CHAPTER

5

We all make mistakes

 

There’s a scene in Eraserhead by David Lynch where the head of Henry (the main character, played by the tragic Jack Nance) suddenly falls off. The head is found by a small boy who takes it to a factory of some sort. Here, a man uses a core drill to remove a thin cylindrical section of Henry’s brain which he feeds into a machine. The machine begins to whirr and a conveyor belt carries a series of pencils along in a row. The core from Henry’s head is sliced and fixed to the top of each pencil as an eraser (hence ‘Eraserhead’). Eventually, the machine produces a finished pencil and the operator takes one, sharpens it and makes a quick mark on a bit of paper before testing the eraser. The operator nods and says, ‘It’s OK’; Henry’s head makes good erasers and the boy is paid. I’ve looked into it though, and that’s not how erasers are made.

The substance erasers are actually made from has been known under various names (caoutchouc, hevea, olli, kik) for thousands of years. Derived from the ‘milk’ of various trees and plants in countries with tropical climates, the material was first used by the Olmecs, the earliest civilisation to form in Mexico around three and a half thousand years ago. At this time, the substance was mainly used to produce the large solid balls used in the extremely brutal Mesoamerican ballgame (which would later become known as Ulama). Mixing the latex from the Castilla elastic tree with the juice from the Ipomoea alba plant (handily the two are often found close to one another), the Olmecs were able to produce thick, flexible strips which could be wound into a ball shape. The material was also used to waterproof fabrics and produce simple artefacts.

In the western world, however, the material would remain completely unknown until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when reports of its unusual properties first started to emerge from the New World. In the middle of the eighteenth century, two French scientists, Charles Marie de la Condamine and François Fresneau, began to see the potential for this ‘new’ material. La Condamine presented his and Fresneau’s studies to the Paris Academy of Science in 1751 – the first academic paper on the subject (published as Mémoire sur une résine élastique, nouvellement découverte à Cayenne par M. Fresneau; et sur l’usage des divers sues laiteux d’arbres de la Guiane ou France équinoctiale or ‘Memoir on an Elastic Resin Newly Discovered in Cayenne by Mr Fresneau, and on the Usage of Different Milky Tree Saps in Guyane or Equatorial France’ in 1755). It wasn’t until the later part of that century that the pencil-erasing qualities of this ‘gum elastic’ began to be exploited.

It seems that British stationer Edward Nairne was the first to realise the substance could be used in this way. In the preface to his Familiar Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Perspective in 1770, Joseph Priestley wrote that he had ‘seen a substance excellently adapted to the purpose of wiping from paper the marks of a black-lead-pencil’ and adds in a footnote:

It must, therefore, be of singular use to those who practice drawing. It is sold by Mr. Nairne, Mathematical Instrument-Maker, opposite the Royal Exchange. He sells a cubical piece, of about half an inch, for three shillings; and he says it will last several years.

Clearly happy with his purchase from Nairne and pleased with how good it was at rubbing out pencil lines, Priestley is credited with giving the material the name by which it is known today – ‘rubber’.

Before that (and indeed for some time afterwards), the preferred method for removing pencil lines was to use stale bread. Even as late as 1846, Henry O’Neill would tell readers of his Guide to Pictorial Art – How to Use Black Lead Pencils, Chalk and Watercolours that:

when a drawing is to be shaded in pencil, the sketch or outline had better be done with a rather soft pencil, in light lines, removing errors with indian rubber or crumb of bread.

However, as the nineteenth century progressed, rubber gradually replaced stale bread as the preferred method of erasing pencil lines, to the relief of all those artists and draughtsmen besieged by hungry ducks.

During the 1830s and early 1840s, the American inventor Charles Goodyear worked on developing a process to stabilise rubber (natural rubber becomes hard and brittle when exposed to the cold; soft and gluey when exposed to heat). By adding sulphur and steaming the material under pressure, he was able to produce something much more durable. However, it was the British Thomas Hancock who in 1844 was first issued a patent for what would become known as the ‘vulcanisation’ process (meaning ‘to put into flames’, and taking its name from Vulcan, the Roman god of fire). Goodyear had sent samples of his rubber to British companies to demonstrate its potential before applying for a patent and it seems Hancock basically reverse-engineered an early sample of Goodyear’s rubber (having noticed some yellow discolouration which he recognised was caused by sulphur) and filed the patent before Goodyear got around to it. While Goodyear may not have seen any real financial reward for creating the vulcanisation process – he died heavily in debt – his name lives on in the tyre company named in his honour. ‘The writer is not disposed to repine, and say that he has planted, and others have gathered the fruits,’ Goodyear wrote. ‘The advantages of a career in life should not be estimated exclusively by the standards of dollars and cents, as is too often done. Man has just cause for regret when he sows and no one reaps.’

