I think people over-complicate fountain pens a lot.
I have a Lamy Safari that I got in 2012 and works just as well today.
It's what I still recommend to anyone who asks what to get.
Just get the pen, with its cartridge, add more cartridges -- you can stay here and already you're way better than with most standard ball pens that you'd be using otherwise.
Then, get the small converter, plop it in, get your first bottle of ink -- and again you can stay here and enjoy your pen-and-ink experience for a long long time.
Now if you want to try a few different inks, do that next. Maybe get a second pen, see whether 'fine' or 'medium' sized nibs is more your thing.
Go further than that if you want, but you don't have to.
Either way, that first step is enough to improve your life a lot
As a person who's at the other end of the spectrum, I don't think it's complicating the matter unnecessarily causing us to fall into the rabbit hole.
Many people like to write also like to write with fountain pens a lot, hence we go exploring. Collecting pens, inks and paper.
I carry three pens. Three colors, three widths, three manufacturers (it's not a rule, but my current rotation is like that). What I currently have is a result of my own curiosity, and I would do the same if I have started over.
I mean, if using an "irrational" tool to write allows me to write longer, better and helps me think clearer, I'll only call this hobby "irrationally rational" :)
I sort of agree but I would say either get a cartridge pen or a refillable pen and leave it at that. Pick an ink and use it until it is gone. Don't get a second pen unless you actually have a need for a second pen.
There are few things in modern life which are lifetime buys and you can use every day of your life, a good pen is one of them, enjoy it instead of feeding into the endless search for something better. 99% of what I have written for the past ~decade has been with one pen, it is an old friend at this point. I picked my ink by it being a reputable brand and sold in bottles big enough that it would last years, and when it was time to order another bottle I had to pull it out to check what it was so I could order another because I had forgotten what it was. I am sure there are better pens and better inks but I have no real issues with what I have and anything else will be lacking in something more important than the supposed benefits offered by those better pens and inks.
The funny thing is, many entry level pens are much more reliable and dependable some of the higher end pens you pay thrice the price.
The secret sauce of Lamy and Faber Castell is, their lower and higher end pens use the same feeds and nibs, so the lower end pens are very dependable, too.
You can leave a simple Lamy Safari (one of my favorites) to your grandchildren, and they'll be happy with it, too.
The only thing is, a good gold nib is a very comfortable thing to use, if it's your cup of tea, but modern steel nibs are very enjoyable to use, too.
On the ink side, if you want to have a single ink to depend on, give Montblanc Royal Blue a go. My dad used to use only that ink, and when I used it for the first time, I told my dad how wonderful to write with that, and he answered "yeah, it is" with a grin.
Excellent starting point but they are sooo scratchy. It made me doubt if fountain pens were for me, but I bought some cheap pens that were less fine and it was a dream.
I carry a few pens with me - different color ink for different days of the week - so I can see how much I wrote in a single day. Started doing it after I read about Neil Gaiman's writing habits.
I think this kinda misses the point of what lost modern pen enthusiasts are looking for.
For one thing, limiting yourself to pre-filled cartridges locks you out of 95%+ of the fancy ink out there, which is sold bottled for use with internal reservoirs.
Some fancier inks also comes in cartridges though. Most of Diamine's collection, Kaweco, Montblanc, Graf von Faber Castell and Waterman comes in international standard cartridges too.
Yeah, Waterman is not that "fancy", but being able to carry 8 long cartridges of Serenity/Florida blue with a dependable pen is hard to beat if you are on the go.
> Either way, that first step is enough to improve your life a lot
Clearly you've never tried being left-handed.
(I joke, but I also wish fountain pens wouldn't fundamentally be incompatible with my way of writing. And I was taught to write with a fountain pen using cursive in school, so it's not like I didn't try.)
I have a shelf full of bottles of ink I wouldn't have bought if the site had existed (and/or I had known about it sooner, since that spans years). They've prevented many similar wasted purchases, and guided several delighted purchases.
When it comes to fountain pens and inks, I went down a rabbit hole more than once in the past.
Noodlers makes some unique pens and inks. I have a Noodlers Ahab, for example, that has a very flexible nib. Different than any of the more conventional pens I used before.
But one thing that bothers me about fountain pens is that they are messy. Some of it can be avoided. You don't need a piston filler to dip into your special ink bottle to refill your pen if you don't mind using regular cartridges. But one thing that seems unavoidable is that the "section" (the part where you hold the pen) gets messy when you put the cap on it. I wonder why every fountain pen seems to have this design. One would think that a smaller cap that only covers the nib would suffice.
I wonder if there are fountain pens like this. I feel another rabbit hole calling.
> But one thing that seems unavoidable is that the "section" (the part where you hold the pen) gets messy when you put the cap on it. I wonder why every fountain pen seems to have this design.
