A Post about Pens

My mother will tell you that I began collecting pens, pencils, and the occasional highlighter or marker from an early age. As I got older, I stopped saving every corporate logo’d stick pen that crossed my path, instead filling mugs and cans with souvenir pens containing trains or animals that floated back and forth, pencils with glittered designs or multicolored erasers, and particularly unique specimens. Most of these are packed away awaiting culling at my mom’s house.

Mail order was our primary means of purchasing things in that era, so with every season a new bevy of catalogs would arrive for me to peruse, carefully reading every description. The Lego catalog was always first, but one of the close seconds was from Levenger, a company that sells “tools for serious readers.” I certainly was a “serious reader;” I spent way too much time for a kid my age pouring over those pages, marveling at the beautiful fountain pens and imagining saving up the hundreds of dollars I would need to bring home one of my own.

At one point, I remember being given one of the entry-level pens, but the reality of bottled inks and converters was a bit too much for my young self, and after thoroughly dyeing my hands and the surrounding area blue, I stored it away, never imagining that when I would look for it years (and moves) later, it would be gone. Since those early days I’ve become quite particular about what I use to write: Dixon Ticonderoga Number 2 wooden pencils, a 0.5 mm Papermate PhD mechanical pencil for written tests, and 0.7 mm mechanical pencils for filling in Scantron bubbles (the increased size actually boosts bubbling speed – try it). Pilot’s Dr. Grip Center of Gravity has been my go-to pen since college – a comfortable barrel with a special ink that is the perfect blending of ballpoint and gel.

More recently, I noticed my friend Halsted writing about her own love of pens, including those of the fountain variety, and through her was fortuitously reunited with my old friend Levenger through Twitter. And so it was that I found myself with a blue True Writer and a bottle of Skies of Blue ink. This time, I was prepared. I washed and filled the pen for the first time in the lab, surrounded by lint-free Kimwipes, nitrile gloves, and double-distilled water. As I wrote my first lines in my journal, my past longings and present excitement mingled with the ink flowing from the pen’s nib. It was love.

The epilogue to this story is one of unprecedented customer service. I later found myself wishing I had purchased a fine nib instead of a medium, and from this point onward, Levenger’s customer service has been phenomenal. They quickly responded to my Twitter query and went out of their way to ensure that I could safely exchange nibs—and covered shipping. I was pleasantly surprised. Little did I know that Nora and the rest of the Levenger team still had one more surprise waiting for me. Again, via Twitter, I contacted Levenger with an unusual request: the hex values or some other digital representation of the color of their inks. Nora and her colleagues actually took time out of their days to look values up for me, despite the person who would know that information being out of the country and unavailable.

I sincerely appreciate companies that make the effort to connect and respond to me, even when I’m their biggest customer in terms of dollars spent, at least at this point in my life. Levenger has been quite good to me, and they deserve some public thanks!