Recognised as a much more durable and reliable material, vulcanised rubber soon began to assert its place as part of the stationery canon, and in 1858, pencil and eraser became one. On 30 March 1858, Hymen L. Lipman of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was issued US Patent 19,783 for his ‘combination of lead-pencil and eraser’. Lipman’s design consisted of a lead pencil made ‘in the usual manner’, except the pencil lead only continued for three-quarters of the length of the pencil – the remaining quarter was instead filled with a piece of rubber:

The pencil is then finished in the usual manner, so that on cutting one end thereof you have the lead, and on cutting at the other end you expose a small piece of india-rubber, ready for use, and particularly valuable for removing or erasing lines, figures &c and not subject to be soiled or mislaid on the table or desk.

In 1862, Hymen Lipman sold his patent to Joseph Reckendorfer for around $100,000 (around $2.3m today). Reckendorfer later issued his own improvement on the design for which he had paid so handsomely. However, when Eberhard Faber began selling a similar product and Reckendorfer took him to court in 1875, both his and Lipman’s patents were dismissed as being invalid. Lipman had simply taken two pre-existing things (a lead pencil and piece of rubber) and stuck them together without producing ‘a different force or effect or result in the combined forces or processes from that given by their separate parts’. The court compared Lipman’s design to taking a hammer and fixing a screwdriver to the handle, or attaching a hoe to the handle of a rake. The combination of the two might be more convenient, but it doesn’t qualify as an invention in its own right that could be patented. In his original patent, Lipman didn’t even claim to have invented the idea of ‘a lead pencil with a piece of rubber attached at one end’ and his repeated use of the phrase ‘in the usual manner’ in his patent application probably didn’t help matters much either.

However, what Lipman’s original patent does illustrate is how the world is split into two camps: those who prefer pencils with erasers on the end of them and those who prefer their pencils and erasers to be to separate items. Lipman explained in his patent why the pencil–eraser combination was preferable – it is not ‘subject to be soiled or mislaid on the table or desk’. Lipman was arguing for convenience. You make a mistake, and you know the safety net of the eraser is there – just flip your pencil round and it’s gone. Personally, I have never liked using the pencil-end eraser. The rubber seems harder and more unforgiving than a normal free-range eraser, and the thought of it cracking or wearing away so that the metal ferrule makes scratchy contact with the page makes me uncomfortable.

There seems to be a US/Europe divide when it comes to the eraser-on-the-end-of-the-pencil debate. In the US, eraser-ended pencils are the default; in Europe they are the exception. But of course it’s not as clear-cut as that: Eberhard Faber managed to turn any clean US/Europe division into a smudgy blur. Not only did German-born Faber destroy the claim of America’s Joseph Reckendorfer to have invented the ‘combination of lead-pencil and eraser’, he also launched a standalone eraser which would become a classroom icon in the United States – the Pink Pearl.

The Pink Pearl was designed as part of Eberhard Faber’s range of ‘Pearl’ pencils. A simple pink rhomboid, its distinctive colouring and soft texture were a result of the volcanic pumice mixed with the rubber and fatice during the manufacturing process. Erasers are made from either natural or synthetic rubber, but the rubber itself is just used as a binding agent and typically only makes up around 10 to 20 per cent of the eraser as a whole. Other ingredients are added, including a mixture of vegetable oil and sulphur known as ‘fatice’. It is this fatice which acts as the real erasing material. Abrasive substances such as pumice or glass powder are also often added, depending on the texture of the eraser required.

The eraser was launched in 1916, just as compulsory education laws were being introduced across America (in 1918, Mississippi became the final state to introduce such laws). Its low price and reliable quality meant it became a common feature in classrooms across the country and, while it may not be well known in the UK, it is familiar to millions of Americans. In 1967, the eraser was celebrated by the artist Vija Celmins, who produced a series of painstakingly crafted Pink Pearl sculptures from balsa wood, shaped and painted to look just like the real thing. The sculptures took the humble eraser and turned it into the icon it deserves to be – blown up to 6 × 20 × 3 and sitting in an art gallery. Ten years later, Avon paid tribute to the Pink Pearl in its own unique way, producing a Pink Pearl nail brush (‘Ten busy fingers after school, play and homework need a scrub-away brush to erase undernail dirt!’)

