Pens and the Age of Consumer Electronics

Now, the general consensus may be that the era of the handwritten, pen-and-paper affair is over. But you're reading a blog about fancy pens, and our job at Goldspot.com is to sell these archaic writing instruments, so you can assume that we would argue the opposite case. Not today. It is over. Everyone can shelf their Pelikans, Parkers and Mont Blancs. Steve Jobs is going to send everyone iPads for Christmas this year. Your pens will make a great addition to our museums to show how primitive our lives were before everything evaporated into a digital "cloud." Schools will replace lessons on handwriting with typing and computer literacy. We send our "signatures" through biometric scans of our thumbprint. Even grocery checklists are automated with bar code scanners and your Stop&Shop card. The luminaries of silicon valley will tout, "We're saving thousands of acres of rainforest to re-build our thin ozone layer. And our wallets have never been thicker!" Actually, they won't say this in person, but in a text message that you receive as a Tweet. And America will say, "Well, it has to be true if @million_$dollar$_CEO said it." Meanwhile, my daughter is going to be more concerned if the boy she's dating changed his relationship status on Facebook from "single" to "in a relationship" than waiting for any love letters to come in the mail. And after she bugs me to check her Facebook one last time as she goes to bed, I'll be up writing a blog post about how people are losing touch with reality the more they "connect" online. As I tap away at my keyboard, I think about all those nice pens that are now collecting dust in the closet. It was nice to look at people's handwriting and get a sense of their personality and the emotions they have in the moment they are putting the pen to paper. What's that word again, "SUBTLETY?" Emoticons can only express so much, even if you copy and paste the same one over and over again. It was far less frustrating to write notes in my notebook than it is to type notes in my tiny iPhone screen with the battery dying from looking up YouTube videos on my way to work. And gee, although the computer wizards claim they're saving the forests, they make up for it by creating massive amounts of environmentally unfriendly batteries and draining our already-tapped electrical power grid. I hear the chanting of "Drill, Baby, Drill" in the distance. Then, there was the one day that an internet prankster in South Korea decided it would be LOLZ to wipe out every hard drive on every server, notebook, netbook, iPod, smartphone and personal computer (even your Nintendo DS isn't safe) in the entire world. Since we went paperless, everything was lost. To Doctors, patients have no more medical history. That amount you owe to the credit card company - gone. Your savings account, however, is also history. And the best thing about this phenomena is that no one can Tweet about it, no one can "like" it on Facebook and you will actually have to step out of your cave and strike up a conversation with your neighbor, "hey, my internet is out, do you have a phone book so I can call up the cable company to complain?" This is what the digital "cloud" has to offer : a veiled, distant form of reality that is even more fragile and difficult to maintain than our real lives. One day, we can wake up, and our lives are hijacked from us by a hacker who managed to crack our foolproof password : "12345" (...and change the combination on my luggage!) What do we hope to pass down from generation to generation? When we click OK to accept the terms of a Last Will and Testament, does that mean we have to upkeep Uncle Larry's MySpace page for all eternity? What value does any of this have in the long run? If pen and paper dies, does our humanity go along with it?

Fun, Animated Pelikan Griffix Cartoon Commercial

Cindy happened to find this video out on the internet and I thought it was a great approach to promoting the Pelikan Griffix line. Pelikan is also going to have a feature article on Griffix in Stylus Magazine that will be released sometime in April.

New Pelikan Griffix : 4 Step System Review

Hello fellow Goldspot readers,

Sorry for the long layoff. Not posting on our blog for almost a month is like an eternity on the internet. I assure you we've been hard at work expanding our webstore with scores of new products that have just been released. We are currently taking some time in letting our loyal customers know about the new lines that we have just established on Goldspot.com.

First-off, we have the Pelikan Griffix Writing System.

Before Die-Hard Pelikan Souveran fans decide to hit the "back" button on their browsers, it will interest you to know that the investment Pelikan is making in the future generations of writers will inevitably pay huge dividends for the future of

 the brand. 

Think about the first time you were introduced to a fountain pen: many of you can remember that fountain pens were all you used to write with in grammar school. Now they have been eschewed for the droll disposable ballpoint pen. Taking a page out of the Big Tobacco playbook, Pelikan is mirroring the "get'em while they're young" attitude to create future fountain pen enthusiasts.

That being said, the Griffix is suitable for early pre-school development. The first stage offers a wax pen, which is essentially a crayon with a unique, child-friendly grip. The design was developed in according to the newest graphomotoric findings in cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering. 

The pen is made kid-friendly by offering four bright colors and "funbuttons" that are placed in the back end of the pen. The funbuttons come in "sports," "space," "animals," and "flowers" themes and are interchangeable. Let's not forget to also mention the smiley face that stares at your child gleefully as he or she scribbles all over your dining room wall.

The second step is the pencil. Since the child is learning coordination and handedness, the grips are now distinguished as a "lefty" or "righty" version.

The third step readies the child for fountain pens by using the ink writer. The ink pen allows for more fluid writing movements as the child refines their motor skills.

The final step, of course, is the fountain pen. Here is where the child will learn good writing form and apply the perfect pliers grip to hold the pen. The Griffix fountain pen uses the standard Pelikan cartridges with "animals" or "sport & space" themes to match your funbuttons.

But is that really the final step? Imagine years later when the Griffix-graduate child has enough disposable income to buy him or herself a luxury writing instrument. They hearken back to their childhood and say, "you know, Pelikan was the first fountain pen I ever had. I'm going to buy a Souveran 800 Demonstrator." Well, it may not go exactly like that, but you get the point.