The write touch
Bromfield Pen Shop leaves a lasting imprint
You are what you write with. Believe it. Your pen is as distinctive as your watch.
The Observer is at sea without a Pilot V Razor Point Extra Fine. It's a cheap pen -- under $2 when you buy 10 and get two free at the estimable Bromfield Pen Shop. But then price is not the issue. It's how a pen feels in your hand, how it moves across paper. Looks are huge, too. You could be wed to a lowly Uni-ball or a $4,000 Cartier offering in gold called La Dona Crocodile.
My old friend Reenie, an NBC producer, favors a Pilot VBall. Extra Fine. It's an inferior writing instrument to mine, but I like her anyway. She had a Montblanc.
"I love that little floating thing in the top," she explains. I ask her how she could spend so much knowing that, like expensive sunglasses, she'd eventually lose it. "I did," she replies.
A truth about pens is that you must try one before you buy it. Imagine buying a car without driving it. The Bromfield shop is one of a few places left where you can test a pen. The Staples store one block over on Winter Street, in contrast, is a disaster. Its pens are hermetically sealed in plastic or shuttered in cardboard boxes. No floor models available. Buy a pen, hate it later.
When you think of the Bromfield shop, think Joe Hamburg. He had a stationery store at 37 Bromfield St. between the Massachusetts Bible Society and a bar. He'd tell people he was between heaven and hell.
His landlord was the old owner of Cafe Marliave -- Marliave's to all of us -- the delightful eatery closed last year for non payment of taxes.
Anyway, Hamburg began in the '20s with a messenger service called Yellow Cap. Sometime around the war, says his grandson, Fred Rosenthal, he moved into wholesale stationery. Eventually had a warehouse on Summer and then D Street in Southie along with the retail on Bromfield called the Bromfield Pen Center.
It opened in 1948 and stayed put until 1995, 20 years after Hamburg's death, when Rosenthal moved the place down to 5 Bromfield, where it remains today, and rechristened it the Bromfield Pen Shop. For almost 60 years, the two spots have been meccas for pen people, much as Peretti's (L.J. Peretti ) has been Shangri-La to cigar lovers.
The shop is, like all the great single-bore spots, a pip - squeak of a place. I'm rubbing shoulders with a guy in a good suit who's trying a silver thing that goes for $159. He paused as he writes and says wistfully, "There used to be a store like this in Philadelphia."
Bromfield stopped selling wholesale in 1988 and focused on retail pens. High-end fountains and ballpoints, mainly, with a broad array of cheap ones for plebes like me. He now sells a lot over the Internet to people who know what they want.
Rosenthal uses a Giuliano Mazzuoli, a name that sounds straight out of the High Renaissance. Along with the likes of Montblanc and Waterman, he sells classy stuff like Faber-Castell, S.T. Dupont, Caran d'Ache, and Pelikan.
When the shop still sold wholesale, Rosenthal had five salesmen selling pens all over New England. "Every town had a store," he recalls. They're roadkill now, crushed by the likes of Staples.
Rosenthal was on the road himself for 20 years and, with Rain Man-like recall, can name each place in every town. He asks me where I grew up. I say Andover. "Kenneth Thompson," he says without missing a beat. He floored me. I barely remember it.
I tell him there was a great stationery store in the building where I used to work on Boylston Street. "H. W. Poulson," he says in a microsecond. Then "Harper W. Poulson." I mention the Waterman brand and he says "Lewis E. Waterman."
Rosenthal, 51, began working for Hamburg during summers when he was 15. His father missed the pen bug. Got a doctorate in English at Harvard and lit out for academia. Never looked back. But Rosenthal, now owner of the shop, got sucked in after college in 1972 and never left. (He's not alone. "One guy died at his desk," he recalls. "He was about 80.)
George Salustro managed the place for 15 years and was also its repair maestro. Desiccated rubber ink bladders , bent nibs -- you name it. His uncle and Joe Hamburg were good friends, and Salustro came over in 1972 after his uncle lost his lease on his stationery store on Temple Place . He taught repair to Greg Byrne, who does it now, before retiring in 1990.
Bromfield is a Ballad of The Sad Cafe sort of street today. It is littered with empty storefronts. The Bible folks are gone, along with a camera store. The old City Sports location is still empty. Marliave's around the corner is shuttered. The indispensable Watch Hospital is holding on, barely. Foot traffic from Downtown Crossing is down, due in part to the demise of Filene's.
But the Bromfield Pen Shop is still cooking because of its small excellence, built on its commitment to the sale and repair of one thing: pens.
It is the antidote to Staples. Its employees know pens. They've been selling them for years. You can't beat experts, so I say back to the future.
Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com 