I imagine the transcription he was doing was the musical equivalent of my draftsman lettering—technical writing intended to be precise, neat, legible, and easily reproducible in short runs using blueprint machines.
Tedious indeed.
Somewhere I have a Parker Vector (gray metalflake w/gold trim) and a dark blue Pelikan Future. I used to use them a lot at work when I had to take a lot of notes and what-not. I moved into a mostly technical role without so much writing, so I lost track of them.
I had four ink colors I think- an ancient bottle of Parker Penman ebony from 1999 or so, a bottle of Swisher’s black, Noodlers’ Legal Lapis, Waterman Florida Blue, and Private Reserve Sherwood Green.
I should probably dig them up; I do write enough again to make them worthwhile.
Thanks for reviving the thread.
I seem to have sated my appetite for $150-range pens at 5 pens. Then I found my old Pilot Vanishing Point in a desk, and managed to revive it just fine, so that makes 6 pens in this range. I now also have several cheaper pens, including Kaweco Classic Sport, Kameco Prepeo (which I wanted to convert to eyedropper but they have air holes in the barrel for some reason), TWSBI Eco, Platinum Plaisir and Monteverde Monza. Plus 2 ebonite pens I just got that were made in India (one free with purchase).
Now that I have enough pens for all the inks that I like, I’m slowing down and focusing on my real grail pens. For example, I had in my hand at Maido a lacquer pen from Japan, and the feeling and the look of it were tremendous. If I were to buy one now it would be the Nakaya Decapod Twist in black and red; but I’ll probably wait a while to see if my taste changes. I’ll probably only be able to splurge once on something like that.
My other area of interest is vintage pens, but I have no idea how to start, especially if I’m not interested in pens with (I think they’re called) balloon fills. Most of the ones I see online that are affordable are of that type. Anyone with good place to start?
A question for Spoons, if you’re around: I’ve been trying to find a dip pen nib that is just for regular, non-calligraphy writing. I tried the Brause index-finger nib, but it was so pointed and scratchy I couldn’t write with it, and it didn’t seem to hold any ink (I was trying to use fountain pen ink, which may have been the problem). I also tried a glass dip pen which wrote well and smoothly but the stroke was broader than I want. I want to use a dip pen that is similar in writing experience to a fountain pen, for testing fountain pen ink samples. Any advice gratefully received.
Trying to find the perfect turquoise ink. I have about 7 samples and they all seem about the same, which is light blue with not quite enough green. Maybe I should be trying to find a light teal instead.
Maybe a naive question, but can you mix your own turquoise ink? Using same brand of blue and green and experimenting with proportions?
What are you looking for? here is a list of many different filling mechanisms.
I cannot speak for Spoons, but using fountain-pen ink with a dip pen should basically work fine; your results may vary depending on the exact combination of nib and ink, meaning that one ink might be perfect, but a different ink might flow a bit too heavily with the exact same nib.
Make sure the nib is clean and not oily, by the way, if the ink blobs up on the nib instead of flowing normally.
As it happens, I found out later by reading on Fountain Pen Network that for a new nib one is supposed to clean the protective shellac or whatever they put on there before trying to use it. So I will do that and try again with the nib I bought.
And thank you for the very thorough link. It’s not that I’m looking for a specific filler type, it’s just that I don’t like the ones with the lever on the side and a balloon to hold the ink on the inside. When I was a lad I remember struggling with those a lot. I guess what I’m looking for is a place both to shop for vintage pens and where I can learn the nuances. For example I’ve been looking at/for Parker Duofold Big Red pens, and there are so many little differences between vintages and between models in the same vintage, I don’t know how people learn and keep track of all that stuff.
A pen refill kit
and a couple bottles of ink. Make sure the ink is for pens and not dip pens/calligraphy. One of my favorite gifts I got this year was a bottle of terrific orange ink; unscented.
That “kit” appears to consist of two 3 ml syringes sold for $9.39. I don’t know what individual syringes or pipettes (as opposed to packs of 100) cost at your local pharmacy or lab supply store, and I realize it is for a gift, but something seems fundamentally wrong with that price point.
Hmm. I guess you would have to read some of these books. I saw Fountain Pens of the World as part of a colorful display in a store somewhere.
I forgot to add: there are little plastic “converters” that fit in a cartridge fountain pen to enable filling it from a bottle without messing around with syringes, pipettes, and eyedroppers. That plus the colourful ink could make a nice gift for an artist who likes fountain pens.
