Word: pennings
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...youthful reputation as a scandalous womanizer (deserved) and as a financial charlatan (undeserved) haunted his career. All his life he was candid to the point of impudence and imprudence and maintained a totally un-Victorian intolerance of humbug and hypocrisy. His pen dripped venom. He once endowed an opponent with "the crabbed malice of a maundering witch." Justifying his casual inconsistency on an issue in Parliament, he bluntly said: "We came here for fame." When friends congratulated him on his first accession to the prime ministership, Disraeli said cynically: "Yes, I've climbed to the top of the greasy...
Last week Adler spread out with a new subsidiary, Bic Pen of Canada, Ltd., which has built a $400,000 plant in Toronto. His aim: to win nearly half of the 200-million-ballpoint-pen Canadian market within three years. Brash though that seems, it only matches the hustle by which Adler last year sold U.S. buyers 480 million ballpoint pens, almost all of them use-and-discard models priced from 19? to 49? retail. Adler keeps a quarter of his 300 plant employees busy checking the quality of parts coming off automated production lines, personally scrutinizes the daily writing...
...Haven-born Adler joined Waterman soon after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Finance, moved up quickly, became company controller at 24, treasurer at 26. He caught the eye of Chairman Marcel Bich, Europe's foremost ballpoint-pen maker, when Bich bought Waterman in 1958. "I told him, 'You've cut expenses as much as you can,' " says Adler. " 'What you need is sales.' " Bich immediately made Adler executive vice president, and after sales pushed the company into the black, Adler became president at 31. Today Waterman...
Though Waterman's founder, L. E. Waterman, developed the first practical fountain pen in 1884, the company no longer makes them. U.S. ballpoint-pen sales, however, today nearly match those of lead pencils. By 1970, Adler insists, the ballpoint pen will be mightier than the pencil...
Harvard-educated Stephen Becker, 39, is a fiddle-footed traveler with a facile pen. He has lived in China, France, Alaska and the Guianas and supported himself as a translator, biographer, historian, and novelist (A Covenant with Death). Recently he has shown signs of settling down-near Katonah, N.Y., and as a novelist. In this newest and best of his books, he handles a Conradian theme with commendable assurance...