Well, I thought that I’d talk briefly about stationery and nostalgia today. This was mostly because my parents were clearing some old stuff and found an old “Berol Handwriting” pen from the 1990s. The nostalgia was instant!
Sorry about the low-quality scan but, even with that, the pen still stands out like a life-raft. Probably designed to stop children from losing them. And, yes, if you’re British and you went to school during the 1990s, you probably remember these pens.
If you grew up in 1990s Britain – or, from what I’ve read online, 1980s Britain too – then this orange pen will probably be instantly memorable. It was typically the very first pen that you were given at infant school or primary school and it’s a really weird one.
Despite looking like a felt-tip pen at first glance, the nib is actually made out of solid white plastic. It’s difficult to tell exactly what type of pen it is. The example I have still writes – albeit intermittently – and, if I had to guess, then I’d say that it was… possibly… a rollerball pen because the ink is too bold for a ballpoint pen, it isn’t scratchy and it still writes after more than two decades of disuse.
It doesn’t seem to be a fine-liner pen, since I imagine that these would be too fragile for use by young children. Yet the body of the pen is much closer in style to the ones typically used for fine-liner pens, even down to the style of end-cap on the bottom of it.
I can’t seem to get inside the pen – probably a safety feature – so I can’t tell whether it has a rollerball-style ink reservoir or a fine-liner style ink sponge. Interestingly, due to the age of the pen, there doesn’t actually seem to be any “air holes” on the cap (not sure when these safety regulations were introduced, but the pen is possibly from before them…).
Another thing which dates the pen is the fact that it was actually manufactured in Britain. Whilst you can apparently still get these pens these days, the modern examples I saw online also carry PaperMate branding and the pens apparently stopped being manufactured here in 2010. And, aside from high-end fountain pens, I’m not sure if any stationery is actually even made over here any more because even Parker pens relocated to France in 2011.
Still, Berol pens are one of those things which possibly only seems to be sold or widely known about in Britain. And, despite being a functional general pen, they are also one of those things – like the devil’s own instrument, the recorder – which are indelibly associated with childhood and never really used after that.
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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting