For the most part, Mark Twain wrote with the usual implements of his day, the same things that everyone else used to write. In his book, "Tom Sawyer", which Twain said was based on his own childhood in Hannibal Missouri, we find the heart warming scene of Tom Sawyer writing love notes in class to Becky Thatcher with chalk and slate.

In Mark Twain's book "Life on the Mississippi" when young Mark Twain is learning the river under his teacher, Pilot Horace Bixby, Bixby scolds Twain for not paying attention and to get a memorandum book and a pencil to write down everything that is said to him. Actually this Memorandum book still exists and is part of the Berkeley Collection.

In 1869, when Mark Twain was touring the country, giving lectures and writing love letters to Livy he would write with steel or gold dip pens, and when he ran out of ink would resort back to the pencil and apologize for it in the margin.

All in all, the interesting pens that twain used would not come until the last 25 years of his life, and these are the fountain pens that I would like to explore.

Fountain pens when they first came out before the Civil War were joked about often. Early fountain pens were like writing with an early personal computer back in the old MS-DOS and Word Perfect days. The computers would work a little bit and then crash, often losing all the work that the writer had slaved over. I still cringe when remembering back in my early college days when I lost 10 pages of a term paper that I forgot to save to disk, the night before the paper was due. My friends couldn't help but laugh at my misfortune. The same was true for early fountain pen users. A pen user might be able to escape the irritating dip dip dipping of a steel pen into ink, but when his fountain pen gushed ink all over his papers...well you get the idea.

Mark Twain, however, saw the promise of these early pens. He kept up to date with their progress and always had the newest specimen, despite what his friends said.