The familiar bevel shape and colour of the Pink Pearl are still recognisable today in the version sold by Papermate (the Pink Pearl name has been passed around a bit, appearing originally as the ‘Eberhard Faber Pink Pearl’, then later as the ‘Sanford Pink Pearl’ and finally the ‘Papermate Pink Pearl’). While the various company names under which it has appeared have changed after each acquisition and merger, the Pink Pearl image itself has remained constant – the ‘Eraser’ icon in Photoshop, both in shape and colour, is clearly modelled on a Pink Pearl-type eraser. On Etsy today, crafters sell Pink Pearl magnets, Pink Pearl badges and modified Pink Pearl erasers with USB memory sticks embedded in them.

With the development of synthetic rubbers, polymers and plastics during the early twentieth century, erasers could be produced in new shapes, colours and scents. The rounded corners of the Pink Pearl wedge emerged because a sharper corner might break off during transit and it is more comfortable in the hand. A slightly more resilient material can allow for a squarer shape, like that of the clean, white Staedtler Mars Plastic (‘Virtually residue-free and with only minimal crumbling’) or the Rotring B20 (‘It works by rolling up graphite and dirt particles in eraser dust’).

The tan Artgum block; the beige Magic Rub; the turquoise Rub-A-Way; a lump of blueish-grey kneadable putty; a white plastic cuboid: erasers come in many different forms. So far, so serious – however, the material’s versatility also allows for a little fun. Cheap, colourful and with the pretence of practicality, novelty erasers are the ideal classroom collectable. Shaped like people, animals, household objects (my sister had one shaped like a toothbrush – the handle yellow and the bristles in white), different types of fruit (each given the appropriate perfume; the strawberries smell like strawberries, the snozzberries smell like snozzberries), and the meta stationery-disguised-as-stationery post-modern Ouroboros of the pencil-shaped eraser.

However, despite that versatility, the long rhomboidal form has survived. Sometimes the eraser will be split in two; one smooth pink or white half for erasing pencil lines, and one more abrasive grey or blue half to erase ink. As pencil lead simply sits on top of the paper, removing it is fairly easy. Ink, which soaks into the paper’s fibres, is harder to erase. For a long time, the only way to remove the ink marks would be to scrape away at the surface of the page itself. Depending on the type of ink and the type of paper, this could be done with a variety of materials: the abrasive half of a pencil and ink eraser; a piece of pumice stone to remove ink from parchment; or even a metal blade. This was the method I used when working on drawings at university – carefully scratching away the ink from a piece of tracing paper or detail paper with the edge of a razor blade. Once or twice, I’d accidentally nick my fingertip with the tip of the blade and the drawing I’d been working on would be ruined. But if the worst that happened to me was the inconvenience of ruining a drawing with a drop of blood, I was lucky. Early ink erasers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century looked more like surgical scalpels rather than anything you’d expect to find in an office, and caused much more than a cut finger.

‘STABBED TO DEATH IN OFFICE FROLIC’ reads the headline from a story in the New York Times from 1909. The story explains how fifteen-year-old George S. Millitt of 425 Pleasant Avenue had mentioned to his colleagues that it was his birthday. The girls he worked with began to tease him, telling him that as it was his birthday, he deserved a kiss. ‘Every one of them vowed that as soon as office hours were over she would kiss him once for every year he had lived.’ He laughed them off, saying that the girls wouldn’t get near him:

As 4.30 o’clock came, and the day’s work was over, the girls made a rush for him. They tried to hem him in, and he tried to break their line. Suddenly he reeled and fell, crying as he did so, ‘I’m stabbed!’

It seems that as he attempted to evade his colleagues, he accidentally stabbed himself with the blade of his ink eraser. John R. Hegeman Jr, assistant treasurer of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company where Millitt worked, told the police he was ‘quite sure that Millitt’s death was a regrettable accident’. It had been Hegeman who had given Millitt the job and it was his understanding that ‘he was doing well in the office, and was popular’. Hegeman said that the ink eraser found in the boy’s pocket was ‘of the regular pattern supplied to employees of the company’. There’s a lesson here for all of us: if it’s your birthday at work, don’t tell any of your colleagues. Stay quiet if you want to stay alive.

