the pen is mightier than the (ahem) sword

By Todd Stadler · Sunday, April 8, 2001 7:01pm

When I talked to Gerry about all this new pentech, he suggested now was the time for an extreme retro craze involving quills. His idea was to invent a quill that was somehow very "now", yet evocative of the original feather quills. He pointed to the number of potentially cool people we could use, royalty-free, in our advertisements: Shakespeare, Jefferson, DaVinci, Hancock.

Jefferson is cool, what with inventing liberty and all and writing on hemp paper. Shakespeare, as we all know, boinked Gwyneth Paltrow, which is cool. And DaVinci, although probably crazy, was very cool.

We pondered the idea of a quill company for a while. What would we name it? We toyed around with names like "Shakespeare & Jefferson" or something classy like that. But eventually we came to our postmodern senses.

Why not simply name out company Hancock Pens? Why, just think of all the patently tacky but potentially lucrative teen market penetration we could get with an edgy name like that! Advertising slogans like "I can't wait to get my hands around a Hancock" would go well with the kids, assuming anyone will print the ads.

To distinguish our quills from regular, boring pens, we could emphasize the extra length of the quill. "A nice long Hancock feels so good in my hand", billboards would trumpet all over, well, Las Vegas at least.

All the ads would feature sexy, scantily-clad women holding the pens near a man's crotch for no particular reason. And the angle would be just right, if you know what I mean. Pure Madison Avenue. Genius.

I then thought of a possible secondary ad campaign slogan. "My pen is...", followed by words that described the Hancock pen in question. But the space between "pen" and "is" would be accidentally smaller than in most other words, making it look like, well, you know.

"My pen is... smooth". "My pen is... able to go a long time". And so on. Featuring sexy male models. I guess it could be a two-pronged ad campaign, featuring ads for men and women. Awesome!