Monami 153

The Monami 153 is a plain ballpoint pen in white plastic, hexagonal in section so that it neither rolls off a desk nor slips in the fingers. A cone at the writing end and a small push-button at the other are moulded in the colour of the ink, black, blue or red, and the barrel is printed with the maker's name, the number 153 and the width of the point. It has five parts: barrel, cone, button, spring and refill.

It was the first ballpoint pen made in South Korea. Song Sam-seok had founded Kwangshin Chemical in Seoul in 1960 to make paints and crayons, and in 1962, at an industrial fair, he saw a pen that wrote without being dipped in ink. After many failures with oil-based ink, his firm put the 153 on sale on 1 May 1963. The name, by the company's account, joins its price, 15 won, then the cost of a newspaper or a bus fare in Seoul, with its place as the firm's third product. Song, a Christian, is also said to have had in mind the 153 fish of St John's Gospel.

It sold slowly at first. The early ink seeped from the plastic tube, the company paid for ruined shirts, and its salesmen handed out pens free in offices and ministries. Within a few years the 153 had become the pen of the nation, and in 1967 the company renamed itself after it: Monami, from the French for my friend. By the late 1970s, one newspaper records, the inkwell had all but vanished from Korean desks.

Monami was making some 200,000 a day by 2016 and had sold 3.7 billion. Since a limited metal edition for the pen's fiftieth year it has added versions in metal and gold, but the plain pen continues unchanged in form, and in 2009 the Korea Design Foundation named it among the designs that shaped Korean daily life.