Solid tungsten pen.

Well, not totally solid, since there is room inside for the ink cartridge. This is one seriously heavy pen, make no mistake about it. The website of the maker explains how this can help smooth the flow of your writing. It's certainly an unusual experience. I have found one absolutely perfect use for this pen: Signing copies of Michael Swanwick's book A Periodic Table of Science Fiction, which I was asked to write a foreword to. The book (which you can order a copy of from the link, if it hasn't sold out yet), is a limited edition that collects all the stories from Michael's one-element-story-a-week-or-bust website, which I've had links to since he first started writing it. Naturally I signed all the signature plates while sitting at my periodic table table. (See, it really is useful as a table! OK, and technically if you look at the picture, I'm using a Fisher titanium pen, and the picture was taken before I even got this pen. Isn't memory a wonderful thing? I could have sworn I had used this one, until I actually checked the photograph again. Rest assured that if I had had this pen at the time, I most certainly would have used it to sign those books!)

This is serial number 2 in a very limited production run of these pens. Expensive, but really, really heavy.

Source: Inkling Pen Company

Contributor: Theodore Gray

Acquired: 5 February, 2005

Text Updated: 11 August, 2007

Price: $590

Size: 7"

Purity: 95%