Fountain Pens

Anciently a man with bunched shoulder muscles squatted on his lean haunches and, with a piece of chipped flint, scratched a design on a piece of bone. That was writing.

A Babylonian tucked his curled black beard out of the way and with a wedge-tipped stylus stamped cuneiform characters into soft clay bricks, which he later baked and for security wrapped in an envelope of clay. That too was writing.

In Egypt a thin-shanked scribe squatted cross-legged and on a broad sheet of papyrus spread across his lap drew, with brush dipped into ink-the hieroglyphics of his master's discourse. That too was writing.

In Greece, a helot trotted down to a river marsh to gather kalamoi, hollow tubular stalks of grass. Each kalamos he whittled to a tapering point and handed with ink to his master, who forthwith wrote out the accounts of his battles and of his business deals.

A Pompeian artisan pounded a sheet of bronze into the shape of a reed pen. It served well for writing. Then Pompeii was drowned in Vesuvian dust and barbarians destroyed what part of Rome that the Romans themselves did not destroy. Men forgot metal pens.