“In the 19th century, a pen of some kind was a necessity,” Binder says, whether or not a writer mulishly stood by his quills. In fact, former and current digital-world workers are disproportionately represented among pen-and-ink militants. It’s not just the older generation sticking to the familiar, says Binder, a former software engineer. It’s hard, to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, to convince a man of the value of something that’s about to destroy him economically.īut this time it’s different, argues just about every enthusiast involved, from Liz and Jon Chan, 27-year-olds who opened a writing-tools shop, Wonder Pen, in Toronto last year, to New Hampshire pen retailer (and pen doctor) Richard Binder. The operators of large-scale manuscript producers sneered at the craftsmanship in early printed books. Resistance to technological change is nothing new, of course. And whether they’re trying to emulate 10th-century ink recipes or lovingly restore 1940s fountain pens, it’s plain they are not about to go gently into the digital night. He may be alone in his methods, but Logan is otherwise just one of a growing legion of pen, ink and paper devotees. “It all gets to feeling like witchcraft,” says Jason Logan, an artist who prefers to scrounge Toronto parks for the ingredients in his black-walnut ink. Its key gallotannic-acid ingredient came from oak galls, apple-shaped growths on trees caused by secretions from wasp larvae. For a millennium, the Western world’s go-to ink, the one that monks with quill pens layered on vellum, was the wonderfully named iron gall, an ink with a peculiar production story.
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