He knows the flow must go on

Half a century is a long time to defy progress, to swim upstream, to celebrate what had been. In the beginning, Andreas Lambrou was just a schoolboy. In Nicosia, Cyprus, he started tagging along with his uncle who happened to sell everyday writing pens. There was something about these instruments and the way they felt in the hand. As Lambrou grew up and moved to Great Britain, he couldn’t shake his fascination. He accepted, oh well, that he was a “weirdo.” He collected pens, repaired pens, designed pens and made friends of like-minded inky antiquarians from around the world. Ultimately, he wrote the book on pens. Fountain pens, naturally.

Now living mostly in the U.S., with his hair gray and the years lined on his enthusiastic face, Andreas Lambrou finds himself unexpectedly in the best of times: The past, at last, has caught up with the future.

Lambrou is a weirdo no more. At 60, he is an industrial artist, a businessman, an authority -- and, yes, still a good part schoolboy. From an apartment office in the Wilshire District, he commissions some of the most exquisite fountain pens ever made. Or, foun-TAINE pens, as he pronounces it with his lingering Greek accent.

Fountain pens are no longer remembrances, as they were a generation ago. Nor are they simply faddish symbols of resistance to technology. That counter-trend peaked a few years back. Today, this old and stylish implement has achieved an uneasy peace with the PDA and the keyboard.

We deploy our pens less often these days, true. But we find that this makes them all the more important when we do. At least that’s the rationale behind the lively and mostly under-noticed global enterprise of quality 21st century fountain pens.

“The fountain pen is one of our most personal possessions -- very, very personal,” Lambrou says. “They are part of you. They are a means of expressing thoughts. You give the same pen to 10 people and you’ll get 10 different expressions of writing. You give the same wristwatch to 10 people and all of them will tell the same time.”

In his stately old stone apartment that is part living quarters, part shipping office and part cluttered showcase, Lambrou unscrews the cap on a chunky, cigar-sized pen. It has a polished barrel of marbleized acrylic in green, vermilion and ebony. The 21-karat gold nib, spear-shaped, was individually “tuned” by a craftsman with 57 years of experience. It is one of just 100 limited-edition fountain pens made by Sailor in Japan in conjunction with British-based Classic Pens Ltd., of which Lambrou is a founding partner and designer. With hands smudged by ink, he presents the instrument across the coffee table, retaining the cap so that a visitor doesn’t “post” cap atop pen and thereby spoil its balance.

“I wanted a pen that writes like 100 years ago,” Lambrou explains.

Contemporary Americans have no respect and barely any understanding of the past. That’s what we say about ourselves. But it’s not quite true. Rather, Americans tend to be highly selective about matters of heritage -- and boundlessly enthusiastic too. There are Civil War buffs, antique-car fanciers, vintage-movie fanatics. Nostalgic avocations absorb millions, and don’t tell them about disregarding history. The fountain pen and ancillary accouterments, like fine paper and fashion-color inks, not only represent fascination with yesterday but also answer imperatives of today.

In the first place, technology has not begun to eliminate the ink pen in its many forms, despite bamboozling predictions of obsolescence for all things manual. According to the Writing Instrument Manufacturers Assn., about 6.1 billion of these reliable and handy word-processing devices were sold in 2000, 16 million of them fountain pens.

In the second place, e-mails, laser printers, form letters and all the rest devalue and depersonalize written communications. Messages written by hand, therefore, increase in value according to their scarcity. Just ask any number of executives or public figures, who understand that a thank-you note is worth many times more if penned by hand. The law may recognize the electronic signature, but an autograph hound won’t.

“Computers? As efficient and practical as they may be, they aren’t very personal. For many people, when they want to write something or sign something, they want their personality to show through,” Lambrou says over coffee. “The only way to do that, I think, is with a fountain pen.” Classic Pens’ Nagahara pen, named after the craftsman who produced its nib, may or may not duplicate the feel of writing a century ago. In point of fact, who can attest to such a thing? But in a way that, say, a game of computer Minesweeper cannot, this pen astonishes, moving across paper left to right as if assisted by gravity. “Direction” is the term used in the trade. As you might expect from a pen that costs $595, the nib seems to glide on its own narrow cushion of ink, utterly without resistance. For that, pen fanciers have a more everyday term: “writing satisfaction.” Of the 100 pens in this edition, half are fitted with an even more specialized, and costly, nib, which is intended solely to render bold, expressive -- and no doubt consequential -- signatures.

