He would often go to join Rieux in one of the hospitals, where he would ask for a table in some office or ward. He settled down there with his papers as though he was sitting at his table in the Hotel de Ville, in air thick with the smell of disinfectant and of the disease itself, would shake his papers to dry the ink on them.
Albert Camus, The Plague, first published in 1947.
When I said to Bruno, "Oh, Bruno, would you buy me a ream of virgin paper?" he looked up at the ceiling ... and replied, "You mean white paper, Herr Oskar." I stuck with the word virgin and told Bruno to ask for it that way at the shop. When he returned later that afternoon with the package, he seemed a Bruno in thought. ... "That word you recommended was right. I asked for virgin paper and the salesgirl blushed red before she gave me what I wanted."
Fearing a long conversation about salesgirls in stationery shops, I regretted having emphasised the paper's innocence by calling it a virgin, and said nothing, waited till Bruno had left the room. Only then did I open the package with the five hundred sheets of paper.
I lifted the resilient stack for a moment and tested its weight. Then I counted off ten sheets and stored the rest in my bedside table. I found the fountain pen by my photo album in the drawer: it's full, it won't fail for lack of ink; how shall I begin?
A feeling of immense disgust suddenly flooded over me and the pen fell from my fingers, spitting ink. What had happened? Had I got the Nausea? No, it wasn't that, the room had its paternal, everyday look. At the most the table seemed a little heavier and more solid, and my fountain pen more compact....
Four o'clock strikes. I've been sitting here in my chair for an hour, with my arms dangling. It's beginning to get dark. Apart from that, nothing in this room has changed: the white paper is still on the table, next to the fountain pen and the ink well...but I shall never write any more on this page I have started.
Nevertheless, after a resigned siesta, he submitted to reality and wrote her a note excusing himself. He wrote it by hand on perfumed paper and in luminous ink so that it could be read in the dark, and with no sense of shame, he dramatized the gravity of his accident in an effort to arouse her compassion.
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| Winsor and Newton shop in Rathbone Place, London (picture from Winsor and Newton Catalogue of Artist's Materials, London 1874) |
I turned into a stationer's shop in Rathbone Place. I can browse indefinetly in a stationer's shop, indeed there is hardly anything in a good stationer's shop which I do not like and want. What a scene of refreshment and innocence! Loose leaf paper, writing paper, notebooks, envelopes, postcards, pens, pencils, paper-clips, blotting paper, ink, files, old-fashioned things like sealing wax, new-fangled things like sellotape....I had to load somebody with presents. I collected for Rachel a ball of red string, a blue felt-tipped pen, a pad of special calligrapher's paper, a magnifying glass, a fancy carrier bag, a large wooden clothes peg with URGENT written on it in gold, and six postcards of the Post Office Tower.
Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince, 1973
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| picture from Winsor and Newton Artist's Materials Catalogue, 1874 |
Has anyone ever seen anything like Winsor and Newton's cups of chromes and carnations...and crimsons, loud and fierce as a war-cry, and pinks, tender and loving as a young girl?
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| old George Rowney pencil, featured in Pencil Archaeology |
1. Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.
2. If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.
He was interrupted in mid-sentence by the stomping of heavy boots outside the door. Someone's pencil dropped to the floor in panic and rattled. These were the feared but familiar sounds of Nazi boots, and the teenage students in the dark room could hear now the horrible bellowing outside the window, the barked orders for the Jews to show themselves.
Something as daily and friendly as a pencil still occupied the random spot on the workbench where Alfred had laid it in a different decade; the passage of so many years imbued the pencil with a kind of enmity.
But, indifferent to the uproar, she was captivated on the spot by a paper seller who was demonstrating magic inks, red inks with an ambience of blood, inks of sad aspect for messages of condolence, phosphorescent inks for reading in the dark, invisible inks that revealed themselves in the light. She wanted all of them so she could amuse Florentino Ariza and astound him with her wit, but after several trials she decided on a bottle of gold ink.
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| Mary Somerville holds probably a propelling pencil like the ones made by Samson Mordan. |
