Definitely.
At least we would love to think so! Handwriting seems today very much an acquired skill than in the past, where it was the most sophisticated mode of transferring knowledge. Now of course, we can bypass the bewilderment of straining eyes on a page of chicken scratch, or spending hours decoding the handwriting of a friend, a family member and of course some doctors. Now we can simply type on keyboards (much like here) much faster than most can handwrite, with that additional benefit of clarity and standardisation between writers of the same language.
But there is still a magic to handwriting, isn't there?
Those symbols on a page reflecting the nature of the flowing hand which wrote it…
That nostalgic allure of opening an old journal to see your thoughts written with your style many years before… Witnessing artefacts in museums of the great people who wrote and signed the constitutions…
The draft and scribbles of those who designed great machines…
Or simply the thoughts of people unknown to us today,
who despite their distance in time and having no name to us today,
bridge that gap of time and tell us of struggles not distant from our own.
They are here, with us, as though we have stepped into a portal linking that place
and the now, with one foot on either side.
It commands and inspires. What will your story be? All on that faded yellow crinkled parchment.
Let's be honest - a fountain pen today is much like a watch.
Does a ballpoint convey your thoughts? Yes.
A phone can tell the time better than a watch.
Just as well as a laptop can write and save your thoughts.
So why bother writing by hand?
It is a stylistic choice, sure, but indeed such a fun one.
They are far more affordable than collecting or choosing high-end watches, yet alone cars, and you have the opportunity to ‘wear them’ daily. Fountain pens in our case contains a mixture of all those allures – the characteristic projection of your own nature in your style of writing, your choice of ink, your sense of aesthetic, that bridge in time which you and perhaps even others may look back on with a certain nostalgic fondness… and, in our case, also of something else…
Luck.
You see, a long time ago there was a particular model of interest – a Visconti Wall Street. A gorgeous celluloid pen representing the skyscrapers of the Manhattan skyline.
It came in four colours, each made 4000 times. It was unfortunately more than 10 years out of production, and so required much hunting around for it.
A small outdated online store in Canada happened to have a blue one,
and a lonely Ebay seller from Italy happened to have a grey one.
Lo and behold…
Even though we ordered them at completely different timepoints, and from completely different parts of the globe, we eventually noticed…
...the production numbers on both pens were the same... 0862/4000
What?! How?! And thus the inspiration for the name of this site!
This page is a little dedication to that little moment, which seemed so incredibly lucky, even to this day, bordering on the impossible and the uncanny. Luck.
