"She took up Barney’s pen—and a vile one it was"
We need to talk about fountain pens.
The ballpoint pens that we buy for cheap at the dollar store were not mass-marketed until the 1930s. If you prefer gel pens, rollerballs, or felt pens, those are also much later innovations! In the Blue Castle period -- some indefinite time between about 1913 and 1926 -- Barney would have used a fountain pen.
This is a stock image of an inexpensive modern fountain pen made by Pilot and sold via Office Max. Two thing are important here. In the middle of the pen is the reservoir where the ink lives. In 1920-whatever, you filled the reservoir by sucking ink into it from the ink bottle. Nowadays, you can get little plastic ink cartridges for your fountain pen, which makes refilling it much easier, at the cost of plastic waste.
The other important part is the nib, which is the pointy bit that the ink flows along to write. So many things can go wrong with nibs!
First, let's take a close look at a nib. This is a stock image from FountainPens.com. (This is not an endorsement to order from them; I've never done so.) See that narrow line down the center? It's actually a gap. This is about to be important, because it directs the flow of ink. (If you want full technical details, here's Goulet Pens' breakdown.)
A cheap or badly made nib will have slightly rough edges, or its gap isn't positioned right, or it otherwise isn't capable of reliably writing a clean line. Fountain pens were more expensive in relation to income in the 1910s-20s than ballpoint pens are for us. It would be tempting to buy a cheap one, and it would be tempting to keep using one after it wore badly.
I went to Goulet Pens (which is a good site to order from) for a list of things that can go wrong with your fountain pen. This includes:
Writing with too much pressure, which will spread the nib permanently
Not cleaning the fountain pen, which will lead to bad ink flow or a rough nib
Dropping it so that the nib bends
It's worth clicking through to the full listicle to see the photos of damaged nibs!
When the nib is bad in some way, the pen will skip or blot when you try to write. It's annoying and very messy! I can't demonstrate because (a) I managed to lose my last fountain pen when I moved in 2022 and (b) it was from Goulet Pens, so the nib was perfect.
Barney has been buying cheap pens, mistreating his pens, or both. Thus the pen is now "vile." It sputters across the page, making it impossible to do nice handwriting.
