Baron Fig Squire Classic
The Squire Classic was the first “fancy” pen I ever bought—fancy meaning it cost about what a date-night dinner costs, with a couple glasses of wine. I’d passed a professional licensing exam and decided that warranted a treat.
I left the stationery store braced for Protestant guilt about the extravagance, but it never came. The Squire became my daily go-to, and I’ve since bought a second so the pen cup at the office matches the one at home (I have the same computer mouse at both desks too). The brass is weighty without being heavy, and the Squire-branded rollerball refill lays a thick line that still dries fast. The reverse-tapered barrel hugs the hand but wants to wander off a desk, which makes me feel protective of it.
I’ve drawn hundreds of doodles of my house cats with this pen and will draw thousands more.
YSTUDIO Classic Revolve
The wandering Squire was on my mind when I bought another brass-barreled pen years later. The YSTUDIO Classic Revolve has a milled hexagonal body that sticks to a desk and stays balanced in the hand. It begs to be twirled in the palm, like the baton of a majorette.
Adjusting the line is a matter of swapping standard Schmidt refills. Mine is coated in a black lacquer that’s easing into a patina with use.
Kaweco Brass Sport
My first real fountain pen, since the calligraphy set I got when I was a kid doesn’t count in my sketchbook. The Kaweco Brass Sport is a pocket pen with real weight to it, a medium nib, and blue ink—always blue. It’s fun to draw with, and I proofread my fiction with it, in blue so the pages don’t look like homework. It’s also become my “signing pen,” for the rare important document and the less rare check to the auto repair shop.
Rotring 600 Pencil
When I was in grade school, I imagined two career paths before me:
- Astronaut
- Architect
I didn’t know about the Fisher Space Pen when I was twelve, but I was keenly aware of the Rotring 600, locked in a glass case in the art supply section of the Ben Franklin store. While my mother shopped for household sundries I would stand watching this architect’s drafting pencil, imagining that if only I owned it I could draw more precisely than with the ninety-nine cent plastic pencil that held the same lead refills. Its knurled grip and hexagonal body would turn me into a Frank Lloyd Wright. I saved up enough quarters and dollars for what was then an absurdly expensive tool—the price of fifty packs of baseball cards, give or take—and drew with it for miles of lead.
One day teenage clumsiness prevailed and I dropped the Rotring on the terrazzo floor of my high school, snapping the aluminum spigot at the end clean off. By then I was more interested in pizza and compact discs than writing implements, and the Rotring went through the ring of a Topeka High trash barrel.
Years after I became an architect I bought its twin. Architects don’t draft with pencils anymore, so it sits in my pencil cup.
Apple Pencil Pro
The Pencil Pro is Apple’s answer to the wandering-cylinder problem, and it isn’t a hexagon. It’s a cylinder with one flat side, which keeps the stylus put on a desk and lets it snap to the edge of an iPad, where hidden magnets hold it and it suckles a charge.
The white plastic body is light in the hand, and the flat is orienting—there’s a right way to hold it that your fingers find on their own. It doesn’t feel cheap exactly, but the plastic flexes and squeaks over a long drawing session.
There’s a saying that the best camera is the one you have with you, and by that measure the Pencil Pro is the best drawing instrument I own. It turned drawing from an occasional planned session into something I do every week. I’ve made more finished illustrations with it than with all my Prismacolors, Derwents, and Rapidographs combined, and I wouldn’t have the time or discipline to produce one for Johnny America every other week without it.
Italian Multi-Pen
This metal multi-pen—manufacturer unknown, but labeled “Italy”—was a gift from my wife, wrapped in colored paper with twine belted around the barrel. Clicking one of four levers at the hilt unsheathes a ballpoint in black, red, green, or blue.
This style of pen was a fixture of my childhood, albeit in plastic. My mother never took much convincing to add one to the shopping cart at the back-to-school supply run at Skaggs, before it became Osco Drug. My love of office supplies is, by all evidence, genetic.
I grab it for grocery lists, one color per store, and for signing the back of a credit card, since the ink dries instantly. If the house were on fire we’d scoop up the cats first, then passports and papers, but this pen would be in the first armload.
Cross Pen and Pencil Sets
As would the two Cross pen and pencil sets I own, one monogrammed in Roman capitals with my maternal grandfather’s name and the other with my father’s, spelled out in cursive. In both branches of my family a Cross set was the apex birthday or Father’s Day gift for a man of a certain age, balanced comfortably between practicality and niceness.
My grandfather, a farmer, carried his mechanical pencil in the breast pocket of his bib overalls next to a carpenter’s pencil; my father tucked his pen into his checkbook for my entire childhood and embarrassingly far into the check card era.
The two sets are nearly identical, the small differences chosen by the women who bought them. They feel warm in the hand, nimble.
These pens are built so simply and well I can imagine them traveling from hand to hand until humans evolve out of hands.