Fans of pencils pocket No. 2, opt for their No. 1: Blackwing 602

Writers like to think that it is the man or woman sitting upstream from the pencil who may become immortal. But here is the story of a pencil that has achieved immortality all by itself.

We are talking about the legendary Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602, which went out of production in 1998. Up in Writers' Valhalla, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and Archibald MacLeish are shedding a silent tear. Down here on Earth, Stephen Sondheim, Andre Gregory, and Roger Rosenblatt are scrounging to locate leftover 602s. The pencils once cost 50 cents; now they are selling for as much as $20 apiece on the Internet.

  thanks to boingboing

The Pencil Pages

Even though I spend untold hours making words with a keyboard, there is something special about making marks on paper (good paper) with a fine writing tool. I've never used a Blackwing — I didn't know about them. But I do use a fountain pen — a Rotring 700.

There is something about the feel of the pen in your hand, the way it glides across the paper, and the way the wet ink shines as the nib lays it down. It makes me focus a little more on what I am doing with the pen — the way I shape the letters and place them on the page. It seems that if you use a disposable writing tool, if you don't care about what you write with, you care less about what you write.

I bought this pen some years ago. I hadn't used it for a couple of years because it ended up in a box during a move that ended up in a storage locker. The storage locker was recently cleaned out, the box retrieved, and the pen rediscovered. I had originally been using the little plastic ink cartriges but they tend to be expensive. So I looked on the web for information about pens and ink.

Glen's Pen Page
All about pens, stores, inks and companies

The pen had a cartridge for bottle inks. I wanted a black black and Glen recommended Aurora which I found at...

Ink Palette

I'm in writing heaven.