Thursday - November 17, 2005
Elephant and Coral and me.
Heaven is on the second floor of Wheelock Place. It goes by the name Elephant and Coral, and I could not leave it without paying homage to each and every pen on display.
I have a very bad habit of wandering into National Bookstore and leaving with pens. Never just one. I must have every Pilot gel pen ever made. G-1, G-2, G-Tec C4 and C3... One of the souvenirs I brought home from Paris was the supremely kitschy Bic Millenium ballpen, the stick we all grew up with in gaudy gold instead of yellow plastic. I have a tiny collection of glass pens. (It is a tiny one because the damn things, being glass, like to break and chip when I'm not looking.) I have dip pens, and assorted nibs. I have a music nib, which I rarely use but like looking at; it looks like a dustpan with five serrations. My elbow copperplate nib is rusted beyond use. I have yet to find a store here that sells them. I have a Montblanc 149 with an OB nib. It has seen better days. I dropped it and broke the resin, once. Off it went to be serviced, just like a car. I bought it after much thought in 1996, when I was childless and fancy-free and somewhat foolish. It is my best memory of that year.
Unfortunately for my wallet and Lucien's trust fund, I also like pencils. Clutch pencils (aka leadholders), mechanical pencils, the Cretacolor Monolith (solid graphite, not woodclad), giant multicolor pencils, mechanical pencils with colored lead (go, Pilot Eno!) - I must have a representative of each category, and more than one, sometimes. I am currently obsessed with the Montblanc Leonardo sketch pencil; it is a squat version of the Meisterstuck, and it is very expensive for a pencil. It accepts only 5.5 mm lead. (You can buy 6 mm in Sketchbooks. But 5.5 mm is an idiosyncrasy.) It was the first item I asked to touch in Elephant and Coral.
It wasn't the last. I saw Namiki pens in person for the first time. I've only ever seen them online. I was in the office, once, scrolling through the hand-lacquered designs. I checked out the price of one I liked - and choked. Six thousand dollars! I suppose you can't be seen signing million-dollar contracts with a dinky Bic. (Although that might have been comme il faut in the good old days of the dotcom boom.) I also saw Graf von Faber Castell's last three Pens of the Year; the latest one, with snakeskin, reminds me of the wallets I always see in trade fairs.
I wasn't too fond of the ostentatious pens encrusted with filigree and sculpted to within a millimeter of unusability. Perhaps men with larger hands can use them, and I'm sure they look at home on 200-year old mother-of-pearl-inlaid writing desks, but I find them precious to the point of twee.
I liked the Conway Stewart Churchill ballpen they let me play with. And a Stipula pen a la moderne that Elephant and Coral had commissioned, from a design by Singapore Polytechnic University students - it was sterling silver and resin, if I remember correctly, and was compact, with a stub nib perfect for aspiring calligraphers.
I did come away with one pen, after much wringing of hands. Thanks, Elsie, for graciously wiping my drool off the shelves, and making the process half less painful and that much more convivial.