Free The Pen Friend by Ciaran Carson

in memory of that difference I am writing this with an American Esterbrook pen, American as Chevrolet, a 1939 model in iridescent red feathered lines with steel trim. It gleams as brightly as it must have done back then, like a red car parked on the lit forecourt of a filling (gas) station. The Esterbrook, like the Wearever I began with, was advertised as the Dollar Pen, but its selling point was a system of interchangeable nibs which could be unscrewed and screwed in at will, not gold but hard steel, sometimes tipped with iridium but more generally with just the steel rolled into an equally durable ball, and by the 1950s there were more than thirty different points, Firm Medium, Flexible Stub, The Right Point For the Way You Write , Extra Fine, Bold Signatures, For Easier More Comfortable Writing , Falcon Stub For Backhand Writing, Manifold For Carbon Copies, The World’s Most Personal Fountain Pen , Bookkeeping, Firm Fine Clerical, Affordable Writing Pleasure , slogans I gleaned from a run of National Geographic magazines from 1955 that I got from Beringer many years ago and unearthed for this purpose, because when I began writing with the Esterbrook I remembered the name from the pages of the National Geographic , interleaved with ads for Mosler Safe and Western Union, Zenith Radio, Kodak, Zeiss, Hartford Insurance, not to mention the sleek low-slung chrome-trimmed automobiles, Pontiac and Buick and Thunderbird and Cadillac and Chrysler, Put New Fun Under Your Foot , Spectacular from Takeoff to Top Performance , Long Sweeping Lines with Purposeful Meaning , in vivid reds and bright yellows and pastel blues and greens, occupied by proud smiling new owners who signed the ‘check’ with an Esterbrook, Every Inch Your Personal Pen – All Ways and Always . The nibs were numbered. I’m writing this with a Firm Medium, 2668, and the Esterbrook glides across the page as smoothly as a pen costing many times as much, epitomising Affordable Writing Pleasure . And before I flew to meet you in New York I perused the National Geographics for their bright promise of an America in which everything could be bought.
    I bought the Esterbrook on eBay. You might have wondered where I get all my pens. There are not that many outlets in Belfast for my passion. Beringer usually has a nice piece or two that he picks up at estate auctions, dead men’s pens, he calls them, and I still browse the antique stalls of Smithfield and Donegall Pass, though with diminishing frequency. Most of my stylophiliac transactions are now conducted on eBay. Before I ventured into that virtual market-place, my computer literacy had been confined mainly to the word-processing I used for my Esperanto book. I supposed the Internet to be a realm of dubious informational value, full of snares and pitfalls for the unwary, and I was nervous at first of entering a realm where the usual physical delineators of a transaction – speech, body language, facial expression – are absent, and where one cannot handle or examine in detail the item one is bidding on. But then I considered that those qualities of verbal and non-verbal language were precisely those used by any con man in the course of his profession, and that people can lie as readily as they tell the truth.
    So I entered eBay cautiously, and over the next few weeks I bought a 1930s Conway Stewart Scribe in Green and Black Candle-Flame, a 1920s Gold Medal ladies’ ring-top in Lapis Lazuli, and a 1940s Burnham in beautifully patterned Celluloid with lighter and darker shades of rose pink pearl outlined with black veins; as my confidence with these transactions increased, I became more and more drawn into the invisible international web.
    Now that I have bought some two hundred pens on eBay my opinion of humanity has been revised upwardly: some people might lie as readily as they tell the truth; but the vast majority of them are honest, and are anxious to be seen as such. The pens come packaged with loving care,