{"id":79686,"date":"2014-11-17T17:34:49","date_gmt":"2014-11-17T22:34:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=79686"},"modified":"2014-11-17T17:34:49","modified_gmt":"2014-11-17T22:34:49","slug":"tools-of-the-trade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/11\/17\/tools-of-the-trade\/","title":{"rendered":"Tools of the Trade"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"IMG_0657\"<\/a>

Foote\u2018s nib of choice. Photo: Elizabeth, via Flickr<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve heard that during the middle of writing The Civil War<\/em> you bought all the dip pens left in the United States.<\/p>\n

FOOTE<\/p>\n

My favorite pen-point manufacturer had all but gone out of business\u2014Esterbrook. I was running out and fairly desperate. On Forty-fourth Street just east of the Algonquin Hotel, on the other side of the street, there used to be an old stationery shop, all dusty and everything, and I went in there on the chance he might have some. He looked in a drawer. He had what I wanted\u2014Probate 313. I bought several gross of those things, so I\u2019ve got enough pen points to last me out my life and more. Another problem is blotters. When I was a kid and when I was writing back in the forties on into the fifties, you could go into any insurance office and they had stacks of giveaway blotters for advertising.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

What precisely is a blotter?<\/p>\n

FOOTE<\/p>\n

This is a blotter [pointing<\/em>] and if you haven\u2019t got one you\u2019re up the creek. You use the blotter to keep the ink from being wet on the page. You put the blotter on top and blot the page. I was talking about blotters in an interview, what a hard time I had finding them, and I got a letter from a woman in Mississippi. She said, I have quite a lot of blotters I\u2019ll be glad to send you. So I got blotters galore. Ink is another problem. I got a phone call from a man in Richmond, Virginia who had a good supply of ink in quart bottles. I got three quarts from him, so I\u2019m in good shape on that.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Do you reckon you\u2019re the last writer to be using dip pens in the United States?<\/p>\n

FOOTE<\/p>\n

There\u2019s probably some other nut somewhere out there doing it.<\/p>\n

\u2014Shelby Foote, the Art of Fiction No. 158<\/a>, 1999<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Shelby Foote was born on November 17, 1916, and died in 2005, six years after this interview was published. Though he was a prolific novelist, he remains best known for his three-volume history of the Civil War.<\/p>\n

His is one of my favorite Writers at Work interviews, and not coincidentally it\u2019s probably one of the longest\u2014Foote\u2019s three (!) interlocutors find him in a loquacious and expansive mood, such that almost whenever he opens his mouth he seems to speak in wry, eloquent, discursive paragraphs. He declaims on everything from pajamas to the Ku Klux Klan, and he appears to have known more or less every writer of relevance; his anecdotes include the likes of Faulkner, Hemingway, O\u2019Hara, Kubrick, and Walker Percy, among others.<\/p>\n

He also relishes the role of gentle, aging eccentric, as evidenced in the passage above. I\u2019ve just spent an embarrassingly long while trying to find the name of the defunct stationery shop he references\u2014no luck. I can report, though, that the Esterbrook Probate 313 is readily available<\/a> for all your dipping needs, even as blotter paper seems now entirely relegated to the realm of LSD paraphernalia.<\/p>\n

The Esterbrook Pen Manufacturing Company, founded by Richard Esterbrook in 1858, was once the oldest and largest manufacturer of steel pens in the United States. A midcentury brochure<\/a> (\u201cINTERESTING FACTS ABOUT ESTERBROOK STEEL PENS\u201d) notes that the company once turned out more than two hundred\u00a0million pens a year, \u201cused in every civilized country in the world.\u201d The factory went under in 1972.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have to communicate sensation,\u201d Foote said of the writer\u2019s mission,<\/p>\n

\n

the belief in what life is, what it\u2019s about, and you do it through learning how to handle a pen. That\u2019s the reason why I have always felt comfortable with the pen in my hand and extremely uncomfortable having some piece of machinery between me and the paper\u2014even a typewriter let alone a word computer, which just gives me the horrors. \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

INTERVIEWER I\u2019ve heard that during the middle of writing The Civil War you bought all the dip pens left in the United States. FOOTE My favorite pen-point manufacturer had all but gone out of business\u2014Esterbrook. I was running out and fairly desperate. On Forty-fourth Street just east of the Algonquin Hotel, on the other side […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2353],"tags":[9158,16070,16071,1132,9050,12818,7782],"class_list":["post-79686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nostalgia","tag-birthdays","tag-dip-pens","tag-esterbrook-pens","tag-interviews","tag-pens","tag-shelby-foote","tag-the-art-of-fiction"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nShelby Foote on the Tools of the Trade<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The southern writer was born on this day in 1916.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/11\/17\/tools-of-the-trade\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Tools of the Trade by Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"November 17, 2014 \u2013 INTERVIEWER I\u2019ve heard that during the middle of writing The Civil War you bought all the dip pens left in the United States. 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