COLUMN ONE : Power and Pleasures of the Pen : Aficionados revel in the revival of fine stationery and the personal letter. Executives find handwritten memos have gained new clout. And who wants a computer-printed Valentine?

May we step back a moment from the great, heralded, chaotic coming of the Information Age and reflect on the survival of pen, paper and letter?

Survival? Make it revival.

Chisel and stone gave way to quill and paper some centuries ago to make writing easier and faster. And now futurists tell us the pen and paper will soon disappear because of quicker photon and silicon.

Or perhaps not.

“Futurists are supposed to say that, so it cannot be helped,” said Ellsworth Brown, president of the Carnegie Institute and Library in Pittsburgh, Pa.

Brown is one of thousands of busy Americans who race through life, from meeting to telephone conference, from taxi to airport, all the while carrying that supposedly endangered artifact from a more placid age: the fountain pen.

“As the saying goes, it is a gift to be simple,” Brown said.

Large, heavy and crafted with precision, the fine writing pen has made a comeback, and is staying back.

The personal letter too.

Some leading-edge Luddites are out there, perhaps in your own neighborhood, trying to revive the dying art of penmanship.

“It’s a combination of things personal,” Brown said about his fountain pen and pad of paper. To manipulate data, give him an electronic machine. To turn over ideas, he’ll take a pen. “It is incredibly convenient . . . you can flag things, circle them, go back to them, see them.”

Maybe we should thank the computer.

Rather than diminish our interest and need, the microprocessor seems to stimulate demand for these venerated traditions: sending us back into our past for ways in which to be expressive and personal against the unbearable sameness of the computer, for ways to be reflective against the ephemeral electron.

So despite the explosion of E-mail, interlinks, cellular phones and fax machines, it may come as a blow to those infatuated by future-think to know that in 1991, Americans wrote and mailed 100 million more personal letters than they did just four years earlier, according to the U.S. Postal Service. Not only that, personal letters increased their share of the overall mail load, despite rising volumes of junk and business correspondence.

Beyond just raw numbers is the growing appreciation for this lively art.

“There is nothing that can take the place of a letter,” wrote Jerry Lee Hill, founder of the Minneapolis-based Letter Enjoyers Assn. In an interview conducted via mail, Hill wrote: “A letter has the ability to deliver a bit of the personality of its writer. . . . There’s a charm and graciousness to letter writing.”

“Letters are gifts--both ways,” said Van Gordon Sauter, Fox Network news executive and former president of CBS News. “I enjoy writing letters because I enjoy thinking of the people who will receive them.”

But, you say, you are too busy to write.

Via letter, Sauter points to President Theodore Roosevelt: “On New Year’s Day in 1907, he welcomed the citizenry to the White House and shook 8,107 hands--an average of 50 per minute. He also on that day conducted personal professional business, and between breakfast and a morning reception wrote 25 letters (of the estimated 50,000 he had written to that point in his life.)”

That was then, but what about tomorrow? Will young people retain any of this tradition?

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Four years ago, the Postal Service set out to increase literacy and an appreciation for the letter by establishing “wee deliver” mock post offices at elementary schools. Today, 18,000 schools have adopted the program, which teaches kindergartners through fourth-graders how to correspond with each other.

A Postal Service spokeswoman says one result has been better attendance at these schools.

Enjoying an even more obvious resurgence are the tools of writing.

A generation ago, the idea of a successful retail store specializing in fine writing instruments was quaint to the extreme. Just a few existed. Today, pen stores thrive in most major cities, and some distribute catalogues nationwide. Department stores and artist-supply, luggage and gift shops also market quality pens.

In the last 15 years, U.S. sales of fountain pens have increased from 6.4 million to 25.4 million, according to the Writing Instruments Manufacturers Assn. You can add to that the millions more fine ballpoints and roller balls. It is common for these instruments to reach prices of $100 to $600 apiece.

Counting pencils and cheaper pens, 5 billion writing instruments were sold in the United States in 1992, twice as many as in 1973. Innovations, style changes and quality improvements seem to occur monthly--both the result of growing manufacturer competition and an increasing number of pen and paper collectors.

To men like Jon Sullivan, this is the golden age of the pen. He is president of America’s pioneer specialty store, Fahrney’s, in Washington.

“There was a time when people used to walk in and say: ‘You got to be kidding. There’s still such a thing as a fountain pen?’ ” Sullivan said.

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He said he believes that President John F. Kennedy helped cultivate the nation’s taste. Bamboo-pointed soft tips were just coming into being during the Kennedy Administration, and the White House ordered boxes of them. Soon, Washington followed suit, and the demand for expressive writing instruments swelled.

“Business has grown steadily since, with only a couple of dips along the way,” Sullivan said. “Right now, today, people have the greatest choice of fine writing instruments ever made.”

Fahrney’s catalogue has a national circulation of 100,000. At least one specialty magazine is published for collectors, and pen shows are held around the country.

