A Fountain Pen Scribe's Ode to a Typewriter

I stood there, just 15, clutching a $30 check from a magazine for something I'd written, the first ever for my writing, growing dizzy with images in my head of where I needed to be.

- JEFFREY ROBINSON

Paris. In the rain. Ducking into a warm café to claim an empty wooden table at the back.

Nursing my grand crème while scribbling flowing exposition and biting dialogue into my leather Moleskine notebook with my Montegrappa pen. Just like Ernest Hemingway all those years ago.

His love letter to Paris, A Moveable Feast, had awakened my $30 fortune with yearning. In that memoir, Hemingway wrote: "It was a pleasant café, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a café au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write..."

Wait. What? Stop. A pencil? What happened to his Montegrappa?

Everyone knows that Hemingway discovered Montegrappas long before he discovered Paris. It was in Italy, during World War 1 when he was an ambulance driver stationed near the company's factory. He wrote with Montegrappas.

Hemingway was Montegrappa.

Hemingway was not a pencil!