What are your childhood (or youth) stories that shape your preferences? Yes I am some sort of wierdo, but pens are my favorite things.

I remember for part of my birthday present one year, I think I turned four or five, I got a set of pocketsize el cheapo colored ballpoints. As someone who was purely used to seeing blue or black ink, I really enjoyed having pens that were like my crayons. You have a lot of eye opening experiences as a little kid, but this one really stuck with me. I can still see thier small, opaque plastic molded bodies, but I thought they were awesome. I still love writing with pens that are in the basic colors, Blue, Red, Green, Purple, regardless of the situation.

When I was seven, I was on my way back from swimming lessons when I picked up a wierd green pen in the parking lot. It was kind of crushed, but it still worked and it didn't have ink like my other colored pens,. It was sort of like a marker, in that its ink was liquid, but it had a pen tip. This became my new favorite pen for a month, until it got taken away because I took it to school and you're not supposed to use pen in the first grade, much less green pen, but I got it back when I promised to be good. Alas, the pen ran out of ink at this point, but it was still my magical pen. Fast forward to about middle school and I was shopping for school supplies at an office store, and then I saw my magical pen! It was a pilot Vball. Now they're not my magical pens anymore at all, but they still hold a place in my heart.

For me it was when I was in Jr. High (I think, I'm so old I forget these things) when my brother gave me one of the first 0.5mm drafting pencils. It was all metal, green body and chrome end cap and push button. It was slim, slimmer than todays drafting pencils and it only held a couple of leads. It didn't even have an eraser under the cap and absolutely no place for a clean out rod. Back then I had been using a lead holder and an old portable style pointer, the kind that have a plastic tube with a basin at the one end that also held 4 metal "teeth" that pointed the lead. Previously I had had to use one of those heavy pointers that sat on the drafting table and used a cup lined with sandpaper to point the lead.

Anyway I was enthralled with this new type of pencil. It was sleek and modern and light weight. Not having an eraser was no problem as I'd been using a stick eraser for a long time anyway (the kind that you peeled away paper to expose more eraser). Best part of all it never needed pointing and it wrote a fine line, finer than I could get with my old style twist up mechanical pencils. I thought that I was Mr. Cool with that pencil. I used it every where. Back then I really pressed hard when I wrote and it wasn't long before the slender metal lead sleeve bent then broke off at the end cap. I was heart broken. My brother had pity on me and gave me another one. Unfortunately it too suffered from my heavy handedness.

I kept that broken pencil for years, to this day I don't know what became of it (it's a drag getting old). As new drafting pencils became available I would, from time to time, somehow obtain one and I tried to see if the end cap from the newer pencil would fit the old one. But alas, it was not to be. Resurrecting that first 0.5mm drafting pencil was never to happen. But my during search for a remedy to my broken pencil I discovered 0.3mm drafting pencils and thus an obsession was born and the rest is history.

Now, my obsession with fine line pens is another post altogether. 8)

My obsession with fine point pens also started in Jr. High. My brother dad and brother introduced me to rapidograph pens. I ended up with 2 very old style pens: they are black and gold and look more like fountain pens when the cap is on. I also had a few nibs but I soon bought more, all of them on the fine end of the scale. I don't know now how many nibs I have for them because they, along with my calligraphy pens, are buried amongst our belongings in the "spare" room.

During my Jr. High and Sr. High years I used those 2 pens, each with a different sized nib, in all my classes, except math of course, trying out various inks. My favorite was Pelican's Peacock Blue! That has to have been the prettiest blue man ever made. Alas it is no longer made. Sad, very sad. :( I also used India ink in them, something I do not recommend anyone do any more as there are better permanent inks out there today. I also used something not designed as ink, I used a laundry product called bluing. It was used back in the day as a whiting agent for colors, before the days of chlorine-free bleach. It was a deep, rich blue that looked fantastic on paper. For some reason in the back of my mine there lurks something that hints at the bluing leaking all the time... hum...

Anyway, I used those pens a lot. They were troublesome as writing pens, not having been designed as such. They work best when held perpendicular to the writing surface, not something the everyday writer is apt to do. They are also the epitome of scratchiness! Yes, rapidograph pens define the word"scratchiness". Mainly because of their design and the way that they are used. A rapidograph pen nib consists basically of of a hollow metal tube which supports a thin wire down the center topped by a weighted plastic plunger. The wire allows ink to flow down it into and out of the tube. The wire sticks out of the tube imperceptibly and when it contacts the paper it pushes up into the body of the nib, raising the plunger, opening the valve and allowing ink to flow down the tube and onto the paper. Ingenious, really. But the finer the tube the more it's like writing with a pin. And we all know just how scratchy that is!