As the typewriter became increasingly popular in the early twentieth century, so there grew a need to correct typing errors. Harder, more abrasive erasers would be used to remove the typewriter ribbon ink. For accuracy, the erasers were shaped like large flat coins; easier to hold and allowing the typist to pick out one individual letter at a time. Any dust or remnants from the rubber falling into the typewriter mechanism could cause a jam, and so often the disc-shaped erasers would have a long brush attached – a design celebrated by Claes Oldenburg’s Typewriter Eraser, Scale × currently held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

Of course, if you can’t completely erase your mistakes, you can disguise them. Hide them. Cover them up. That was what Bette Nesmith Graham did. After leaving school at seventeen, Bette McMurray applied for a job as a secretary at a law firm in Texas, even though she couldn’t type. Luckily, she got the job – and the company even paid for her to attend a secretarial school. In 1942, she married Warren Nesmith and the couple had a son, Michael, the following year. The marriage did not last and a few years later, the Nesmiths divorced. Bette was forced to raise Michael on her own, but through a combination of hard work and determination, by 1951, she had reached the position of executive secretary at the Texas Bank & Trust in Dallas. But still she couldn’t type properly. For a long time, this hadn’t been a problem; she’d just rub out the mistake and retype it correctly. But as the company switched to IBM electric typewriters, she found that the ink from the carbon film ribbons used in these new machines would leave smear marks on the page if mistakes were erased with standard typewriter erasers.

However, Bette found a solution when she volunteered to work overtime one Christmas to help pay the bills. While she was decorating the window for the bank she watched the artists painting the sign boards. ‘With lettering, an artist never corrects by erasing but always paints over the error,’ Nesmith would later write, ‘so I decided to use what artists use. I put some tempura waterbase paint in a bottle and took my watercolour brush to the office. And I used that to correct my typing mistakes.’ After a while, her colleagues began to ask Bette if they could have some too, and she realised that there might be some commercial potential in this new product, which she called ‘Mistake Out’. Getting advice from one of Michael’s chemistry teachers and a local paint manufacturer, Bette made some improvements and paid a chemist $200 to develop a solvent-based formula which would dry quicker than her water-based tempura paint. After changing the name to ‘Liquid Paper’, and patenting the new formula, she began to market the product beyond her circle of friends and colleagues.

She set up a miniature production line from her garage, with Michael helping to fill hundreds of bottles each month using squeezy ketchup bottles. In 1957, a magazine article about the product boosted sales to over a thousand bottles a month. Despite the increased demand for the product, Bette continued to work at the bank; that is until one day when she was suddenly fired. Ironically, the reason for her sudden dismissal was all down to a typing error. Typing out a letter for her boss to sign, she accidentally typed ‘The Liquid Paper Company’ instead of the bank’s name. The game was up.

Sacked from the bank, Bette now concentrated on Liquid Paper full time, but success wasn’t easy – especially as Michael was no longer around to help (in 1965, Michael had replied to an advert looking for ‘Folk & Roll [sic] Musicians-Singers for acting roles in new TV series’ and was now one quarter of The Monkees). In 1968, the company was producing 10,000 bottles a day and grossed over $1m in sales that year alone. Over the next few years, the company grew even more – producing twenty-five million bottles a year by 1975. Four years later, the company was bought by the Gillette Corporation for $47.5m – Bette also received a royalty for every bottle sold until the year 2000. Eventually, however, Bette’s fame was eclipsed by that of her son; her innovation and business skills reduced to little more than the answer to a trivia question on a pub quiz machine. After Bette died in 1980, Michael inherited $25m – money which helped him realise his PopClips concept of a TV show playing music videos and which inadvertently paved the way for MTV. If video killed the radio star, then it was funded by correction fluid.

While Liquid Paper and Wite-Out are well known in the US, most Europeans would be more familiar with Tipp-Ex. Like Liquid Paper, Tipp-Ex was developed to help correct typing errors, but the original Tipp-Ex product wasn’t a correction fluid – in fact the company, led by Wolfgang Dabisch, had been in business for six years before Tipp-Ex launched its first correction fluid in 1965. Originally Tipp-Ex was a corrective tape for use by typists. As described in one of Dabisch’s many patent applications, the original Tipp-Ex product was ‘a material for obliterating erroneously typed characters from typed paper’. The product consisted of a:

… relatively dense base sheet and a covering layer composition. The covering layer is microporous and not substantially penetrated into the base sheet. The covering layer composition is weakly adherent to the base sheet, detachable therefrom by pressure of a typewriter key, and compressible and transferable thereby in substantially the thickness of the covering layer and with substantially sharp contours of the typewriter key.

