A little diversion and brief detour this morning so I can mention my current favorite pen. It's called a Jetstream.
The world standard for pens is of course the venerable Bic Cristal in iconic blue. Bic or BIC is a simplification of Bich, pronounced identically, the surname of company co-founder and visionary Marcel Bich. The Cristal, shaped like a standard pencil, will be 75 years old next December. It is the best selling pen ever with 100 billion sold as of 2006. The company is still based in the northern suburb of Paris where it's always been. It's the ultimate disposable pen: you can get the price down to 12¢ each if you buy 500 of them. That low cost of course assumes you can somehow use them all, which I guess maybe an office or a school could do. It's probably more sensible to buy, say, two dozen at a time. That way they're still reasonably cheap at 29¢ each but you might feasibly get around to getting some use out of all of them. Note that the price rises considerably the fewer you buy, which is unsatisfying, since absurd cheapness is prominent among the Bic Cristal's many charms.
A Bic Cristal has two holes in it. There's a tiny hole in the clear plastic body of the pen to equalize the pressure inside and outside the pen, and since 1991 there has been a hole at the top of the cap to take solemn note of at least one tragedy and maybe more: a nameless kid somewhere inhaled a Bic pen cap and suffocated. The hole in the cap thus adds a disagreeable memento mori to the familiar and iconic design—but if the air hole saves even one child's life, then okay. Otherwise the design is unchanged since the beginning, making it unquestionably one of the great examples of industrial design in world history. Appropriately, an example is enshrined in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, just as if there were anyone in the world who has not already seen one.
Despite such formidable competition, I'm a fan of the uniball [sic] Jetstream made by the Mitsubishi Pencil Co. Ltd. of Shinagawa, Tokyo, which is no relation to the multinational conglomerate The Mitsubishi Group.
The uni Jetstream is a "hybrid" or "hybrid gel" pen type, meaning its low-viscosity oil-based ink flows freely like a water-based-ink gel pen, but dries instantly, won't smudge, and is permanent like a traditional high-viscosity oil-based ballpoint. A more recent term than "hybrid gel" is "low-viscosity ballpoint" although they refer to the same thing. Pilot calls its version "Acros." The trick to writing with any uni Jetstream is to cultivate a light touch: you don't have to bear down, as we've learned to do with thousands of ballpoint pens since childhood. It's not actually easy for some people to retrain longtime and unconscious muscle memory. To me it's a relief. I dislike those super-cheap no-name ballpoints that make you press too hard.
uni* makes Jetstream pens in many styles and flavors. Since I needed to restock my desktop pen mug recently—I usually just order yet another box of Pilot EasyTouch or PaperMate Profile pens to distribute around the house, and God only knows where they all go—this time I made a little impromptu survey by ordering a bunch of different types of Jetstreams.
They all handle differently. Some of them I actually don't like very much. This turned out to be my favorite:
Rather awkwardly for my purposes here, it does not appear to have a name, just a generic description that doesn't work as a search term (Amazon's search function is completely broken now anyway, although that's a topic for another day). [UPDATE: It's called an SX-217, but a search for that term on Amazon doesn't get you anywhere.] Here are the links for the black one and also a blue one. I much prefer the 0.7 mm point, although it also comes in the inferior 1 mm point size which writes worse, if that's something you want. (Just kidding. Suit yourself.)
Why do I like it? Because it's the most comfortable pen I tried and writes extremely smoothly, assuming that light touch I already mentioned.
A few caveats, though:
- I'm no expert on pens nor even a proper enthusiast.
- And I doubt I ever will be, because I don't write by hand very much.
- I'm a leftie, meaning I can't use fountain pens, because we drag our writing hand through what we just wrote. (We also push the pen ahead of our writing hand, which as a general rule doesn't help our handwriting.)
- Except when I forget, I carry a pen with me in my shirt pocket, and I have an irrational preference for pens that are carried with the point facing up, toward heaven, rather than down, toward hell, the result of a long-ago experience with a leaky pen ruining a favorite shirt. Good pens don't really leak any more, I suppose, but another thing I carry around is my old prejudice and thus, my old preference. So I prefer pens with removable caps because they point the right way in stowage. It's not like I won't carry a downward-pointing pen, but it nags at me just that little bit.
- This pen is expensive, per my personal definition of the cost of these things. I'm sure someone will chime in about his $10,000 MattBlanc, because YOLO and blah blah, but to me a pen has to be reasonably close to being disposable, since I tend to lose them even when I try not to. I have absent-minded professor syndrome. You, in contrast, might be a grownup.
The Pink Gold Stylus Single Knock is another one I rather unexpectedly liked. Very light and fragile-seeming, but comfortable and somehow pleasing, and the touchscreen stylus works well. And it has a name, and a great one at that. And readers have suggested I look into the uni Power Tank. It's uni's version of the Fisher Space Pen. Its ink is under pressure so it can always write, whether upside down or in very cold temperatures**.
You can also get a nice sampler of various Jetstream options from Jetpens.
So that's it then. My current favorite pen. Could change.
Mike
*How loath I am to begin a sentence with a lowercase letter.
**And those two sentences are a nice illustration of whether to use an apostrophe when adding an "s" to "it." It was one of the last basic grammar rules I learned. I was an adult before I sorted it out.
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