A Note on Ball-Point Pens
Jane Stafford, in Kotare Vol.2, No.1 (May 1999), makes the following observation on Ngaio Marsh’s early play, Little Housebound (p.30, note 6): ‘The name and address are written in ball-point pen, rather than the ink of Marsh’s dedication. My assumption is that this indicates that it was written later than 1922.’
There is no need to ‘assume’: it could not have been written before 1938, when Biro patented his design, and is unlikely to have been written until after the Second World War, when ball-point pens became generally available in New Zealand. (I judge from a notebook with dated entries that I acquired my first in 1949.) This is not a trivial point. It would be crucial to the dating of some manuscripts, and literary scholars should take note of it.
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