This thread is for users of and enthusiasts for fountain pens. I hope we’ll have an informative conversation about experiences, resources and recommendations.
I used to have several fountain pens years ago, but I didn’t use them very often, I didn’t think they were very suitable for work (now I think I was wrong) and they kept drying out and I didn’t know how to take care of them properly. I don’t know where they ended up, but I don’t have them any more.
So a couple of weeks ago, on impulse kind of, I bought a new fountain pen, a Pilot Custom 74. I bought it at a Japanese stationery store in SF called Maido, so I was able to get a color that’s normally not available here, it’s a deep solid green with gold trim, 14 kt gold fine nib. I have been writing with it every day, in fact, I decided to start keeping a daily journal just as an excuse to write on good paper with a fountain pen.
Since then I’ve been gorging on fountain pen lore, looking at the online stores, binge-watching recommendation videos and tips-and-tricks videos on Youtube, and I’ve ordered two more pens online, a Sailor 1911 Standard, bright yellow with a broad nib, from Pen Chalet, and a Stipula Etruria in Green Ebonite and clear body, with what they call a T-Flex nib, which is a limited edition item exclusive to Goulet Pens.
So, before I bore you further with my own experiences, please share yours. Do you use fountain pens? Do you regard them as strictly practical tools or also as beautiful objects? Do you normally shop online or do you have any local shops that you like? What’s your favorite paper to write on? And so on, there is so much to talk about.
I don’t know too much about them, but I inherited a couple from my Daddy. I will dig them out now.
I loved writing with them. I do a kind of calligraphy I made up.
When I get to them I will post their brand and stats. I do want to learn more.
I have a pretty good number of fountain pens and innumerable bottles of ink. The sad part is that my handwriting is terrible. It’s like handing a beautiful violin to a chimp who plays it by beating it against a rock.
I get most everything from gouletpens.com. Brian posts tons of useful videos; you can waste days catching up.
90% of my writing is in Rhodia notebooks, the kind with the paper from Clairfontaine. It’s a nice, smooth stock that doesn’t bleed or show through. I get it with grids of dots instead of lines. I basically only use two of my pens on any regular basis, a Pelikan Souverän M805 and a Rotring 600/Newton. Honorable mention goes to my Lamy 2000, wherever it may have gotten off to. I’m hoping that one day, I’ll clean out a little used drawer and find it again.
Hmm. I have a few fountain pens, which I actually use to write with, as well non-fountain pens. It is true that they are, by design, not air-tight and can potentially dry out, so if you are not going to use one for a long time then you should rinse it out before putting it away.
I think they are fine for work and very comfortable for long periods of continuous writing; I prefer the extremely flexible nibs that respond to a light touch. Even writing on cheap newsprint should not be a problem if you fill it with an appropriate ink. I would recommend ink that is permanent and waterproof but at the same time does not dry out, clog, and trash your pen; flows just right from your pen+nib; and as mentioned does not feather or smear on your choice of writing paper. E.g., I think that in SF they sell Noodler’s Ink which comes in a variety of different colors and thicknesses and is pretty good. One big problem with fountain-pen and dip-pen ink is that today you get a few ounces for the price of what used to buy you a 1-liter bottle, at least at stationery shops. (Supply and demand…) Another problem is that for decades now they have made fountain pens designed to work with ink cartridges, so unless you plan to use those you need to buy an old-fashioned fountain pen and/or a cartridge converter.
I see from your post that you already bought a fountain pen. I don’t know anything about that model, but I’m sure you could use it every day for a hundred years and it will continue to work fine; maybe once in a while clean it out with water, just to make sure.
I bought some Chinese ink from “Pearl River”. It’s a shop in NYC. They have an online catalogue. It was dirt cheap. Not gonna swear to it’s usefulness in fountain pens. I used it with a brush. It was very, very black.
Chinese/Indian ink contains shellac or glue. Do not use it in a fountain pen. Brush, or dip pen, (or similar) only. It is black because it’s basically carbon black.
