Taccia is releasing a limited edition fountain pen in honor of the Samurai in Japanese History, and sports the tag line, “The pen is mightier than the sword”
From their release posted on FPgeeks.com, the pen is “Hand-polished from an ebonite barrel, the TACCIA Tanto is then sealed with fine Japanese urushi lacquer, and fitted with a sting ray leather cap, sterling silver sword pin ornament, and Japanese 14-karat gold with rhodium two tone nib, the TACCIA Tanto is our finest homage to the power of the written word.” Only 100 were made, and they are available for $1,595.00.
Ok. So they made a pen out of ebonite shaped like a teeny little sword. That’s sort of cute and punny and funny. But personally I think it looks a little silly. They made the cap portion look like the handle, but it’s not proportioned like an believable tanto, and that’s forgivable because we all know it’s really a pen that’s an abstraction of a tanto. But the pen’s attempt to even suggest a tanto gets even more pathetic when you uncap it, because it gives the impression you’ve just unsheathed your mighty “tanto” out of it’s handle by the scabbard.
The folks at Taccia even had the nerve to put in this little bit about self defense: “The “Tanto” was a classic short sword in Japan, mostly used by samurai as a weapon of self-defense . Men, women, and sometimes children carried the Tanto for self-defence.”
This is to know about tanto, but it just makes the pen look even more incapable. As you’re writing, you’re basically holding your “tanto” by the scabbard. But here’s the thing, yhe tanto scabbard is actually a very effective self-defense tool. I’m a little bit of a martial arts geek as well as a pen geek and I think this is why this pen is irritating me so much because the pen, just like the tanto scabbard it looks like, can be used like a very short staff, or as a yawara or kubotan. Like this:
So, actually, your Taccia Tanto pen COULD be used in self-defense as a small kubotan, which makes it’s shape like a tanto scabbard really fun and exciting because the artistic suggestion is reinforced by the subversive utility to it. What Taccia has done instead is to make the pen out of brittle ebonite… So it’s useless. The end result is the message that the pen is indeed NOT mightier than the sword. Heck, it’s not even mightier than the scabbard.
Nib/Crease 