While I was sick last month, I started making my way through the Sherlock Holmes mysteries I so loved as a child. Of course, now that I’ve started, I can’t seem to put them down. And I was amused to read the following in The Hound of the Baskervilles:
If you examine it carefully you will see that both the pen and the ink have given the writer trouble. The pen has spluttered twice in a single word and has run dry three times in a short address, showing that there was very little ink in the bottle. Now, a private pen or ink-bottle is seldom allowed to be in such a state, and the combination of the two must be quite rare. But you know the hotel ink and the hotel pen, where it is rare to get anything else.
I daresay I’ve never been to a hotel that had fountain pens on hand, let alone a dip pen. But judging from the cheapo Bics they all seem to offer, I’d say very little has changed in the abstract.
