Monami (모나미)

Monami — French for "my friend" — launched a fifteen-won ballpoint in 1963, in a Korea that still wrote in pencil for lack of means. The model name, 153, comes both from the price and from a verse in Luke's Gospel where 153 fish are caught; the founder took it as an omen.

The 153 became South Korea's ordinary object par excellence: hexagonal, white and black, it lies in every drawer in the country and has been reissued in luxury, brass and limited editions for its fiftieth anniversary. Few Korean industrial objects came through the country's economic transformation so intact.