Fountain pens of distinction, and their plebian cousin -- the uptown ballpoint -- rebounded from obscurity in the mid-1980s. It was a global phenomenon, occurring in Asia, Europe and North America. Collectors and everyday users couldn’t seem to get their fill. It was no coincidence that this resurrection kept pace with the spread of laptops, desktops, the Internet, cell phones and, of course, affluence. Among the ordinary tools of white-collar labor, only the pen offered universal opportunity for individuality. Suddenly, the handy disposable pen had some competition.

“My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain,” writer Graham Greene once remarked. “My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ballpoint pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.” Besides, a fountain pen that costs more than logic says it should is not easily misplaced. Perhaps you have noticed that the person who relies on stick pens purchased by the dozen is often caught without one. Not so the colleague whose pen is worth the price of an NBA ticket.

For many who don’t use one, fountain pens have a reputation as fussy -- and messy, leaving behind more unwanted spots than an ice cream cone on a 100-degree day. However, modern improvements, such as ink cartridges or piston-operated “converters,” plus improved “collectors,” those fins underneath the nib that gather surplus ink, have eliminated much of the mess, if not entirely the fuss.

For those who contemplate the internal workings of things, fountain pens pose uncommon challenges. Not only must a pen control the flow of ink against gravity, but also against the expansion of internal air pockets in the ink reservoir, which results from the heat of the user’s hand. The necessary mechanisms, plus the precious metals used to make nibs both flexible and durable, account for the relative expense of these instruments.

A fountain pen can be refilled in less time than most computers need to boot up -- a ritual of housekeeping very much part of the aesthetic. As for writing, a nib can be tuned by an expert to produce either a wet line, which requires use of a blotter (itself a practiced art) or a dry line that is nearly as foolproof as a ballpoint.

Classic Pens, which grew out of Lambrou’s fountain pen repair business in England, is not a manufacturer, but arranges with established companies to produce limited editions of their top-of-the-line production pens. In the last 13 years, 10 editions have been produced in sterling silver, several others with intricate hand embellishment as works of art, and now the first in a planned series of pens in acrylics and other materials. Lambrou, a British citizen, spends most of his time in Los Angeles. Not only is the U.S. his most important customer, it’s his most impatient -- and he finds that only by being here can he meet the demands for instantaneous shipping and servicing.

Lambrou’s first book, “Fountain Pens: Vintage and Modern,” was published in 1989. In 1995, he followed it with the 448-page, $190 coffee table book “Fountain Pens of the World,” which inventoried nearly all the important manufacturers and models since Lewis Waterman of New York invented the first practical prototype in 1883.

The encyclopedic book fueled the spreading interest in fine writing instruments. It also established Lambrou as a reigning figure in the field. Today, the topic has grown so vast that Lambrou began expanding the book into three volumes. The first, covering the U.S. and U.K., was published in 2000. Volumes on Europe and Japan are forthcoming.

Although his first manuscript was “penned,” Lambrou has since switched to a computer -- for everything but post-publication inscriptions.

“We have to move with the times, fortunately or unfortunately,” he says with a shrug.

In the late 1990s, the bubble that brought technology down to earth had some of the same effect on the anti-technology business of pens. Retailers who rushed to expand wound up retrenching or disappearing. Manufacturers became more cautious and more competitive.

“The market has been saturated since ‘98,” Lambrou says of high-end fountain pens. “The gold rush is over.” Today, consumers are more discriminating, not to mention less affluent. The catalogs that appeal to pen buyers offer fewer ornate-and-jeweled $8,000 collector pens and instead emphasize the writerly qualities of instruments in the range of $250 to $600.

Lambrou seems to welcome the trend. His limited-edition pens, he says, are for writers. Each, he is sure, will be put to work, not just displayed in a collection. “It has to be used,” he says. “Otherwise, it’s just another plastic pen.”

And what makes a fine pen? Easy. “Does it look good?” he answers. “Does it feel good in the hand. Does it write well?” By those standards, he continues, we live in sublime times.

“Pens made today are better than they’ve ever been, at least some of them.” Listen to him. Who could have imagined?

In the five decades since Andreas Lambrou collected his first schoolboy’s pen, the world of commerce and communication has gone electronic, instantaneous, impatient and transitory. And improbably, this has given fresh life to the fountain pen.