In his 2002 memoir, The Gatekeeper, the British Marxist scholar Terry Eagleton recalls the "strangely paralytic" effect of visits from "Gulliver", an Oxbridge young fogey who ritually placed "a gleaming fountain pen" on the table between them at the start of every tutorial: "I sometimes thought of poisoning the glass of sherry I gave him, dumping his body down some ravine and nicking his fountain pen." Little did Eagleton realise that he was on the cusp of a revolutionary moment - albeit one in luxury accessories.

Stylomania led Britons to spend £175m on premium fountain pens (those costing upwards of £25) in 2004, according to the market research group Mintel. In fact, the premium pen market is the only segment of the writing industry that is growing.

Right now, if you want to buy a fountain pen, there is a near- bewildering array of products to choose from, whether made by the giants of the industry - Montblanc, Cross and Parker - or from boutique companies.

But this is only half the story, for with every product there are the consumers, and then there are the consumers who become consumed. What the most committed devotees seek is not a £50,000 diamond-crusted Montblanc pen, but an instrument that can write as artfully as those made by master craftsmen around the turn of the 20th century, the golden age of the fountain pen. The trouble is, there doesn't seem to be anybody left who knows exactly how to make them any more.

The fountain pen was supposedly first invented in 1884 by a New York insurance broker, Lewis Edson Waterman, after a leaky pen cost him an insurance contract; but this is just advertising lore. What is true is that by the late 19th century, the competition to turn the fountain pen into a mass-market writing instrument was intense.

By the 1970s, however, the inexorable roll of the ballpoint, and its more sophisticated sibling, the rollerball, had carried the fountain pen to the point of oblivion. True, it was hard to imagine Anne Frank writing of a mass-produced Bic as she did of her prized fountain pen after it rolled off her table and was unwittingly swept into the fire: "I am left with one consolation, small though it may be: my fountain pen was cremated, just as I would be some day."

But a Biro didn't leak (often), didn't need to be refilled, and didn't cause emotional unrest when lost. Yet still the fountain pen came back. If it had a saviour, it was that paragon of conspicuous consumption, the yuppie. Much as Wall Street and City types took a chunky mechanical watch designed for serious diving - the Rolex Submariner - and turned it into a badge of upward mobility, there was really no competition between the biro and a fat, glossy, cigar-shaped Montblanc when it came to signing the cheque.

After Dunhill took a controlling stake in the company in 1977, Montblanc did exactly what Lewis Waterman and George Parker, founder of the Parker pen empire, had done in the late 19th century: they out-advertised and out-marketed every one of their competitors. Within a decade, the words fountain pen and Montblanc were practically synonymous.

As well as making the Montblanc a symbol of luxury, the company persuaded the well-heeled that fountain pens could be good investments. In 1992, they launched the first of their annual limited editions named after famous writers and patrons of the arts. As the first models, such as the Ernest Hemingway and Lorenzo de Medici, slowly sold out and then rapidly shot up in value (they are now worth three to four times their original retail price), other companies - old and new - saw an opportunity and charged into the market with dazzling and sometimes dubious designs (the Krone pen company's homage to Abraham Lincoln was impregnated with a replicated strand of the president's DNA).

Stylomania turned the 1990s into a new "golden era" for the fountain pen, according to Glen Bowen, who began publishing a glossy magazine - Pen World - for the burgeoning pen collecting masses in 1987. But as enthusiasm led to knowledge, knowledge led to discontent.

It was hard to argue that the machine-made modern fountain pen was technically better than its predecessors. It might be sturdier and less likely to leak, it might even be more beautiful to look at; but in one crucial aspect, something was missing.

Pick up a fountain pen made before the advent of carbon paper in the 1920s (which required a nail-like nib to engrave multiple copies) and there is an immediate tactile difference. The nibs - if not damaged, or worn away - are smoother and more responsive; in some cases, they seem to be more like fine artists' brushes, flexing from a hairline to a broad stroke at the slightest touch.

