The Right Way to Write.(The Good Life; STYLE)(demand for style in pen design)

Byline: Nick Foulkes

As someone who looks deeply beneath the surface of things, I have been obsessed for some years by the great philosophical question: when did expensive pens become "prestige writing instruments?" I trace this development to the early 1990s, when two things happened. On a macrocosmic plane, the Internet and e-mail created a seismic shift in the way we communicate. Reason would suggest that the arrival of the Internet would have pealed the pen's death knell. But the world of luxury goods operates according to an almost perverse logic, whereby the moment technology threatens obsolescence, the law of elegant futility kicks in. So the proliferation of e-mail has been fabulous for ultraluxury pens, turning them into prestige writing instruments by liberating the correspondent from the need to communicate on paper and thereby making the use of a pen a choice.

On a microcosmic level, the other event occurred when Hamburg-based Montblanc, run by Norbert Platt, opened a stand-alone shop in Hong Kong in 1990. Platt's genius was to recognize that there was an appetite for yet more expensive pens and to expand on the company's elegant Meisterstuck model with a panoply of precious metal and gem-set pens that took prices into four and five figures. He also understood that such objects could not be sold in traditional stationers and took the bold step of opening Montblanc shops worldwide. This allowed him to send the message that buying Montblanc "says I am a cultured person, and successful," says Platt, now the CEO of Montblanc's parent company, the Richemont Group.

At about the same time, the market for vintage pens was gaining in stature. As these relics caught on, their look and feel began to influence the current market and design of modern fountain pens. Indeed, some of the most coveted and collectable implements are Alfred Dunhill's Namiki pens: elaborately lacquered pieces first sold in the 1920s that are still made and sold in extremely limited quantities today, fetching in the region of [pounds sterling]50,000 apiece.

But these last 10 to 15 years have seen growth in the vast market between Montblanc's popular Meisterstuck and the rare Namiki. Cartier can point to a heritage of stunningly decorative instruments. And even luggage maker Louis Vuitton has managed to make a very good ...