Ballpoint–The Tale of a Tool
Like many readers, writers, and scholars, I am an unashamed office supply junkie. I trail through my local Office Depot with the same delight I accord to grocery shopping* and only slightly less fascination than I feel in my local independent bookstore. (Go Seminary Co-op!) I like my pens to have a fine-point and my notebooks to be college-ruled. I’ve never met a specialized pad of paper that didn’t catch my imagination and I hoard my stash of hard-to-find summary paper.
I always knew that ballpoint pens were a relatively modern invention, but I never knew how we made the leap from fountain pen to ballpoint.** I found the answer in György Moldova’s Ballpoint: A Tale of Genius and Grit, Perilous Times, and the Invention that Changed the Way We Write.
Although his work is little known in English, Moldova has been Hungary’s best-selling author for more than forty years. In Ballpoint, Moldova tells the story of two other notable Hungarians largely unknown in the west: Lázló Biró and Ander Goy, the inventors of the ballpoint pen.
The story of the pen’s development is interesting in itself, beginning with Biró life as a Jewish journalist in interwar Budapest, frustrated by a leaking fountain pen. Biró’s technical difficulties and triumphs are told in a clear, non-technical manner. His search for financial partners is an object lesson in understanding legal documents before you sign them.
But what really makes the book is Moldova’s use of Biro and Goy’s story as a lens through which to view the troubled history of Hungary in the mid-twentieth century. Biró escaped from fascism by fleeing first to Paris and then to Buenos Aires. Once in Buenos Aires, he traded increasingly large percentages of the rights to his as-yet-undeveloped pen for help in getting his family safely out of Hitler’s Europe. His erstwhile partner and fellow inventor, Goy, remained in Hungary. He prospered under fascist rule, but lost everything when the new communist government nationalized his company. By the end, both partners had lost their rights to the pen as a result of financial deceptions and legal chicanery.
It makes me wonder if there’s a heroic story behind the invention of, say, the stapler.
*That is not sarcasm. I love grocery stores–ethnic, mainstream, or neighborhood bodega. Just ask My Own True Love, who patiently accompanies me to grocery stores, farmers’ markets, spice shops, and cheese emporia wherever we happen to be.
**I had a brief and inky flirtation with dime store fountain pens when I was ten or so. As far as I’m concerned, the romance of the ink bottle is dead.
The guts of this review appeared many moons ago in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
Punctuation, grammar, and like that
Anyone who comes to History in the Margins solely for historical tidbits may want to abandon ship today. Instead of committing my usual history-geekery, I intend to talk about the most appealing book I’ve ever read about the mechanics of writing.*
One of the things that instructors of writers say with some frequency is that before you break the rules of grammar (or story structure, or punctuation or physics) you need to know them. Mary Norris, the author of Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, knows the rules: she’s been a copy editor at The New Yorker for some thirty years. That’s a credential that would earn her book a place on my reference shelf alongside Fowler, Strunk and White, and the Chicago Manual of Style–or at least as close as the rules of alphabetizing allow. But credentials alone wouldn’t inspire me to read Between You and Me over meals instead of my current meal-time novel–or to bring it to the attention of the Marginites with evangelical zeal.
Norris is witty, irreverent, and a world-class storyteller. Between You and Me is as much memoir as it is grammar guide. There is plenty of practical information, presented with absolute clarity; in the future I’ll turn to Norris when uncertain about the correct use of my personal bête noir, the hyphen. But the grammatical advice is given almost as if it were the punchline to a personal story or the jumping-off point for an essay on a larger subject.** Along the way, Norris takes the reader on engaging side trips: Noah Webster and spelling reform, the invention of the comma in the Renaissance, the Paul A Johnson Pencil Sharpener Museum (now on my road-trip list).
In short, Norris takes what is often the driest of subjects, written in the most pedantic style, and makes it sparkle. If writing is an important part of your life, you need this book.
*Those of you who read History in the Margins via e-mail may not realize it, but the subtitle reads “A blog about history, writing, and writing about history.” If you want to verify this, just click the header in your e-mail and it will take you to the History in the Margins site. This trick is useful to remember when I embed a video or a bit of music.
**I draw your attention to the chapter titled “The Problem of Heesh”–an extended consideration of the larger questions of gender in language and society that begins with the vexed problem of the third personal singular pronoun in English.
A Good Place to Hide
In A Good Place To Hide: How One French Village Saved Thousands of Lives During World War II, Peter Grose describes how a population with its own experience of religious persecution and two charismatic pastors with unlikely international connections turned isolated community in the upper Loire Valley into a haven for Jews and other refugees during World War II.
A Good Place To Hide combines solid historical research with the narrative tension of a spy novel. Grose roots the story of Le Chambon and its neighboring villages in the experience of French Huguenots as a religious minority, the relationship between the Vichy government and Germany, and growing French resistance against the Nazis. He traces the communities’ gradual shift from hiding refugees to helping them escape into Switzerland. But the heart of the book lies in the stories of individuals, often told in their words, using journals, letters, memoirs and interviews. A 17-year-old Jewish office machine repairman who became a master forger of identity papers. A teenage girl who carried money from one Resistance cell to another, right under German noses. A mother of five who scoured the countryside for safe houses. Middle-aged refugees who disguised themselves as Boy Scouts and hiked toward freedom. The activist pastor who inspired the community to offer sanctuary with a literal reading of one Old Testament verse.
In the vein of Schindler’s List, A Good Place To Hide is an inspiring account of the extraordinary courage of ordinary people.
This review appeared previously in Shelf Awareness for Readers