This quality allowed a great deal of physical pleasure in the act of writing - and, in practiced hands, calligraphy. As fountain pen enthusiasts gathered online, started clubs and began supporting a calendar of international pen shows, one question was endlessly repeated: Why couldn't modern pens flex like this?

The answer was gutting. Because most people had learned to write by pressing down hard on a ball point, there was no incentive for fountain pen companies to give the heavy-handed masses a nib that they'd probably spring with their first stroke; it would be like introducing a novice driver to the accelerator by way of a Ferrari F40. Second, many manufacturers had increased the carat content of their nibs. While an 18-carat gold nib may sound more lavish than a 14-carat one, it is a case of bling without benefit.

"The higher copper and silver content makes a 14-carat nib less malleable and [therefore] springier," explains John Mottishaw, a sculptor and art professor who, in 1992, set out to repair his wife's heirloom pen and ended up running the world's premier nib repair and customisation business.

But even if someone had wanted to make an old-style flexible nib, there was a more fundamental problem: no one knows exactly what the old pen makers did to make their nibs so flexible. "I've been straightening a nib from the 1890s," Mottishaw says from his workshop in Los Angeles. "And I had to bend the tines 90 degrees to see any movement. That tensile strength - there's nothing like that today. And I'd need a year and a MacArthur 'genius' grant to find out how they did it."

If the market abhors a vacuum, the search for nib nirvana led to an unlikely success story. One day in 2002, at a pen fair in Tokyo, an American-born graphic artist named Russ Stutler stopped by the booth of a struggling little Japanese pen company called Nakaya, run by Toshiya Nakata, the 41-year-old grandson of the founder of Platinum, one of Japan's oldest fountain pen companies.

In 1999, Nakata deliberately created the world's most inefficient pen company to employ two of Platinum's top retired master craftsmen, Sadeo Watanabe and Kohsuke Matsubara. Their mission: to create tailor-made pens, with no compromise on quality. The customer would simply soak up the expense - as well as the month or so it took to make his or her pen.

Intrigued, Stutler bought a finished display model, and then watched as Watanabe adjusted the pen to the way he wrote. On a whim, Stutler asked if he could add some flex to the 14-carat gold nib. Watanabe complied. Stutler was deeply impressed, and as a contributor to Pentrace, an international English-language fountain pen website based in Ireland, he wrote about the experience. Soon the site's message boards were flooded.

"When Russ talked of total hand production, it had a lot of appeal to limited-edition collectors, especially given the very reasonable prices," explains Len Provisor, the Chicago-based director of advertising and marketing at Pentrace. "But the greatest appeal was being able to produce a nib to a customer's individual specifications. No other company goes to such trouble."

By 2003, Watanabe and Matsubara were working seven days a week to meet international demand. Nakata had to hire three part-time workers to handle sales. The most popular models proved to be the most distinctively Japanese - those decorated in layers of opaque and translucent lacquer, known as Wajima Urushi, which sold for between $335 and $540.

More elaborate designs - such as scenes from Japanese or Chinese mythology - can leave little change out of $10,000. When the Nakaya staff visited the world's two largest annual fountain pen shows in 2004 - Chicago and Washington DC - they sold out of all their stock in a matter of hours.

To say that Nakata and his staff were amazed at the reaction to their pens (and the turnaround in their fortunes) is something of an understatement, particularly as Nakata admits to not even thinking about using the internet to reach out to enthusiasts. He didn't really know that there were websites devoted to the subject of fountain pens and his own company site is far from advanced.

But the thing is, stylophiles don't really care: Nakaya was a step back in time - and that meant a step closer to perfection.

Trevor Butterworth is an Irish writer based in Washington DC. He is a regular contributor to the Financial Times Magazine, and he has written for The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Salon, and other publications. He has, literally, been an ink-stained wretch since the age of eight.

This article originally appeared in issue 104 of the FTmagazine, May 7 2005.
© 2005 Trevor Butterworth