George Nelson

DESIGNGreat writers

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Ebony pencil Rapidograph

I'VEBEEN PUSHED by circumstance,of late, into thinking about writing.

Not the deathless-prose variety butthe business of putting words downon paper. At first blush it hardlyseems possible that the modest im-plements involved would providemuch in the way of evidence of goodor bad design, but the subject is lessbarren than one might suspect. Thestores have never been so full of newand different writing tools, each withits particular defects or virtues.

There are uncounted varieties ofball-points, now offered with an en-tire spectrum of points, from extra-fine (accountants, it says on the box)to bold (waitresses and credit-cardholders). There are all the markers,also from fine to jumbo, with felt

46 nibs or nylon; china markers; laundry

Aurora Parker"Big Red"

MontblancDiplomat

markers (indelible); and kid mark-ers (nontoxic). Plus mechanical pen-cils (one brand, Pen tel, has leads sothin you need tweezers to pick themup) , the good old plain pencils (most-ly hexagonal so they won't roll offdesk tops), carbon pencils, charcoalpencils, and fountain pens. There arealso special types of pens, many ofthem superlative for writing, like theRapidograph, which feeds its inkdown through a fine tube with a wireinside that jiggles when you write, sothe ink won't clog. The Osmiroid pen(made in England, $3) comes withinterchangeable nibs that offer a va-riety of writing styles. I tried myillegible signature with one of theiritalic pens, and it came out with anGeorge Nelson heads a design firm in NewYork and is at work on a book about design.

Lamy Osmiroid Pentel

unfamiliar kind of eighteenth-centuryelegance.

When I was in high school, morethan a few years back, one of themost gratifying graduation presents,if Father couldn't come through withthe 1923 bright red Buick roadster,was the red-and-gold Parker, recentlyreissued for the nostalgia market as"Big Red." It isn't a fountain penanymore, just a nylon-tip job with areplaceable cartridge. A comparisonbetween the two models provides aninteresting commentary on the value,then and now, of five dollars. The

. original was made, I would guess,out of a rod of some heavy plastic,drilled and tapped, and it had a lotof gold plating on the nib and clip.Big Red isn't in the same class at all,although it is a perfectly good fine-

line marker. Automation and near-miracles in the plastics industry arenot enough to match the quality acrew of conscientious mechanicscould turn out back then.

MOSTL Y WHEN I WRITE I use atypewriter. The typewriter in

my office is an electric, the OlivettiPraxis, designed by an old friend,Ettore Sottsass, Jr., who lives andworks mostly in Milan. It is a verycrisp little object, very Italian in itsclcgance and sophistication, and itworks admirably. In the country Ihave a manual machine, the ruggedold Olivetti Studio, which kept mecontented for years, until I got usedto the electric.

Anyone who does a fair amount oftyping knows that switching backand forth from a manual to an elec-tric machine creates problems thatcould easily lead to madness. Brusha key with your finger and the elec-tric will give you an unwanted char-acter on the paper. The manual, giv-en fingers accustomed to the elec-tric's no-pressure typing, becomessheer labor, and the printing is all ofdifferent weights, depending on howhard each key is struck. The speed,of course, is like trying to run inchildhood nightmares. John O'Hara,who used to be a neighbor, had aportable so old and beat-up that itmust have gone back to his earliestnewspaper days. Still, it banged out afantastic dollar volume of best sellersthat could have paid for IBM Selec-tries by the gross, but he loved it andnever switched, at least during theyears I knew him.

The relationship between a crafts-man and his tools is always a verypersonal thing. I remember a verygood photographer who remarkedthat while he used a Leica, a mass-produced article identical with allother Leicas, his camera had a feel,through years of use, that madeit different from all others. Use, inother words, creates an almost or-ganic linkage between implement anduser. There are many familiarimages: Sherlock Holmes and hismagnifying glass, Marshal Dillonwith his infallible six-shooters,the Japanese carpenter with hisplane. True, it is not that easy tovisualize the writer with his type-writer, possibly. because it doesn'tfit the hand. A fountain pen wouldbe a better symbol of the writer-tool

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DESIGN

relationship, but even this doesn'twork. Nothing has ever really re-placed the image of the quill pen. Isuppose fountain pens are not suffi-ciently photogenic, and, anyway, theyare supposed to be obsolete.

Obsolescence is an odd process. Ina disposable-consuming society onetends to assume that as soon as a bet-ter product comes out, the old onebecomes obsolete. But in reality it isnot quite that simple. Brooms weresupposedly made obsolete by carpetsweepers and then vacuum cleaners;bicycles were "replaced" by motorvehicles. But these days the roads arefull of cars with rack-mounted ten-speed bikes on their roofs, and itwould be hard to find a householdwithout at least one broom.

