Excerpted Interview with Pen Collector Lorne Saifer
After their first album, Dreamboat Annie, was released in Canada under Mushroom records, the band Heart was approached in 1977 by the CBS affiliate Portrait. At the time Lorne Saifer was vice president of CBS; he signed Heart into U.S. history with a Montblanc 149. He has since been the long-time manager of the band The Guess Who. Mr. Saifer began collecting pens at the age of 13.
Why do you collect fountain pens?
I have notes from friends of mine from years ago, in particular a gentleman who was my best friend’s father. He would use this beautiful onion skin paper and he had this beautiful handwriting that he wrote with using a broader nib. I still have those notes. They still have a value to me. I think writing with a fountain pen is a way of creating some connection to the past. I don’t think emails give you that. Of course you get a sense of the person but when you look at this letter that I got from this gentleman… over the course of years you get a sense of people–who they are and what they’re thinking. There’s an identification in the way people write that doesn’t come out the same way in emails.
When I travel I carry a Montblanc Travel Pen. When I’m on the road with The Guess Who or when I’m with Burton (Cummings) or Lionel Richie or any of the other artists that I’m involved with, I always carry a set of cards with me, you know, stationery cards, because when you’re on the road people usually take you out for dinner or otherwise do something nice, and I think there’s something nice about sending someone flowers for dinner and hand-writing a note to go with it as opposed to somebody else doing it. It’s also good for business. Any time you take the time to let somebody know you appreciate what they’ve done and you take that extra second to do something personal, everybody appreciates it. Especially in the world we live in today, where there’s a world of immediacy.
I’m in the music business and it used to be that someone would call you from England and say “I’m sending you a tape” or “I’m sending you some documents, so get back to me”. That process used to take a week to ten days and you had some time to digest it. Now that process takes five seconds. You don’t have the time to really think about it. You know I’m out on the road and I’ve got a Blackberry in one hand and a cell phone in the other hand—there’s something about handwriting, there’s something about slowing down, just sitting down at a desk and putting all that aside and actually thinking about what you’re going to write down on that card. It’s very zen. It brings you down a level.