Fountain Pens

Anciently a man with bunched shoulder muscles squatted on his lean haunches and, with a piece of chipped flint, scratched a design on a piece of bone. That was writing.

A Babylonian tucked his curled black beard out of the way and with a wedge-tipped stylus stamped cuneiform characters into soft clay bricks, which he later baked and for security wrapped in an envelope of clay. That too was writing.

In Egypt a thin-shanked scribe squatted cross-legged and on a broad sheet of papyrus spread across his lap drew,...

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