Word: ballpoints
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Brokers on the Paris Bourse had never seen anything like it. At least not over something so mundane as a disposable ballpoint pen. Last month, when Baron Marcel Bich sold a fraction of his pen company's 1,500,000 shares to the French public, investors went into a frenzy over Société Bic. On opening day there were offers for 8,000,000 shares, but only 300,000 were made available; the price promptly jumped from $176 to $208. Helped by that rise, Baron Bich's holdings in the company that he controls increased...
Last week the company got a windfall when the French Ministry of Education ruled that the country's 4,000,000 children in elementary schools may use ballpoints instead of the traditional ink pens. It was about time. Bic has become a byword in the schools, offices and households of 96 countries. Nearly a billion and a half Bics are rolled out of 20 plants round the world every year according to company officials; they account for one-third of the world's ballpoint total, and production has been rising 10% annually. Baron Bich has done for ballpoints...
...tell me." What follows is like a Ken Russell film version of The Messiah with George Frederick Handel composing away as flights of angels swarm over his harpsichord. The voice comes through to Bach like a three-dimensional movie, and as Bach writes it all down with a green ballpoint pen, it shows-and-tells the story of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Precisely at the moment when Jonathan is cast out by the Flock, it stops. For weeks young Bach tries to figure out ways of ending Jonathan by himself. "It sounds ridiculous," he admits easily, "but I just couldn...
...once-standard tokens of appreciation handed out by U.S. visitors -ballpoint pens and cigarette lighters -are now rightly viewed by most Soviets as small insults. However, more expensive freebies are not out of line: one electronics executive who passed out $300 minicalculators will be long and fondly remembered by the officials deciding his business proposition. And speaking of propositions, the dolled-up girls who hang around Moscow's hard-currency bars should be avoided. It is not necessarily that they are KGB agents under orders to set up Americans in compromising positions (too many U.S. businessmen overestimate their importance...
...Floyd Dewey Gottwald of Richmond, Va., has been running up a remarkable record of swift starts and fast fades. In the early 1940s he turned a little paper company into the world's largest producer of blotting paper; then the blotter market rapidly dried up as the ballpoint pen caught on. Next, Gottwald converted his company into a maker of thick, waterproof paper bags for packaging fertilizer and chemicals, only to see that market crumble when plastic-lined bags came out. In 1962, with his two sons, Gottwald bought Ethyl Corp., the world's largest producer of lead...