James Joyce and pencils (i).
The Theorist at Fade Theory quotes from Paris bookshop owner Silvia Beach:
“Ulysses, like everything else of Joyce’s, was written entirely by hand. He used blunt black pencils - he found the ones he wanted at Smith’s in Paris - and pencils of different colors to distinguish the parts he was working on. Fountain pens he didn’t understand at all. They bewildered him. Once I found him struggling to fill one, covering himself with ink as he did so.”
Check out the rest of this great post here.
If you’re a Hemingway fan, this is the nice lady he talks about in A Moveable Feast when Papa recalls his days in Paris, writing with his pencils over a nice cafe’ au lait.
[Image and text, Fade Theory.]
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Joyce did a lot of writing in pen — there are many drafts in ink. He did also use pencil, yes, and variously colored crayons. If fountain pens confounded him, I wonder whether he might have used dip pens?
By Michael Leddy on 01.05.06 12:21 am
I read the rest of the quotes/review on Fade Theory and ended up dropping the _Shakespeare and Company_ book into an Amazon order that was already brewin’. Thanks for the mention of something I never would have otherwise come across.
(Thanks also for helping me once again utterly confound Amazon’s recommendations sw. I ordered the Serenity DVD for a friend, this Lost Generation memoir, and a Lisa Gerrard CD.)
By Alia on 01.05.06 8:18 am
Can anyone out there help me find plastic (E or N) drafting leads for this dinosaur of an architect!!!
By Ron Zakary on 10.30.07 4:32 pm
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