We had the same pen rule in Camden County in the early 1990s.  I would go around passing out pencils to folks who forgot, and we added an extra blank page at the back of each book for the abstractors to put their penciled notes.  I never had to kick anybody out, but I did have repeat offenders.  Defacing a public record is a crime, but we understood the need for some type of internal communication tool to show previous search work.  That's why we settled for the blank page.

It was getting to the point, especially on Master Deeds that it was hard to read the original documents because people wrote so many title search file numbers in the book.  On some pages we had to redo them from microfilm.  But as you know from scanned originals, a microfilm copy looses detail you can only really get from the original document while it is new.

There is no doubt that there are some county employees who didn't really care for the folks making their living in our vault.  I suspect there would have been better relations if everyone respected the records that keeps both employed.