Get her a gift certificate to Goulet’s, Anderson Pens, or JetPen. She will have a lot of fun shopping. I am only a little pickier than most pen geeks and I wouldn’t want anyone buying anything for me. You get super opinionated in this hobby.
It could be the region/state I live in but getting blunt-ended syringes locally is not all that easy and to get normal hypodermic ones is possibly illegal; at least it was at one time. Yeah - the cost is silly. But I’ve used those ones in particular and found them worthwhile – although I will admit to not having tried a lot of others outside of some sold for use by mechanics.
I have converters for most of my pens; I don’t like or use them. Nothing against them but they aren’t my thing. Using the plastic and refilling them encourages me to look more to the care and cleaning of my pens and gives me a better result in writing IMHO.
I do find it amusing however that as no-one seemed to want to offer suggestions to the request but my simple post drew two from you alone. So with that I will bow out of this thread and leave it to the experts.
Fair enough. My only question is, when you buy new ink cartridges, they come sealed by a little plastic ball. Then, when you stick them into the pen, the ball is dislodged and you are ready to go. So, if you refill a bunch of them, how do you carry them around without some ink spilling out?
Please accept my apologies; I did not mean to dismiss or belittle your suggestion, just add to it (and please note I am not an expert, and could not tell you off the top of my head all the models of Duofold ever produced, or whatever). But you are right, I did not respond to the initial request, and upon further thought it is because I agree with Ulfreida that it is extremely difficult to guess what type of gift Dinsdale’s daughter will really like, whereas she will probably be ecstatic over a gift certificate. It’s not like (at least for me) one goes around talking about writing utensils, and definitely not which brands and detailed features one prefers. A few months ago, I literally had to talk a friend out of buying me a fountain pen as a gift; good thing I got wind of the plan!
For science, I just tried using a spare fountain-pen nib in a dip-pen holder, along with some fountain-pen ink and, unsurprisingly, it wrote perfectly fine. In case anyone wants to recreate that fountain-pen writing experience with a dip pen (@Roderick Femm)
No-one answered this question, but I suspect it is that one only refills one cartridge at a time, as needed. At least, that is what I have assumed when I have read about refilling cartridges. I presume, although I haven’t tried it, that you can use a syringe to wash the old ink out of the cartridge with water so that you could then introduce a different color ink into it.
I’m currently mourning my loss of a leather carrying case I’ve had for years, that carried a Parker Sonnet that was my daily writer. I’ve owned three or four Sonnets - they’re far and away my favorite fountain pen. But ADD and fountain pens don’t mix - I’ve lost probably five or six in the last 15 years I’ve been using them.
Last year at a pen show, I bought a vintage Sheaffer (not sure of the model). It has a great weight, good nib, and feels wonderful in my hand, but I simply cannot get a consistent inkflow. I’ve cleaned it, soaked the nib in water overnight, done everything that I can, and it still won’t flow. Damn it.
My other great pen was a Lamy Studio, that always wrote well. Alas, part of the feed broke, and I haven’t yet sent it back to Lamy for repair.
I’m sorry to hear this, it must be very frustrating to keep losing your pens. I’m sometimes forgetful, which I battle by being a little obsessive about making sure I’m walking away with the things that I came in with.
I’ve been fascinated by fountain pens as long as I can remember. When I was growing up, all my older relatives wrote with fountain pens. My maternal grandmother was a prolific memoirist (in Bengali), and she always wrote with a green-barreled Parker 51 with a bladder-style filler.*
From a very young age, fountain pens were a very common special gift for us when we were visiting our elder relatives. Unfortunately, these pens were of very poor quality, and I could rarely get them working.
I would rummage through my parents’ desks and bureau drawers looking for interesting things and I often found fountain pens. They never worked. They were very cheap knock-offs. In my father’s desk drawer was what I now know was a thick-barreled Mont Blanc fountain pen. It had been damaged in some odd way and the cap was not removable.
I loved fountain pens, and writing instruments in general, so much that for years on the bulletin board in my bedroom I kept a cutting of a magazine advertisement for a beautiful black-and-gold pen set. I can’t remember now what kind of pen it was, perhaps Parker or Cross.