I gave up writing with the rapidograph pens when I discovered 0.5mm gel and liquid ink pens. Later I discovered fine point disposable technical pens as well as other fine point gel pens accumulating with the Mitsubishi uni-ball Signo bit gel pen. There are technical pens, both disposable and not that will produce a finer line, but they are not gel pens and have their own problems.

So thus began and is the current state of my obsession with fine point pens, be they technical, rollerball, or gel. The finer, the better, to a point (pun intended). 8) :lol:

Come to think of it, yeah, my stationery obsession has a lot to do with a 'deprived' childhood. As the youngest child, I seldom had new things and struggled to bring proper and enough stationery to school. What I had were mostly hand-me downs or stuff that someone left unguarded at home, which I adopted as my own. I wanted new pencils, erasers and sharpeners, just like my friends. So I would go to the school bookshop to look. Stationery was kept in a glass cabinet and only the staff could take them out to show us. I used to see other students buying some really funky erasers, which on hindsight were probably from Japan. There was one which was really cool, almost 'transformer' like as you could keep the erasers on both ends of the hollow tube or swing them out to use. I once asked for that eraser and emptied my purse, but was short of 10 or 20 cents. So I got embarrassed and fled! :(

In high school, my brother took pity on me and gave me a Pilot mechanical pencil that had a slim but slightly heavy plastic body. There was no 'cap' on the eraser end, so he'd rolled a bit of paper there for me to advance the lead. I loved the pencil even though it was imperfect as it was expensive and given to me by my brother. One day, I lost the pencil in class and confided in my friend, who reported to the teacher. The teacher found out that a student had stolen my pencil when I dropped it on the floor. The student got a scolding and probably punishment as well, though I can't recall how. I was glad to get my pencil back, but felt sorry for the student. :?

My obbsesion with pens started by deprivation as well, but not as extreme. In first grade, we were only ever allowed to use these horrible fat blue "pencils". They had no earasers which the teachers justified by saying that they needed to see what mistakes we made. Well I was the only kid in the class that got up every half hour to sharpen my pencil because I couldn't stand the super thick tip.
At home I would sneak into my mom's office and try out her shiney mechanical pencils and think about what it would be like to have one. When we could use different pencils in school I had about 30 different pencil in one of the pockets of my backpack so I would never be deprived of the pencil I wanted again!
My preference still changes depending on my mood, but now I have my favorite pencils narrowed down to about 15. I never loan them out though because I have noticed that other people just don't care about the beuaty of an unused earaser or the fragility of a grip that can get dirty from touching the wrong surface. :)

Oooooo, girl! And I thought I had it bad! :lol:

haha, I went all pencil crazy as soon as I had the chance. These other stories are interesting in that some people start liking pens/pencils quite a while into life.

I'm honestly not sure when I started appreciating pens and stationery. I think when I started school. Every fall the stores would be bursting at the seams with brand new pens, erasers, pencils, pencil sharpeners, all shiny and colourful. It came to symbolize the anticipation and excitement of a new year. Even after I got tired of school, I still looked forward to those first few days in fall when school supplies had to be bought.
I was the only one who showed up with two huge pencil cases for the very first day of school in first grade - earned me a few looks :p

My parents also had a pen drawer where they kept all their pens and pencils - except all their pens were dry, all the pencils broken, with no sharpener in sight. It was a pen-addicts nightmare, and I swore I'd never keep a non-functioning pen around! The disappointment I experienced when I spotted a nice pen in there, only to find it was dried out... ouch. Piles of cracked fountain pens (some from the 70s), dry felt tip pens, useless, sad, sometimes expensive pens. Never again.

10 years after I finished school, and I still go to the office supply store every fall when they get the school supplies of the year :D

Yeah, I like it when the major department stores, Wal-Mart, Target, K-Mart, etc., and the office supply stores, Staples, Office Depot, etc., get in the school supplies each fall. All the extra supplies to choose from... But I really like 0.3 mm drafting pencils, 0.5 mm gel pens and rollerballs (aka liquid ink pens) and narrow ruled notebook paper, so there's not much in the way of "supplies' that I get from these places, except maybe a bit of collage ruled paper or such. :wink: