Come to think of it, just how important was the fountain pen? I have to admit that when I was in school I always assumed that the ball-point pen was the standard writing utensil, and that the fountain pen was a luxury item. It took me quite a while to realize that I was only partly right. By the fifties and sixties the ball-point pen had become the standard, but at the time I wasn't aware that only a generation earlier the fountain pen was the best way of writing with ink. As someone who, while writing, often stops to think with my pen resting on the paper (and my hands on the keyboard, as well) I can imagine that the fountain pen was a problematic tool. Of course it might be easier simply to learn to lift the pen from the paper while thinking (or to think more quickly), but even so, my own experience teaches me that the ball-point pen rightly became the standard.