Dot Wordswoth on pens and puns
‘Why,’ asked my husband, looking up from his book, ‘is Joseph Gillott a very bad man?’
‘What?’ I said.
‘Because,’ he replied, as if I had acknowledged defeat, ‘he wishes to accustom the public to steel pens and then tries to persuade them that they do write.’
By the way that he was slapping his thigh and spilling his glass of whisky, I could see that he thought this was a joke. There was, it appeared, a double play on words: steel and steal, and do write and do right. Who Joseph Gillott was, perhaps I should have known, but didn’t.
He was, it turns out, the perfecter of the steel pen nib. ‘It was said to be doubtful,’ remarks the ODNB, ‘if any article of such wide and universal use was ever so identified with the name of one man.’
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