Proud as I am of my garden in the summer, the yard really never looks better than it does in the snow, with icicles hanging down from the old, rickety shed and white mounds covering the fence… And check out the wall that greeted me when I opened the door this morning!
Now that my Internet connection has finally been restored, here’s wishing everyone on the East Coast a happy last-blast-of-winter…
NY Times writer Patricia Cohen had a fascinating article in the Arts section on February 11, 2010. It was titled” “Where Faulkner Found His People: Characters’ Names Are Inside a Plantation Diary the Writer Knew Well.”
“The climactic moment,” the article begins, “in William Faulkner’s 1942 novel “Go Down, Moses” comes when Isaac McCaslin finally decides to open his grandfather’s leather farm ledgers with their ’scarred and cracked backs’ and ‘yellow pages scrawled in fading ink’ –proof of his family’s slave-0wning past.” 
The diary that was a source for Faulkner for names, incidents and details was penned in the mid-1800s by Francis Terry Leak, a wealthy plantation owner in Mississippi. His great-grandson, Edgar Wiggin Francisco, Jr., was a friend of Faulkner’s since childhood. Mr. Francisco’s son, now 79, recalled the writer’s frequent visits throughout the 1930s, and said Faulkner was fascinated with the diary’s several volumes. Mr. Francisco said he saw them in Faulkner’s hands and recalled that he “was always taking copious notes.”
Sally Wolff-King, a scholar in Southern literature at Emory University who discovered the connection between Faulkner and the journals, called it “a once-in-a-lifetime literary find.” A short preview of her findings was available in the fall 2009 issue of The Southern Literary Journal; her book “Ledgers of History: William Faulkner, an Almost Forgotten Friendship, and an Antebellum Diary,” is due out in June from Louisiana State University Press. 
Has a chance find of a diary in a friend’s house, a yard sale, flea market, antique store or junk shop given you a character or inspired a story?
Let me preface this by saying that nearly everyone keeps a variety of different notebooks, made by different brands, in regular rotation. We know that. We endorse that. And we all have different needs/preferences in terms of writing instruments; fountain pen users love our heaviest, 90g paper, while others need nothing more than a few pages of lightweight 64g to receive their gel pens and rollerballs and pencils.
But Karen and I were nonetheless intrigued to see pen maker Brian Goulet’s recent vlogs over at Ink Nouveau. As you may remember, Brian likes to subject the notebooks and stationery that his company sells to various acts of ink-related torture. A couple weeks ago, he put a Habana, a Webbie, and a Moleskine to a head-to-head bleedthrough test with a couple drops of J. Herbin. That video’s embedded above, so you can see the results for yourself.
Brian’s since done more detailed comparisons of Moleskine vs. Habana and the Moleskine vs. Webbie to discuss size, thickness, price, and all the other factors that help determine which notebooks best fit your needs. In a world where you can’t always try before you buy, they’re great tools to aid your decisions.
To learn more about Brian and his pens, check out this profile at Rhodia Drive!
I recently had an email from my friend, Kass Speerly of The Ink Sampler, asking me about J. Herbin’s ink –  l’Encre des Vaisseaux – The Ink of Ships. “I’ve seen the logo for the bottles of this ink before,” she wrote, “but never the ink. I assume it is no longer produced, but I am interested in some information about it, such as what the color was, what it’s primary use was intended for, when it was produced and when it went out of production. Also, curiously, could it ever be produced again.”
Those are all good questions for which I don’t have a ready answer.  But I will try to find out over the course of this year. Some information may be gleaned from the collective memory of the J. Herbin staff in France. I also plan to add a Wiki on historical J. Herbin inks to jherbin.com, so people anywhere in the world can contribute what they know or have discovered so we all can benefit.Â
The one piece of information I have about The Ink of Ships is that it was created in M. Herbin’s workshop prior to 1700. The rest is my conjecture…
As long as we’re revisiting old Quo Vadis ads, I figure I might as well retell the story of our most popular planning format…
Though it seems like one of those things that must have been around forever, the idea of weekly time management—at least as it applies to planners—didn’t exist until 1952. The inventor? A French doctor named F.G. Beltrami, who invented the “one week on two pages” planner format when he stamped a grid onto the white pages of a notebook. (Up till then, appointment books were like diaries, with one day per page.)
Dr. Beltrami called his invention the “Agenda Planning Diary.” His friends and family were so enthusiastic about it that he eventually decided to switch careers and form his own company to manufacture his creation. In 1954, Editions Quo Vadis was formed in Marseilles, France—and has been turning out new Agendas ever since.
Curious about the name “Quo Vadis”? Read Karen’s post about the topic.
Anyone else remember spinning pens during high school math and science classes? A simple, around-the-thumb loop was the only trick I ever came close to mastering (and I daresay I’ve since lost all aptitude), but there was a period in, like, 9th and 10th grade when pen spinning seemed to be everywhere.
Of course, nobody at my school had anything on the spinners at this Hong Kong tournament, some of whom even use special weighted pens and practice at home for hours. Apparently, you can’t actually write with those pens, but one mother’s comments may nontheless strike home for us fountain pen collectors. “The only thing I don’t like about it is he wastes a lot of money because he spends a lot of money on pens,” she says of her competitive son. As for the practicing, she continues, “I think it is a spirit that should be encouraged.”
I found these images recently when I was straightening up my desktop (New Year’s resolution: keep my files better organized).
Karen sent them to me years ago, and it’s just madness that I’ve never blogged about them, because they’re totally interesting. Here, for example, is a montage of old print ads (click through to see a larger version):
And here’s an office display that seems to have been set up for a trade show booth or something:
Here’s a simpler trade show display:
Guest blogger Lito Apostolakou is a freelance author, historian, and feature writer at Suite101; she also has a fascinating blog on the history of writing instruments. Here, she writes about seeing one of Leonardo’s notebooks.
It doesn’t look like much, in fact the humble notebook is no bigger than a pack of playing cards, yet it is one of the most precious objects on display in the new Medieval and Renaissance Galleries in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The notebook of Leonardo da Vinci which dates from 1490-3 is one of five owned by the museum and it was bequeathed by English collector, John Forster in 1876.
It is packed with tiny handwriting, notes about geometry, hydraulics and weights and (curiously) with drawings of hats. At the time Leonardo compiled his notebook he was working for Duke Ludovico Sforza in Milan and he was probably required to create costumes for court festivities – hence the hat drawings. The notebook seems to be suffering from ink corrosion (due to the iron gall ink Leonardo used) and is very light sensitive. It was a privilege to have seen it.
Brian Goulet, pen maker behind the Goulet Pen Company, has started a series of vlogs at InkNouveau.com wherein he reviews the notebooks, stationery, and inks that his company also carries, and performs various experiments.
For instance: the Triomphe Torture Test, which I’ve embedded above, and which subjects a few unlucky sheets of Clairefontaine Triomphe stationery to some awfully vigorous testing to demonstrate the lack of bleedthrough and feathering. Go Triomphe!
Here’s another cool thing I picked up in Germany: a pencil made from a hollowed-out twig. There was no brand or label on it (I saw it at a garden center), and the woman at the checkout didn’t know where it came from. But it’s fun to use all the same, and reminds me of a passage from Nabokov that I read on Palimpsest:
We recognize [the pencil's] presence in the log as we recognized the log in the tree and the tree in the forest and the forest in the world that Jack built.