Essentially, what that means is that it was a bit of paper with some white stuff on it and if you made a typo, then you would go back a space, stick the sheet on top of the paper, retype the letter and the typewriter key would print some of the white stuff over the offending letter and then you’d remove the Tipp-Ex sheet and go back again and then type the correct letter. It sounds impossibly complicated in this age of MS Word, Pages and Scrivener, but this is how things were done back then.

Seeing the success of products like Liquid Paper, Dabisch developed a similar product of his own. Building on the distribution channels he had already created with his Tipp-Ex correction sheets, he was able to establish the Tipp-Ex correction fluid brand throughout Europe before Bette Nesmith Graham even had a chance to move production out of her garage. Dabisch’s Tipp-Ex was a huge success, to the point where the product not only became the generic noun for correction fluid in the UK, but it also became a verb. We ‘Tipp-Ex’ things out, just as we ‘Hoover’ the carpet – feel free to Google more examples of this sort of thing.

Browsing in Fowlers one day (the same stationery shop where I bought the Velos 1377 Revolving Desk Tidy), I noticed something odd. Behind rows of familiar-looking bottles of Tipp-Ex and other correction fluids (Snopake and QConnect) I saw something I hadn’t seen before. I reached to the back of the shelf and picked up two dusty bottles. They were both Tipp-Ex, but they were nothing like the fresh-looking bottles at the front of the shelf. One bottle was a sort of beige – discolouration due to age, or had it always been like that? I looked at it more closely. ‘Tipp-Ex Air Mail Fluid’ said the label, ‘For airmail and light weight paper (art.no 4600)’. The border of the label featured red, white and blue lozenges – like a proper airmail envelope. The other bottle was black. The label for this one said ‘Tipp-Ex Foto Copy Fluid. For use on coated or plain paper copies. Will not dissolve toner (art.no 4400)’. The labels on both bottles said, in small writing, ‘A West German product’, suggesting the two bottles had been on the shelf in Fowlers long before the reunification of Germany twenty-five years earlier. I bought them both, even though the contents had long ago dried up, making them unusable.

Correction fluid was originally (and is still) sold in small bottles, with an applicator brush attached to the lid – similar to nail varnish. But is this the ideal solution? The bottle design has obvious flaws – it can be knocked over, meaning the fluid might spill across your desk. Dried correction fluid can start to collect around the neck of the bottle; the fluid itself can begin to coagulate, the heavy pigment slowly becoming solid over time with the thin, watery solvent sitting on top. As the correction fluid solidifies around the brush, it forces the bristles apart in different directions, destroying any hope of a clean, precise correction. It’s messy.

Pentel certainly weren’t happy. The Japanese stationery company thought they could improve upon the bottle design. They gathered together a collection of used correction fluid bottles and studied them: lots of the bottles still contained correction fluid, but it had dried and the brush had split; some of them showed signs of spillage. Something had to be done.

In 1983, Pentel launched their new correction fluid bottle design – a small, square bottle with a spring-operated nib built into the lid. Rather than using a brush, the bottle was designed to be turned upside down and the correction fluid applied in a way similar to eyedrop fluid. The tip and bottle shape were refined, and in 1994, they launched a metal-point nib with a pen-shaped body. Who would go back to the bottle now?

The bottle faced another threat with the advent of correction tape. Correction tape was developed in Japan by eraser manufacturer Seed in 1989. Seed were formed in 1915, and, like Pentel, they were dissatisfied with the conventional correction fluid bottle. However, Seed’s new innovation was a dry-tape; if anything making it closer to Dabisch’s original Tipp-Ex product. It took Seed around three to four years to develop their product before launching it in 1989, but within three years Tipp-Ex had produced their own version: the Tipp-Ex Pocket Mouse was launched in 1992, with a Mini Pocket Mouse three years after that. Correction tape consists of a white pressure-sensitive tape which is applied over the error using a small plastic applicator (in the case of the Tipp-Ex Pocket Mouse, the applicator is mouse-shaped although that offers no practical benefit). Tape has the obvious advantage over fluid in that it is already dry, and so can be written over immediately. It’s also quite difficult to spill.

