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Photo © 2007 Daniel Falgerho

Daniel Falgerho took this snapshot of Barbara at the Philadelphia Pen Show in January 2007.

I grew up in central Indiana, the eldest child of a career National Guard officer and his homemaker wife. I learned to write with a fountain pen in Catholic elementary school. (We were not allowed to use ballpoints.) In public high school I continued to use a fountain pen, and when I went to college I took my pen with me. Somewhere along the way it fell out of use, and I lost it. I didn’t become a fountain pen user again until I started working with Richard at pen shows in 2002. At about the same time, I began developing a little osteoarthritis, and I find that fountain pens are more comfortable than ballpoints.

I’m not a pen collector, but I do have (and use) about half a dozen fountain pens. I’m a left-handed overwriter, and it’s funny sometimes to see the misconceptions people have about being left handed. At one show, I was busily writing something with my favorite pen, a Bexley Submariner SE that Richard stubbed for me, when a man came up to our table and said to me that he couldn’t use fountain pens because he was left handed.

I spent more than 10 years as a professional tax preparer, and I’ve always enjoyed working with numbers that have dollar signs attached to them. This means that I’m the “front office” half of our business. I handle tasks that don’t require Richard’s immediate personal attention — this leaves him free to concentrate on the things that only he can do. We joke that I’m the Managing Partner and Richard is the Revenue Producing Unit, but it’s actually an arrangement that works very well.

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© 2008 Richard F. Binder

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