When I got old enough to start buying things myself, I would get the cheap Sheaffer fountain pens (with regular and chisel-tip nibs) you could find in art supply aisles. I continued to look for better fountain pens as I got older, had more access to specialty stores, and could gradually afford better-and-better pens.
The first fountain pen I had that was good enough to use on a daily basis and didn’t have the cheap-looking design of the Sheaffers was a Kreisler fountain pen from Best Products, a now-defunct chain of “warehouse” stores.** I believe the Kreisler was a knockoff Cross Townsend fountain pen. I had a couple of the Kreislers.
I discovered the Levenger catalogue and over the years I’ve purchased probably half-a-dozen fountain pens from Levenger. I’ve always regretted it. There has always been some problem. Either the finish would succumb to my sweaty fingers and get ruined (goodbye, Retro 51!), or they would be prone to leakage and the converter would be more likely to stick to the barrel instead of the nib.
My first “good” fountain pen that I used every day was a Cross Townsend, purchased from a specialty pen store. I’ve owned probably four or five Cross Townsends over the years, a few of which I gave away to close friends who expressed interest in the hobby. So far, I think all those gifts have gone to waste.
I also managed to obtain a green Parker 51 from eBay, just like my grandmother had, which I used regularly until about a month ago, when it started getting leaky for no discernible reason. I have had problems using the sheath-type nibs, such as the Sheaffer Legacy Heritage, the Waterman Edson, and a sleek, torpedo-looking Cross, whose model name I can’t seem to track down.
I have developed something of an anti-Mont Blanc prejudice, because they are so much more expensive than the other pens I have and when I pick it up, it has no heft. It feels like a cheap pen.
The security scanner at Paris Orly Charles De Gaulle airport destroyed by my light-blue-barreled Aurora Ipsilon. I still have the shards.
My regular use pens now are a red-barreled Pilot Namiki vanishing point, a black-barreled Cross Townsend, a black-barreled Lamy Safari, a black-barreled Pilot Elite 95S, and a yellow Sailor 1911 Music Nib.
I also have a Parker Sonnet, a couple of Levenger True Writers, and old Esterbrook student pen, and a Jorg Hysek fountain pen. The Jorg Hysek, like the Levenger pens that I haven’t bothered to list, is useless because the ink converter tends to adhere itself to the inside of the barrel instead of to the nib.
However, because of my more recent problems with leakage of my beloved Parker 51 and Cross Townsend pens, I’ve turned more to using dip pens, including my Jorg Hysek dip pen, which is an amazing device. It requires so little maintenance, because it doesn’t store ink in the barrel, but one dip seems to last for pages and pages. I have a boatload of other dip pens acquired from various sources, like art supply stores, museums, Barnes and Noble, Levenger, and specialty pen stores in Florence and Venice.
I also have a box of goose quills that I acquired from a mediaeval recreator back in the heyday of message boards/Usenet news groups. I’ve only tried to cut a quill once or twice, and found it too time-consuming, especially when I have so many other pens I love using.
I’ve had to segregate the nibs of my dip pens, because about half of them I can’t get the nib to hold ink and flow smoothly. Maybe I need to do what was suggested in this thread and get the varnish off. I haven’t yet looked into how to do that.
*She was the daughter of a semi-prominent non-fiction writer. She also was a voracious reader of both English and Bengali novels. My cousins have a story about her wandering into the room and asking was “fuck” means. “Uh, it means sexual intercourse.” Very matter-of-fact reply: “Is that right?,” and went right back into her room to continue reading.
**For those who don’t know, a warehouse store was a store whose front part was a display area only. Only demonstration models were displayed, often tethered to the shelves with cords and wires. You looked around for something you liked, and then filled out a paper slip with a golf pencil and took it to the warehouse window and someone would fetch your item for you from storage. It’s somewhat like Ikea, except at Ikea, you take your paper slip to the warehouse yourself and fetch your items.
I have more fountain pens than I mention in my prior post, but I didn’t mention them because they’re not good enough to mention. Some were in gift sets, some came with the old-fashioned wooden writing boxes I got at the U.S. Supreme Court and the Library of Congress. Some were just cheap so I decided to try them out.
I used to get the Varsity disposable fountain pens, but I found that they dried up unless I used them constantly, so not really worth it.
The only cartridge I carry around with me is the one in the pen. In a separate case I have a 5ml Nalgene bottle filled with ink, another with distilled water, and a syringe with a drawing-up needle.