What often happens as new de-signs proliferate is not obsolescencebut an increase in specialization.This fact is sometimes used as socialcriticism, the proposition being thatAmericans are gadget crazy, but infactories, which are not gadget hap-py at all, the same thing goes on. Aplant fully equipped with power-driven screwdrivers will also havethe older hand models around, andfor good reason. When the originalReynolds ball-point was inauguratedwith much fanfare at Gimbels in NewYork about twenty-five years ago,everybody rushed to buy (at an out-rageous price), and predictions wererife that the fountain pen had had it.But things didn't work out that way.The fountain pen simply moved fromthe role of a near-universal writingtool to that of a more specializeddevice.

I discovered one of these roles ona trip when I had some writing to do,and the portable typewriter was justtoo heavy and too bulky. So I boughta large bottle of ink and stuck mypen, a Montblanc Diplomat model,in a pocket. The Montblanc is a giantamong pens, with a barrel almost ahalf-inch thick, and my guess wasthat it held enough ink to write thefirst half of War and Peace. It wasn'tquite that good, for it dispensed inkas generously as it took it in, but itwas okay. Anyone with a writingchore and a deadline is always look-ing for some legitimate way to goofoff from time to time, and refuelingthe pen, in this respect, was ideal.Not only did the reservoir and nibhave to be washed out in water eachtime but when the pen was finallyfilled it had to be wiped carefull

with tissue, or your fingers would besemipermanently stained. All thistook at least five minutes, and witha little practice I was able to stretchit to ten.

The great thing about being stuckwith a pen rather than a typewriter,however, was not the fussing around:it was the rediscovery of sensa-tion, the feeling of a nib slidingacross paper and the pleasantmanipulation of the instrument sothat all strokes were full of ink andnot two thin parallel lines with a voidbetween. Then there was the fascinat-ing interaction of pen and paper,with one result on smooth paper anda different feel and look on paperwith some tooth to it. What I amtrying to say is that stepping downthe technological scale, from moderntypewriter to the relatively primitivepen, changed the act of writing froman "operation" to an experience.

One of the most subtle dehumaniz-ing things technology does is to elim-inate experience. When I was a stu-dent, I went on a bicycle trip throughthe hill towns of Italy, and most ofwhat I remember of the man-tool re-lationship was that I walked up a lotof hills. Still, it was good for the ap-petite, sleeping was no problem, andtrying to beat a thunderstorm down aten-mile hill into Perugia late one af-ternoon was something to remember.I don't think there would have beenthat much to remember with a car.As flying moved from open cockpitsto the closed fuselage and pressurizedcabins of high-altitude jets, experi-ence diminished-which is why theycan sell those inside seats in the747 s: there is nothing to see if youlook out. Chevrolet has been suggest-ing that the best way to see Americais in one of their cars, but on the biginterstates you don't see America. Iam sure that the revivals of camp-ing, hiking, bicycling, home-bakedbread, and the other do-it-yourselfactivities have come about becauseof a growing mass feeling of sensorydeprivation, and the feeling reflects avery real and unpleasant reality,which is that technology, except invery carefully rationed doses, is notreally good for people.

I can see some astute reader point-ing out that the big Montblanc is aproduct of modern industry, and Iwould not argue, but, compared to atypewriter, it is not as impersonal,probably because the engineering isless sophisticated.

DESIGN

ONE ALSO BUYS PRODCCTS becauseone cannot resist their looks, and

as a designer I am especially vulner-able. The first really modern fountainpen I ran across was the Lamy, aWest German pen introduced in theU.S. a few years back. One is alwaysinclined to think, when dealing withshapes and functions as simple asthose of a pen, that not many varia-tions on the theme are possible, butthe Lamy stands out as having a verydifferent look. It is all black, notshiny but matte, and the only visibleadded element is an elegant clip ofwhat appears to be brushed stainlesssteel. A very beautiful nothing, so tospeak, and I bought one in tribute toits anonymous designer.

I used the pen and liked it, buteventually I found that the designerhad succumbed to styling temptationinstead of respecting a functionalneed: the finger grip tapers in such asleek way from the barrel to the nibthat I found my fingers were alwayssliding down the taper. I still use theLamy from time to time just for thetactile pleasure it gives, but that flawbothers me-so handsome a toolshould have remembered that it isfirst, after all, a tool. Or perhaps Isqueeze too hard; some good toolsfind one kind of hand better thananother.

The next encounter I had with apen came as a gift. The Italians havebeen proving, during the past dec-ade, that if they are not the best in-dustrial designers in the world, thereare none who are better, and MarcoZanuso is one of the best of the Ital-ians. The gift was his new Aurorapen, produced by a manufacturer inItaly, and it is at this writing one ofthe half-dozen most elegant small in-dustrial objects in existence.