ETA maybe you can mail-order a 1-liter bottle of fountain-pen ink from India for the price of an American 3-oz. bottle; I have not looked (my 1-liter bottle is still half-full…) But make damn sure it is fountain pen ink before using it in a $100 pen.
My Pilot Custom 74 is my favorite pen, the one I use every day, a purplish demonstrator. I love the push button filling mechanism. I also love my Platinum 3776 in Chartres Blue. I have a Pelikan, and also a limited edition Conklin with a wicked-looking nib, like a harpoon, that gives me a thrill every time I look at it. I was just given a Lamy Safari, but I really don’t like the narrow triangular grip on it. Someday, I hope to be able to splurge enough to buy a Visconti, just for the more exotic fill mechanisms.
My current favorite ink is Colorverse Quasar, which has a vivid intensity. Of course Iroshizuki inks are all good, too.
I like Rhodia paper, and like the Rhodia goal book more than the Leuchturm. Goulet Pens is also my favorite online pen stores. Alas for the disappearance of many genuine, wonderful pen and stationery stores, but I am grateful for Goulet and other online sellers.
A dear friend bought me a Lamy Vista for my birthday in 2008, and I love it and use it every day. It takes cartridges, so maybe not for the purist, but the pen has great meaning to me, as that friend died about six months ago.
[Moderating]
While a good pen might be nice, I’m having a hard time seeing it as a work of art. Which makes this better suited for IMHO than CS. Moving.
Re: the filling mechanism on your Pilot, you must have the Con-70 adaptor? I had to order that for my pen, they didn’t have it at the store, and it hasn’t arrived yet. I looked up your ink color online, it does indeed look gorgeous. For my first ink I have opted for a dark piney green (by Sailor), in honor of my dark green pen.
May I ask what you love about your Platinum 3776? Or what you would look for in any new pen?
For all the respondents so far:
Thanks for your interest and participation. A lot of fountain pen folks seem to like Rhodia paper. I’m not very versed yet to be able to tell why, it seems quite nice but not particularly different from other nice papers that also don’t bleed or show through. I’d be interested to find out more.
Besides Maido, there are two other stationery stores in SF I’m going to be checking out over the next couple of days that purportedly sell fountain pens and supplies, and one or two in Berkeley, including one called University Art that sounds promising, that will take a bit longer to get to. I’m very tempted to splurge on a Lamy 2000 if they have them (a splurge mostly in the sense that I have already spent a lot of money on pens in a short time, a bad tendency of mine when I have a new interest). But mostly I’m hoping that at least one of them is the kind of place where I can try out pens in advance of buying, and where I can get good experienced advice.
I do not know the answer to your question about paper, but I presume different brands have different coatings/sizings, chemical treatments, or length of fibers. You will just have to test a piece with the ink you plan to use. I never had many problems even with cheap notebooks.
Unless you are starting a collection, obtaining one or two good pens should not cost a lot of money, unless they are limited-edition diamond-encrusted maki-e objets d’art. Remember, these are mass-produced tools that people actually use (or used to use, anyway- didn’t some thread intimate that kids aren’t taught handwriting nor typing any more because why bother when you have robot slaves?). Either way, the store will let you try before you buy.
I’ve used a fountain pen once or twice, but found I don’t like them.
What I have done, more times than I can count, is use a dip pen. For ink, I always used Osmiroid when lettering and doing calligraphy–unlike India inks, it is water-soluble, and easy to clean out of nibs, and I guess by extension, pens. I did use crowquill nibs with India ink, but only when I was decorating a work of calligraphy with a border, and would be using watercolors in the border. But crowquills were cheap and disposable.