The bottle had to adjust, but there was limited scope for development. The best Tipp-Ex seem to have come up with is the move from the standard brush to the wedge-shaped foam applicator that ‘provides neat and precise correction’.

Rather than just painting or taping over an error, there are more scientific ways of erasing your mistakes. In the 1930s, German pen company Pelikan developed a type of ‘ink bleach’, originally referred to as ‘Radierwasser’ (‘erasing water’) or the more sinister-sounding ‘Tintentod’ (‘ink death’). The name was changed to the more exciting though less explicable ‘Tint-entiger’ (‘ink tiger’) in 1972, and then was changed again to ‘Tinten-blitz’ (‘ink lightning’) two years later.

Two-part formulas such as Sloan’s Ink Eradicator (made by the Waterman Pen Company) offered you the opportunity to perform a miniature scientific experiment on the page in front of you. The box contained two bottles (labelled simply ‘1’ and ‘2’). Using the applicator built into the lid, the user would apply the first solution and then ‘agitate until the ink has softened’ and use blotting paper to remove the excess fluid. The second solution would then be applied, but the user was instructed to ‘not blot until No.1 solution has been applied again’. The product could also be used to remove ‘ink, coffee and fruit stains’ from white fabric by following a similar process and then rinsing in cold water (‘Particular attention is called to the fact that coloured articles should not be treated with this ink eradicator’).

In 1977, Pelikan launched the ‘Pelikan-Super-Pirat’ double-ended pen. At one end was the ink eradicator and at the other was a permanent ink pen with which to rewrite the erased letter or word. With this ink eraser, you only get one chance to correct your mistake, as the eradicator does not work against the permanent ink. The ink eradicator offers no second chances; it is unforgiving.

BASF, ‘The Chemical Company’, explain how the ink eraser works on their podcast (yes, there’s a BASF podcast):

Let us first take a look at why blue ink looks blue. It contains flat, disc-like colour molecules wherein many free moving electrons buzz around. Light cast upon these electrons is absorbed or ‘swallowed’ for the most part. Only the blue part of the physical light is reflected. That’s why we recognise it as ‘blue’.

The ink eraser disrupts these ‘colour molecules’:

Now the time has come for the ink eraser. It contains, to a large degree, sulphites that change the composition of colour molecules. Previously flat, they now take on the shape of a pyramid. In this new shape, the molecules cannot move around freely and are no longer able to distribute themselves within the whole molecule. The effect: they reflect all parts of the visible light again.

So although the words remain on the page, they are no longer visible. It sounds like magic:

What might sound like magic is actually a sleight of hand in chemistry.

This kind of ink eradicator only works with ink of a specific hue – the royal blue used in the majority of fountain pens around the world. The permanent ink of the ink eraser has a different formula and so is not affected by the ink eradicator formula. Pelikan offer this important information about their correcting ink:

The ingredients of the ink were chosen bearing all possible hazards and threats in mind. Even accidentally swallowing ink would not harm the average person. We do however warn against consumption as ink is not to be considered as nutrition.

That’s worth keeping in mind: ink is not to be considered as nutrition.

The ink eraser really only works for royal blue fountain pen ink, but what about ballpoints? Ballpoint ink doesn’t react in the same way as fountain pen ink, and instead of turning invisible, it just smudges a bit which makes a mess and ruins the eradicator tip. Instead, a new solution had to be developed.

During the 1970s, while everybody else was [insert glib description of what people were doing in the 1970s], Papermate were busy developing a new erasable ink. The Replay pen (called the Erasermate in the US) was launched in 1979 after a decade of research. The ink in the Replay is slightly drier than the usual thick, viscous ballpoint ink. The different formula requires the ink to be pressurised in order to allow it to flow smoothly and continuously; this means that it can be used upside down, like the Fisher Space Pen, which is handy if you like lying on your back and are prone (no pun intended) to making spelling mistakes. The eraser tip is attached to the lid of the Erasermate, and acts in much the same way as a pencil eraser (‘Writes like a pen, erases like a pencil!’), except it doesn’t really work very well and seems to produce quite a bit of debris from the eraser tip.

