Eight pens I forgot about

I sorted out my pen boxes last week. A shoe box and a cake box filled with the accumulated stationery of my lifetime. Among the gel pens and rollerballs (which are now going to Oxfam) I found these:

1. Lamy Joy black and red pen, 1.5 nib.
2. Platignum black desk pen, medium italic nib.
3. William Mitchell dip pen with spare nibs.
4. Pilot V-Pen, blue ink, medium nib – recent.
5. French Tintin pen with broken clip, from a holiday in Paris.
6. W H Smith calligraphy pen with twist converter, broad italic Platignum nib.
7. Pilot V-Pen, turquoise erasable ink, medium nib – older.
8. Campo Marzio Minny orange (mandarin)/gold pen, German iridium nib, turquoise ink cartridges, from an Italian holiday.

I’ll add these to my collection and review them some day, paired with a random ink.

This reminds me of the last time that I cleared out some pens, ten years ago, gripped with minimalist zeal. One of the first to go was the purple fountain pen that I filled with turquoise ink and then used to fill many notebooks and “rough books” in my teens. Yes, I still have the notebooks! I thought a photo of the pen would substitute for the real thing. I wish I still had it.
There is also a scan:

This in turn reminds me of a similar effort at clearing out my LPs when they were replaced by CDs. I had Fripp & Eno’s No Pussyfooting and loved it, but the disc got a lot of wear and accumulated dust and crackles so I was very happy with the CD release in about 1985 on Editions EG, but the cover was a cropped version of the original with larger text; not the same, not gatefold either. I miss the vinyl, especially the typography of the label, as an object, as art and design and guess what: I did not replace many more LPs with CDs. I got both. So much for sacrificing one’s darlings and meaning to carry on decluttering with less regret.

I just watched a little of ‘Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners’ on television in which a hoarder stated that she did not want to throw any memories away. Of course, we’re both wrong. We will always have the memories, but not the objects that trigger them.