In Praise of Rotring

 

OK - pictured is my bastardised Filofax, now rechristened The Twenty [blog posts passim]: my sort of, kind of, take on the Zettelkasten [auch blog posts passim, meine Damen und Herren]. Atop the gnarly old leather folder is a relatively recent adoption, a 0.3mm Rotring draughting pen. Now - caveat - this is one of their cheap, disposable range of said instruments; but Rotring being who they are, do even cheap stuff very, very well. I don't normally cleave to disposable stuff, for environmental and moral reasons, but I wanted to revisit this style of pen without breaking the bank on something that might not get much further use if my memory of using these devices turned out to be rosier than the actuality of using one today.

My first memory and use of this type of pen dates back to my sixth-form days at school, and the Art Room: the Rotring pen was very much a fetish object amongst those of us denizens of that hallowed space: we saved up to buy one of these - even in those days expensive - instruments, in order to make the kind of undifferentiated - technical term - line-drawings made so trendy and cutting edge by David Hockney in the sixties. It had to be done: you had to possess one of these things. Anyhow, as I said, I was loathe to invest speculatively in a full-fat refillable top-of-the-line jobby, and so opted for the above featured item. What a pen! For something costing well under a tenner, it performs beautifully. So my conclusion now is that I will indeed invest in a more permanent replacement for the instrument that I first owned in the early 1970s and which lasted until I lost it, over twenty years later. There you go.