I love stationery!

The earliest ancestor of the pen probably was the brush the Chinese used for writing by the 1st millennium BCE. The early Egyptians employed thick reeds for penlike implements about 300 BCE.

A specific allusion to the quill pen occurs in the 7th-century writings of St. Isidore of Sevilla, but such pens made of bird feathers were probably in use at an even earlier date. They provided a degree of writing ease and control never realized before and were used in Europe until the mid-19th century, when metallic pens and pen nibs (writing points) largely supplanted them. Such devices were known in Classical times but were little used (a bronze pen was found in the ruins of Pompeii).

John Mitchell of Birmingham, England, is credited with having introduced the machine-made steel pen point in 1828. Two years later the English inventor James Perry sought to produce more-flexible steel points by cutting a centre hole at the top of a central slit and then making additional slits on either side.