…the proper way* to refill my vintage Esterbrook fountain pen that my friend Jan gave me.
Friends are nice, especially ones who give you vintage fountain pens that they found in the back of a junk drawer and say “Here, you can have this. If it doesn’t work just chuck it out or sell it on eBay or something.”
I wasn’t sure it would still work, but a good cleaning got rid of all the dried ink and crust that had built up . . . and now it writes perfectly fine, although it lacks the majesty and elegance of the Waterman Hemisphere that Keeley gave me for my birthday earlier this year.
Paul Auster has spoken about how he gets a bit fetishistic about his writing materials, particularly having a specific pen for Writing. I’ve never had trouble with being pretentious and I’m getting to the point of fetish about my pens now. I’ve got four of them and I don’t like to use them all interchangeably. I have pens for different tasks and different kinds of writing, it’s not all workmanlike-one-as-good-as-the-other.
And, sometimes, if I use one pen for too long . . . well, I’m afraid the other pens will get jealous.
* Three pulls on the plunger. No word on what happens if you pull more than that. Perhaps you go blind.