Printed Pens

In idle moments - relatively few and far between - I have wondered just how many different versions there could possibly be of a pen! Looking at our manufacturer's information is mind boggling and here's another thing just how many pen producers are there in the world today? A pen is a pen after all, it has ink inside a barrel, it may have a cap or a mechanism to hide the nib but then that is it. Well it was until the designers got their hands on it. Now we have proud and expensive executive pens ; we have jolly printed promotional pens, giveaway pens, novelty pens, funky pens, and magnetic pens to name but a few, and that barely scratches the surface of the variety that is available today. When Cro Magnon man first started doodling in the dust with a stick little did he know what he had started. ( www.infoplease.com/ce6/society ) Whilst typing this I have also had at the back of my mind the sheer waste of resources going into this overproduction of writing equipment - I know - I am working my socks off to sell more and more of the stuff - how can I square this with my conscience? Not easily, but we do have pens made from recycled paper and PET bottles and pens made from corn starch; sadly we do not sell so many of these. There are a lot of websites out there telling us what we should recycle and why, this was just one of them www.bbc.co.uk/education (Could we turn pens into plough shares?) Going back to one of my original thoughts on pens a search on Google has just revealed 662,000 sword manufacturers and 967,000 pen manufacturers. So what does that tell me? I am not sure but I guess that swords these days are often for decorative purposes whilst pens are for the more important tasks of signing credit card slips!