I Am Going to Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter, Posted on September 25, 2025

Do you have a favorite pen or writing instrument? I do.
My favorite is a fountain pen I bought years ago in a shop in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The pen, a handsome Pelikan in black and green with a gold nib, sits on my desk at the Scott Family Collection.
By now, my Pelikan is old enough to qualify as a relic, and I was tempted to include it in the display case for our next exhibit, From Desk to Desk, A Journey Told in Letters. The in-house display includes various hand written letters, envelopes, dip pens, ink pots, and two handsome writing desks all testaments to how hard you had to work to communicate in the 1800s. Before the fountain pen took off, letters were written with ink, usually iron gall ink, and dip pens.
I have discovered that in the past, letters were often exchanged, that is, included in the envelope with a new letter. I also noticed that in many cases, the sender would give careful instructions about what parts of the enclosed letter to share and which portions to keep confidential. Of course, the reader must have been tempted to read out the confidential parts. They were often much more interesting and in some cases, hilarious!
But I digress. Back to the fountain pen.
I still don’t know why I wanted that pen. I was in graduate school at the time and spent most of my waking moments peering through microscopes at extremely tiny creatures who had no awareness of me or how much my degree depended on them.
A fountain pen is a messy thing. I do not recommend storing it in a shirt pocket, although the cap does have a cute clip in the shape of a pelican’s bill. Filling a fountain pen involved dipping it into a bottle of ink and pulling up a small amount into the pen’s reservoir. Even if you do this maneuver successfully, there is always the chance you will get ink all over your fingers when you use the pen to write.
As it turned out, my fountain pen came in handy when I was brushing up on my German. Back then you had to show proficiency in a foreign language to get your degree. I had brief encounters with French and Latin, but German was the only foreign language I had any hope of passing a test in. I used the pen to write out words and sentences, trying to renew my acquaintance with a language I had not studied in a very long time.
I took German, starting in junior high school. The curriculum at that time expected the student to learn German the way children learn languages, that is by hearing it spoken. We were not allowed to see the words printed on paper until about half way through the first year. The odd sounds crystallized for me at that moment. It did not hurt that in German, the nouns are capitalized. That was my light bulb moment and I loved German and German pens ever since.