and ink to the paper in the book was really something that interested me.

I'd used fountain pens in school, but that just involved awful school work of various sorts, and none of that writing was for me. It was all for the teacher to look at

So I wonder if I'd be up here on FPN today, and covering thousands of pages of various notebook pages over the decades with ink, if I hadn't seen that tiny beginning of that movie when I did. It was my bed time and I was made to go to bed, denied any further views of writing in the diary.

It was years before I could get to see that entire movie. I liked it when I got to see the whole thing.

Jeez, I bet a shrink looking at this posting would have a few things to deduce about me .