Where once the boundary between pen and pencil seemed reassuringly clear, Sharpie have been working hard to smudge it. Like the Papermate Replay, the ‘Liquid Pencil’ (launched in 2010) was designed to write ‘as smooth as a pen’ while erasing ‘like a pencil’. The Liquid Pencil had a ‘game-changing liquid graphite’ which ‘eliminates broken pencil leads forever’ and promised to ‘redefine the way you write’. The properties of this ‘liquid graphite’ are quite mysterious – even Sharpie don’t fully seem to understand what the stuff is. Originally, they claimed that the Liquid Pencil could be erased like a normal pencil immediately after writing, but then the line would become fixed like a pen. However, they later changed this to explain that ‘unlike a Sharpie permanent marker, you will always be able to erase it to some degree’. The fact they felt the need to change the wording suggests that if you tried hard enough, you would still be able to erase marks made with a Liquid Pencil even once the line had become fixed. The only limit was your determination it seems. Some inks, however, are so sensitive that they can be erased accidentally.

The Pilot FriXion pen is erased by heat. The thermo-sensitive ‘metamocolor’ ink becomes transparent when heated above 65°. The ink contains a special ‘microcapsule’ pigment, consisting of three components: a ‘colouring substance’, a ‘developer to colour’ and an ‘adjuster for colour change’. At room temperature, this ‘colouring substance’ connects with the ‘developer to colour’ and the ink is visible. The FriXion features a small rubber tip at one end, and when the ink is rubbed out with this tip, it creates friction which heats the page. When heated, the ‘adjuster for colour change’ is activated and combines with the ‘developer to colour’ and the ink magically disappears.

Because the ink colour is heat sensitive, the product warns you against leaving documents ‘near heaters, in a car on a hot day or even putting pages through repeated photocopying’ as doing so can cause the ink to turn invisible. Even leaving the pens in the sun can heat the ink inside them. Should this happen and the ink inadvertently turns invisible, Pilot recommend putting the documents (or even the pens themselves) in the freezer, as the thermo-sensitive ink reappears at -12°. It seems that anything written with the Pilot FriXion hovers between the states of ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’, depending on the weather. And therefore, for obvious reason, the pack features a warning:

Caution

This product is not recommended for signatures, legal documents, examination papers or other documents where writing needs to be of a permanent nature.

When it comes to legal documents (cheques, contracts, marriage certificates) you want to know that what you’ve just signed can only be changed by a lawyer, not by a hair-dryer. While there are obviously lots of legitimate reasons for wanting to erase something – whether it’s to correct a simple spelling mistake or just to tidy up an otherwise cumbersome sentence – there are some people who have a more malevolent interest in the possibilities offered by stationery.

Frank Abagnale was probably one of the most successful con-men of the twentieth century. Using a number of false identities (airline pilot, doctor, lawyer), he cashed millions of dollars in forged cheques in the early 1960s before finally being sentenced to twelve years in prison. In 2002, his autobiography Catch Me If You Can was turned into the Stephen Spielberg film of the same name, with Leonardo DiCaprio playing Abagnale. Despite the glamour associated with his life of crime, since leaving prison Abagnale has advised banks and businesses on how to prevent fraud. He now travels all over the world, sharing his expertise.

In his book The Art of the Steal, Abagnale detailed some of the stationery used by fraudsters to alter laser-printed cheques:

They take a piece of Scotch Tape – the grey, cloudy kind that doesn’t rip the paper when you peel it off – and put it over the dollar amount and over the payee name. They use a fingernail to rub it down hard over the cheque, and then lift the tape off. The dollar amount and the name and the address will come off on the tape. The toner attaches to the Scotch tape and gets pulled from the fibre of the paper. If there’s any laser toner residue left over, a little high-polymer plastic eraser will take care of that.

In 2006, Abagnale teamed up with stationery retailer Staples to promote their ‘Shred Across America’ campaign, highlighting the ways in which people can protect their identity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the best way to do this, according to the campaign, was by buying a new shredder from Staples. He also worked with the pen manufacturer Uni-Ball to develop the 207 Gel Pen (‘The only pen in the world that cannot be altered by chemicals or solvents’). The 207 uses ‘specially formulated inks that contain colour pigments. The colour pigments in the ink are absorbed into the paper fibres.’ This means the ink is ‘trapped’ in the paper and cannot be altered, making cheques and documents safer and more secure.

And so finally it seems Abagnale has atoned for his sins against stationery. Although maybe it was stationery which corrupted him in the first place, rather than the other way round. As a teenager, Abagnale worked in the stockroom of his father’s stationery store. Could it be that being surrounded by all those erasers and rolls of Scotch Tape gave him the inspiration for his life of crime?