The handwriting looked, in fact, like a kindred version of Ambrose’s own. He felt a thrill of camaraderie, like that of a traveler who, after long wandering in a foreign land, overhears at a bazaar stall, for the first time in months, a countryman speaking his native English.

Tetraktys, p. 198

During my commute to work by train, I keep my head well buried in a book or technical article. While I imagine I have a forbidding look of concentration, and reticence is the rule on Boston trains, someone did once buttonhole me. I was penning notes in an article, when a woman leaned over and asked, “Is that a fountain pen?”

My fountain pen also instantly attracts other enthusiasts in business meetings. There’s fast camaraderie in that tiny, half-empty little boat in which users of archaic writing instruments bear against the tide of modernity. There’s no headway to be made against the flood of cheap pens, themselves being whelmed beneath a wave of typing, with video and other threats to text in general curling somewhere over the horizon.

In Tetraktys, Ambrose not only uses a fountain pen, but writes in the distinctive style of Oxbridge classicists (with touches like the occasional substitution of an epsilon for an `e’). When he comes upon similar handwriting, he knows that he’s found another member of his own, nearly extinct clan…