Let fountain pens flow

In this coldly pixelated age, old-fashioned writing implements make a small but meaningful comeback, writes Miranda Purves

Around 40 people had gathered on a recent weekday evening in SoHo at the Lamy store, a 600-square-foot ground-floor showcase of contemporary Germanic pen design. Packed around a table with notepads and test pens, the group, ethnically diverse but mostly men, lacked the slick appearance you expect of customers at a luxury boutique.

In fact, it quickly became clear that these were nerds. Twenty-first-century pen nerds.

They had come for several reasons. For a pen nerd, there’s endless pleasure in sharing one’s collection of fountain pens, or “fps” as they’re called on the Reddit board where they live when not at shows or events.

Lamy was handing out free Vibrant Pink Al-Stars, a sleek aluminum-bodied pen, and plastic Safaris (each around $40). And then there was the guest of honour: Brian Goulet, of Goulet pens, who had the handsomeness of a 1950s young dad, thick hair like mink, broad shoulders, a warm handshake.

“He’s, like, a rock star in the world of pens,” said Steve Birkhold, the CEO of Universal Luxury Brands, which own the American distribution rights to Lamy. Birkhold, formerly the CEO of Diesel and Lacoste, has started his own company with a partner, Eli Hollander, to bring niche, design-focused European brands to the US.

Lamy, headquartered in Heidelberg, is still owned by the German family that founded it in the 1930s. Its Lamy 2000, introduced in 1966, a Bauhaus-inspired minimalist steel pen, made the brand’s reputation as the cool pen maker.

This year Birkhold opened the SoHo store and another in the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. “Business has already tripled,” he said, since he bought the US distribution rights in 2017. The office supply and paper company that held them previously, he added, didn’t understand how to take an “omni-channel” approach and market the “pen brand for millennials”.

The fountain pen has been imperilled since the rise of disposable ballpoints in the 1960s; by the ‘90s and early aughts the almighty keyboard was positioned to kill it off. Once-stalwart household names like Sheaffer (Sylvia Plath’s preferred brand) were closing American factories to manufacture cheap parts in Asia and seeking corporate buyers. Holdout users were mainly ageing collectors, and only a few firms, like Montblanc, which had been acquired in 1988 by Richemont, were flourishing.

Goulet, 34, opened his namesake e-commerce site at 25, in 2009, with his wife, Rachel. His affable but rigorous social-media presence and tantalising website are credited with making the old-fashioned tool both literary and lit.

Generationally at ease with the so-called pivot (he majored in commercial real estate management at Virginia Tech), he gave up on his own pens. “That was an emotionally hard transition, but a smart business decision,” he said on the phone later, from Goulet Pens in Richmond, Virginia, where he has a 24,000-sq ft building and 39 full-time employees.

The company’s website cannily bottles and sells small ink samples and walks you through how-tos: how to “flush” a pen, how to use a wax seal (there are now flexible ones that can go through the postal machines). There are also reviews of new pens and interviews.

There are hundreds of new, delicious ink colours and small-batch firms with romantic bottles and names like poems or perfumes (Organics Studio, Nitrogen; Colorverse, Andromeda, DeAtramentis Black, Roses, Pilot Iroshizuku, Kosumosu, Robert Oster Fire & Ice, Monteverde California Teal). Manufacturers like Diamine in England, once almost moribund, have customers again.

© 2019 The New York Times