National Ballpoint Day---June 10th

In case you haven't noticed, I love the colour orange...Orange is the new black ;)

In honour of National Ballpoint Day (which falls on June 10th every year), I bought this cool new orange Faber-Castell 'Grip' ballpoint from Buchan's Kerrisdale Stationery at their new(ish) location (9100 Blundell Road in Richmond), which carries selected Lamy, Faber-Castell and Parker writing instruments. The Grip's triangular body and pebbled surface make it a really comfortable writing instrument to use (its wooden pencil counterpart won a Red Dot design award) and it only set me back $12.99. Incidentally, although we're primarily a fountain pen club, we do have the odd meeting where the theme features other writing instruments, like mechanical pencils, vintage ballpoints, rollerballs and dip pens.

Now, here are some interesting facts about ballpoints & National Ballpoint Day, taken from this page:

History of National Ballpoint Pen Day
On June 10th of 1943, Hungarian brothers Laszlo and Gyorgy Biro walked into a European patent office to declare ownership of their new writing pen design. From this day on, countless ballpoint pens have been enjoyed by writers around the world, and this date has grown into the holiday National Ballpoint Pen Day to celebrate the achievements of these ingenious brothers.

Fun Facts about Ballpoint Pens
In honor of the Biro brothers and National Ballpoint Pen Day, we’d like to share some interesting facts about this incredibly popular pen type:

* Each second of every day, more than 125 ballpoint pens are sold
* An average ballpoint pen will write approximately 50,000 words – or about 100 pages of text
* 4.3 pens are used, on average, by each person in the United States each year
* Ballpoint pens range from about 7-cents each, to over $730,000 for the Mont Blanc ballpoint
* Before acquiring the rights to the ballpoint pen, RAF flyers used feather pens in the cockpit
* The first ballpoint pens sold in New York (1945) cost $12 each – or about a day’s wages
* 3.4 billion ballpoint pens are imported into the USA each year
* 56% of individuals own a logoed or customized ballpoint pen
* 95% of the time, when a person receives a new pen, the first word they write is their name

(~click on photos to enlarge~)