So, those of you who know me, know that I am something of a packrat. Or, more kindly put, a collector. And the two things that I collect with the greatest passion are books and pens.

The pride of my pen collection is my collection of fountain pens, which is still fairly modest: fewer than a dozen pens. (Including my first two fountain pens - a pair of Sheaffer no-name cartridge pens, one fine point, one medium, that I picked up on sale at Walgreens years ago.)

However, I own a lot of other writing instruments. A writer cannot live by fountain pen alone. I almost always carry a backup rollerball or ballpoint pen, in case I run out of ink/cartridges for my fountain pen. Fountain pens also don't always do well on carbon-copy forms, or on cheap paper like newsprint. I like to use mechanical pencils for sketching. And sometimes it's nice, just for variety's sake, to experience the different tactile sensations of writing with a rollerball or a felt tip or a pencil.

(Any readers who fall into that group of humanity that gets by perfectly happily with nothing more than a 25 cent Bic Stic pen and a yellow legal pad will now be perfectly convinced that I've gone 'round the bend. And perhaps I have, but I've got a lot of company here.)

Anyway, the sad truth of it is, I've got a crapload of pens and pencils. Mostly the cheap kind that you can buy in blister packs at drug stores. Many of them are several years old now, since a lot of them were acquired during the period before I discovered the fountain pen, when I was still searching for that elusive perfectly writing pen. Some are well used, and others basically haven't been written with in years, after I tried them a couple of times and decided I didn't like the way they wrote.

I decided that things had hit the point of ridiculousness sometime last week, when I grabbed a pen from one of the four(!) pen cups on my desk, and discovered that it wouldn't write. I grabbed another one, and it wouldn't write either. On the third try, I got a pen that wrote, but I did get to thinkin', "Why am I taking up so much space on my ever-crowded desk storing pens that I don't use and that won't write?"

So, last night I decided to sort through them. I took each pen, scribbled with it a bit to get the ink flowing, and then tried to write, "This pen still writes." If the pen didn't write, I tossed it. (Unless it was one of the better quality refillable rollerballs, in which case I tossed the used up or dried up refill, and put aside the pen in a special "needs refill" pile.) If the pen wrote, but I found myself thinking, "Aw, man, don't tell me this piece of crap still writes!" I tossed it. If it wrote, I kept it.

The end result: I now have three pen cups on my desk, and one of them is less than half full. One cup consists entirely of pencils (mostly mechanical), and the other two hold pens. And everything writes.

It's not a complete victory - I still have a fair sized stash of pens in one of the pockets of my backpack - those still need sorting through. And three pen cups is probably two too many by any rational standard, but at least I can be assured that if I grab a writing instrument, it will write.

As a side note, it was interesting to see how the various styles of cheap pens fared in terms of holding up with age. Most liquid rollerballs did very well, especially ones made by Uniball. Among gel rollers, the Sakura "Gelly Roll" was a champ - I only found one that wouldn't write, out of 10 in my collection. (I've owned a lot of Sakura Gelly Rolls in my life. They're waterproof. (I kept my lab notebooks in grad school using Sakura Gelly Rolls. When the ceiling above my bench developed a leak and a couple of notebooks got soaked, every word I had written was still legible.) They write very smoothly, they come in scores of colors, and they were sold for $1.29 each at the Berkeley student store.) Zebra and Pilot retractable gel rollers also did well, but the Uniball ones were pretty much a lost cause. "Felt tipped" (not really felt, usually porous plastic) pens did really well, which kind of surprised me. Somehow, I had expected them to dry out. I only have a few ballpoints in my collection. About half of them would no longer write.

So, there you have it. More than you ever wanted to know about how I weeded my pen collection.

Next question - do I dare to attempt to purge my file cabinet before we move?