As for paper, find out if it is “sized” or not. “Sizing” is a coating on the paper that prevents the ink (of any sort) from running–this is why paper used in copiers has an up arrow on the ream, to indicate how it is to be loaded into the copier. Depending on the paper used, the oils in your hand can remove the sizing, making your writing fuzzy and blurry. Like a surgeon, I would typically use a mask (just a piece of paper) over the areas I was working on, so my natural hand oil would not remove the sizing.
The closest I’ve ever come was to buy a couple of cartridge pens for doing calligraphy many years ago. It’s an enjoyable hobby, and one year I addressed all of our Christmas cards in italic font.
I loved fountain pens but like Pork Rind my hand writing has become so bad through lack of use that I haven’t used them for years. I was so proud of my first fountain pen as I remember those bottles of ink and the nib pen at school. The bottles of ink normally sat in a square box in holes that had been cut out of the container that held mosquito coils.
Strangely, we had a teacher, although he was quite young, was totally against biros. I don’t know if we as children continually spilling ink changed his mind.
I have several fountain pens at home- nothing expensive. I will check when I get back.
I suppose that for a person who does not write a lot, only occasionally at her desk, a fountain pen may not be the best choice. A dip pen is much cheaper, holds all kinds of different nibs, and requires practically no maintenance compared to a fountain pen. The point of a fountain pen is that it is portable.
Interesting thought. I’ve never tried a dip pen, except when I was trying out a new ink at a shop.
As a counter-thought: they do make desk-style fountain pens, without clips, so not all fountain pens are intended to be portable. Another benefit of fountain pens is that you don’t have to dip them, you can continue writing without constantly stopping to dip, and the ink flow is even instead of starting out strong and then weakening until the next dip. And then, it is possible to swap nibs on a lot of fountain pens, with some caveats: it’s a lot more trouble than with dip pens (I presume); and the nib swap-ability for fountain pens is not something that seems to be noted on the information pages of online pen sites. It seems to be something you sort of have to pick up along the way.
I was disappointed today, I went to a stationery store that Google seemed to think had fountain pens, but it did not. Apparently Google thinks that anyplace that sells office supplies ipso facto sells fountain pens. At least I did find an interesting notebook for journaling.
I use quite a few and use them a lot. I even have a few disposable ones for packing around places I expect to lose or destroy one like at work. My collection of inks is only about 30 bottles; far from what a friend has. I don’t use serious antique bladder pens much anymore; too much care and upkeep. But I do refill plastic cartridges and have a few with the Waterman-style tubes. My favorites, and most often in use, are several LeBoeuf models.
Done dip and quill pens at historic events because I have to. Not something I would ever choose to do at home.
Fountain pens are big. There was an article in the NYT in the last week about fountain pen geekery. Reddit has a big forum on them I hear (I don’t do Reddit). Young people are adopting them. I used to hang out at theFountain Pen Networka lot. It has thousands of members. There you can get any possible question answered about anything whatsoever to do with fountain pens. It is dominated by old guys who collect pens-- Reddit and other forums trend younger and are more about using pens rather than hoarding them.
I myself have written virtually exclusively with them for many years now. At present I own four pens, winnowed from some twenty-odd.
Esterbrook SJ in blue pearl celluloid with a rare semi-flex nib, 1950 or so
Eversharp Skyline Demi, navy with a striped gold and green cap, flexible nib, 1938
Waterman red ripple hard rubber ringtop with a super-flex nib, around 1915
Pelikan 400NN Tortoise with a flexible nib, early 1950’s, from Germany (all the others were made in the USA, even the Waterman – the company moved to England later)
I like small celluloid pens with flexible nibs. These three things together are virtually impossible to find in modern pens which are almost invariably way too large, and never flexible. Celluloid is making a certain small return to popularity although it is very expensive now (as in four figures expensive). So I am a Vintage Pen person.
My pens cost me between $50 and $200 each (only the Pelikan was in the upper range). This is a middle price for vintage pens in good shape. Rarities cost more. Seems expensive but remember my pens have been writing well, ink fill after ink fill, for many decades, and are probably good for decades more.