Externally, the pen is a slim (aboutpencil thickness) tube of stainlesssteel, plugged at both ends with blackplastic. The cap, in some mysteriousway, does not slip over the barrel-as is the case with the Lamy, theMontblanc, and all the other pens Ihave ever seen-but it ends up flush,so that the closed pen is a smoothtube with no visible taper. The cliphas a perky little fillip on the end,and it slips into any pocket withoutfuss. A finger grip of black plastic isfluted, so there is no problem of apositive grip for fingers. The niblooks, in some odd way, like an oldsteel pen's, and the writing quality issuperb. The only place I have seen

the Aurora in New York is at GeorgJensen's, where it sells for $50. It isso extraordinarily sleek and beautifulthat it actually looks the price.

,lFTER THE GRATIFYING TRIP with.f'. the Montblanc, there came an-other, also with some writing to do,when I decided to slide down thetechnological scale another fewnotches. This time it was a handfulof Ebony pencils, Eberhard Faber's#6325, Jet Black, Extra Smooth,twenty cents at all good stores. I hadaccidentally discovered that the feelof the Ebony point on Goldenrodpaper was comparable to sippingDom Perignon for the first time, andI wanted to spend a week swimmingin such inexpensive sensuous plea-sure. It was great. And as a substi-tute for the ink-filling routine, if youtake one of the tiny brass pencilsharpeners that art supply stores im-port from Germany, you can spendeven more time putting a perfectpoint on that jet black extra smoothlead. The reason for insisting on thelittle brass pencil sharpener insteadof the more common aluminum oneis not quality: both use special razor-type blades and work equally well.It is the nice feel that comes with abit of added weight. Since the priceof either is under eighty-five cents,this is no place to cut corners. Thereis another thing to be said for writ-ing with the Ebony: it is sheathed inan aromatic wood, cedar I imagine,and the fresh scent of the shavingsadds still another thrill for the hun-gry senses.

I don't want to drop the Ebonypencil without noting that it is prob-ably one of those real rarities, an ab-solutely perfect design. The shaft iswithout incident or decoration, asidefrom the necessary manufacturer'sinformation printed in white. Thegrip is as good as a finger grip couldbe: it fits and nothing slips around.The fingers never touch the lead.The point is instantly put into per-fect condition with a cheap and sim-ple tool. It never leaks, not even indepressurized cabins,' and I imagineit would write under water if it hadto. It is close to weightless, for allpractical purposes, and it functionsduring its entire life without need forsupplies from the outside world. Ifyou lose the little sharpener, anyknife with an edge will do a perfect-ly good job. I am not suggesting that

all these estimable qualities are thedoing of Eberhard Faber, but merelythat the pencil is, from the most crit-ical point of view, a genuinely classicdesign.

The reason for my fix of Golden-rod paper (standard product, anyoffice supply store) is that it has ex-actly the right amount of tooth tomake the physical act of writingsheer delight, and also because thedeep yellow-orange color makes iteasy to use in bright sunlight.

T HE MONTBLANC is different from.the other pens in that it is not asophisticated modern design. In fact,I suspect that it is not a modern de-sign at all. It has a funny kind ofpudgy gold clip (which works justfine), it is decorated with three sep-arate sets of gold bands set into theshiny black plastic cap and barrel,and it looks rather like a fat blackcigar. The gold nib looks just like thenih people have been putting on foun-tain pens for more than a generation,and the finger grip has a rim on itso that fingers will not slide down tothe nib and get stained. It is old-fashioned, for modern tastes, never acandidate for museum recognition.It is, in fact, nothing more than anabsolutely marvelous design for writ-ing, and I hope it goes on forever,like its guarantee. A couple of yearsback I damaged the point while inVienna, found the company repre-sentative in an ancient loft, got acomplete new nib installed in half anhour-and an indignant lecture onlifetime warranties when I attemptedto pay.

A couple of days ago some youngdesigner friends from Paris came byfor a visit. I had discarded my jacketand had the Montblanc stuck in myshirt pocket.

"Aha!" said one of them. "So youown that fat old Montblanc too!"

There was nothing to do but admitthe fact, since there it was.

"Funny," he said, "not a singledesigner we know would do a penlike that." I agreed. We talked for abit about Zanuso's beautiful newAurora. "But we all own the Mont-blanc," he went on. "All the designersI know own one. Funny, isn't it?"

It really wasn't funny at all. Whyshouldn't designers recognize a greatdesign when they see one? Even ifnone of us could bring ourselves todesign anything quite so unstylish? 0