Art Brown's venerable pen store closes its doors in Manhattan

Adam Frank reported on Pentrace this weekend about the sudden closing of the venerable (next year would have been their 90th year) Manhattan pen shop, Art Brown -- a family business.

All reports indicate that this was due to an increase in rent that could no longer be sustained (some report an increase to $50,000 per month!).

What a sad event.

How It's Made Retractable Ballpoint Pens

How its Made - Fountain Pens

Freedom Pen project lets Thompson honor soldiers, remember son

Freedom Pen project from Mankato Free Press on Vimeo.

Read more about Mr. Thompson's project by clicking on the title bar above.

NoteTaker digital pen

The pen that never forgets

"To refresh her memory, Dervishaj pulled out her math notebook. But her class notes were not great: she had copied several sample problems but hadn’t written a clear explanation of how exponents work.

She didn’t need to. Dervishaj’s entire grade 7 math class has been outfitted with “smart pens” made by Livescribe, a start-up based in Oakland, Calif. The pens perform an interesting trick: when Dervishaj and her classmates write in their notebooks, the pen records audio of whatever is going on around it and links the audio to the handwritten words. If her written notes are inadequate, she can tap the pen on a sentence or word, and the pen plays what the teacher was saying at that precise point.

Dervishaj showed me how it works, flipping to her page of notes on exponents and tapping a set of numbers in the middle of the page. Out of a tiny speaker in the thick, cigar-shaped pen, I could hear her teacher, Brian Licata, explaining that precise problem. “It’s like having your own little personal teacher there, with you at all times,” Dervishaj said."

Click on the title to read the entire article and see a graphic

Collector’s ink hobby draws pen customers

Click on the title to read the article about Robert Bradford and Bradford Ink.

How you should take pen to paper, and why

How you should take pen to paper, and why

By EDWARD A. IANNUCCILLI

"I fell in love with fountain pens when Miss Casey taught us penmanship in the third grade. My penmanship was just promising — my letters were small, did not slant enough, and hugged the bottom line, never quite reaching the one above."

Read the article in its entirety here.

Which Makes the Better Writer: the Hand or the Keyboard? Age Is a Part

"05 October 2009
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: we talk with an expert on children and handwriting.

RS: Virginia Berninger is an educational psychology professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. She tells us about a study which found that children sometimes do a better job as writers when they compose the words by hand than when they type them on a keyboard.


VIRGINIA BERNINGER: "And this was a chance to follow over two hundred children -- it was about two hundred forty -- longitudinally, once a year for five years. And I looked comprehensively at writing development. And what we found, which was very surprising to us, is that they wrote longer essays, they wrote the words faster. And, in the paper just published, they wrote more complete sentences in fourth and sixth grade when they were writing in handwriting by pen than when writing on keyboard."

Click the title bar to read the full interview

Umberto Eco: The lost art of handwriting

The days when children were taught to write properly are long gone. Does it matter? Yes, says Umberto Eco



Author of 'The Name of the Rose' says "The crisis began with the ballpoint pen. Handwriting no longer had soul, style or personality."

Click the title bar to read his entire article.