In recent years, H. G. Daniels Co., an art-supply firm in Los Angeles, has gone head to head with the computer, and in some cases lost. It’s hard to match computer graphics with off-the-shelf artist equipment, for example. So thank heavens for precious pens. In the last 20 years, the company has become a major purveyor of quality writing instruments.

“If we didn’t have the pen, we’d be in trouble filling the gaps for products computers have taken the place of,” manager Nancy Robertson said.

And, yes, she realizes the irony.

Along with the pen has come a boom in fine writing paper.

Capper Heffernan opened her downtown Seattle store in 1983, offering exotic and handcrafted stationery “because I love paper. I needed it. It’s friendly. It’s essential. It’s right up there with the wheel. It has history. But it has a future.”

Every year since, business has grown in cotton bonds, watermarked Italian stock, handmade sheets from the Himalayas, a variety of regionally indigenous fibers.

“Our indications are that personal correspondence is undergoing some kind of resurgence,” said John Hansen of Crane & Co., a nationally known supplier of stationery in Dalton, Mass.

Aficionados of pen and paper search for some simple explanation.

Whimsy, mysticism, nostalgia, rebellion, practicality and a healthy dollop of egotism all figure in one way or the other. People say they are reaching for a personal touch in an impersonal culture, something warm against the chill.

Maybe it’s because some people write less by hand and take greater interest in the few things they do write, such as their signature. Others don’t use a pen at all, but feed their laser printer $7.50 sheets of rice paper.

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Only a few years ago, business executives made their best impression in flawlessly typed letters with a secretary’s initials at the bottom. Today, many executives deliver their strongest punch with their own hand.

Katherine Newell Smith is an entertainment and food expert at Sutton Place Gourmet in Washington. She advises writing invitations by hand for any party smaller than 50. “What you say is, I’m writing you because I want you to come.”

For some, the fine fountain pen is a way to display status. That’s why Mont Blanc pens are often advertised in the same upscale publications that feature Rolex watches.

Others, who take notes or write a lot by hand, proselytize about how the “feel” and “balance” of a good pen against fine paper adds a sense of pleasure and craftsmanship to their work.

Los Angeles lawyer Jeff Towns learned in school that he could write faster and enjoy it more by using better tools. “Without sounding completely strange, I just like the feel of a fountain pen. It’s smooth and effortless.”

For some people, pen and paper is a disciplined way to write or edit--words thus produced come slower and mean more than those that fly off keyboards in clumps of easy verbosity.

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Post-modernist designer Ettore Sottsass of Milan, renowned for his rendition of the 1970s Olivetti typewriter, among other things, has just turned his artistry into a new fountain pen for the Italian company Omas. “Tapping a keyboard,” he said by way of explanation, leaves writers “separated from our thoughts. . . . The act of writing is in fact a mysterious action, sometimes ambiguous and complicated. The transition of thought to written word requires duration. Thoughts multiply as time passes.”

Magazines as diverse as serious Harper’s and trend-setter GQ published articles this spring about the simple art of the love letter.

In Columbus, Ohio, Richard Northup is a vice president of Zaner-Bloser, which publishes handwriting courses for teachers and young students. He was interviewed by several reporters for Valentine’s Day stories and says: “I was surprised, practically all of them interrupted me to say how much they were afraid of receiving a love letter that came out of a word processor.”

To many people, the matter of pen and paper is a deep attachment.

“The pen is an aesthetically beautiful object. It connects me to myself, my past, my entire being,” said Nancy C. Andreasen, professor of psychiatry at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

Andreasen also is editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Psychiatry and must turn down 80% of the professional papers submitted for publication. A rejection written with her Pelikan Toledo fountain pen “conveys to them that I care.” And it also soothes. “I learned from my predecessor that it’s harder to be mad at someone who writes you a personal note.”

If pens and paper are thriving, penmanship, it seems, is not keeping up its end of things. Teachers, postal clerks, secretaries and pharmacists can attest to the decay of American handwriting.

In December, 1992, American Demographics magazine compiled a disheartening inventory of undeliverable letters, processed film that could not be returned, indecipherable prescriptions and even the fatal crash of a small airplane caused by someone’s illegible handwritten barometer reading.

Here and there, however, are scattered signs of change.

Fahrney’s pen store is increasingly being asked by customers to recommend handwriting courses. Calligraphy and calligraphy pens are hot sellers in gift stores. Zaner-Bloser says demand is up for its correspondence course designed to help teachers understand the basics of penmanship.

At Maple Hill Elementary School in Diamond Bar, Calif., handwriting coordinator Teri Beattie produced two winners in a national penmanship contest this year.

“This hasn’t been receiving emphasis like multiculturalism or social studies, but we believe students need to know how to write. It’s basic,” Beattie said. “When you learn to write, your self-esteem goes up.”

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Times researcher Doug Conner in Seattle contributed to this story.