FYI, there are fountain pens with a retractable nib that don't have a cap, including for example the:
- Pilot Vanishing Point/Capless/Decimo (there's a cheaper Japanese "Special Alloy" version as well)
- LAMY dialog
- Platinum Curidas
I don't know if they fix your inky fingers issue but if taking the cap on and off is a hassle then these might be worth looking into.
Handwriting seems to be becoming more and more of a niche phenomenon, actually paying attention to what one writes with even more so, and actually using fountain pens yet more so. Still, there seems to be an absurd number of ink makers around, producing an absurd number of inks. I suppose dyes and water are relatively cheap, and can be mixed in buckets...
A good number of the inks are because of artists, hence the wide variety of colors including colors which are not particularly useful for writing. The water based inks used in fountain pens are the primary inks for pen and ink drawing because they allow all of the classic techniques like washes and water brushes which do not work with other sorts of inks. Many of the makers of these inks have started to exploit the fountain pen fad to expand their market.
> A good number of the inks are because of artists
I actually think you have it backwards. Hobbyists drive the economics of almost all gear used for creative pursuits. For every artist making meaningful objects and sharing them with the world, there are a 100 dabblers who fantasize about being that, buy a bunch of stuff, but never really use it.
This is a strange but ultimately harmonious economic arrangement. Hobbyists increase scale, which helps gear producers lower costs, which benefit actual artists.
As a person who writes a lot, "seems" is the important word here.
In IT circles, computers and tablets are the most coveted tools for note taking due to processing flexibility it provides, but while less visible, writing is there, evolving.
From personal experience, writing with pen and paper unlocks a different mode in brain. Personally, I can concentrate better, think deeper and clearer, hence I work with pen and paper a lot, incl. software/architecture/algorithm design, free-form thinking while working on other things. I keep "lab notebooks" for software I develop. I also keep a hand-written diary, which again feels and affects very differently when compared to writing to a text document on screen.
There's another sub-culture who writes for the sake of writing (people generally transcribe books by hand). I don't judge them, but that's not my taste.
Some writing inks are very cheap (Pelikan 4001 / Lamy Standard / Parker / Waterman comes to my mind), but some pigments and dyes are very expensive and inks are produced in limited quantities. Companies like Noodler's produce very interesting chemistries and try to keep their costs low to provide the most ink for the buck, but they also make some exotic inks. It's not uncommon to ask a producer why an ink is not produced anymore, and getting "they don't make the dyes anymore, we got their all stock they produced for the last couple of years" as an answer.
So, tl;dr: Writing has evolved, but it's not going anywhere soon. Some of us are writing a ton, with purpose and intent. And no, some inks are not cheap, but "standard issue" inks are optimized for cost and performance, and they are very good inks, indeed.
If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer.
I think hand-writing is gone already, save a few hipsters who like it more for the calm and repetitiveness than because they actually need to write what they are writing.
I can write 20x faster with a keyboard and I won't have cramps after a few minutes. And I don't think painful hands are a prerequisite for deep thought.
I've been buying from Goulet for years, but lately their service has taken a major nosedive. I recommend people stay away from them now.
The last pen I received from them was broken. They would not take it back, asked me to deal with the manufacturer directly. Horrible customer service. After so many expensive pens (Pelikan, Pilot and Visconti), I won't be buying from them again.
Potential buyers should also be aware the fountain pen community on Reddit has soured massively on Goulet.
In addition to deteriorating service and slow shipping concerns compared to alternatives, there’s a view that purchasing from the company directly funds anti-LGBTQ owners and organizations. The owners cofounded a branch of a church whose pastor made wildly anti-LGBTQ remarks. The response to the controversy was not well handled by the Goulets (essentially radio silence then an highly misleading statement). The controversy came around the same time a well beloved podcast employee Drew was fired.
There was also the prior controversy with Noodler’s Inks and the Gaulet’s rehabilitating him after anti-Semitic imagery was placed for a second time on his bottles.
Because so much of the original megathread was deleted (whole lot of subreddit moderation drama occurred because of this incident) I’m linking a later summary for those curious.
Strong recommend. Brian's a friendly and diligent guy, always ready to help research and solve customer problems. The only fountain pens I don't get from Goulet Pens are the ones they don't sell.
While the colours and such do look very nice, the "writing samples" images show exactly why I hate using fountain pens. I'm left-handed, so if I try to write prose then my hand will just smudge the writing. I've always found that cheap ballpoints are the least likely to smudge, even if they still leave residue on my hand, and as the pen gets more "premium", the worse the smudging problem gets.
I like to use as fine a pen as possible if I'm just trying to work something out (diagrams, small notes, etc), and I've found that a Unipin Fine Line (currently a 0.03) does work well, though I've been having some issues with ink flow recently (though the pen is probably nearing the end of its life at this point anyway). I have liked the feel of Uniball Eye pens in the past, though they have a similar smudging problem if used for prose. Other than that, the cheapest Bic ballpoints have been the most successful for me, since the ink dries super fast and they feel good enough to write with.
In school I was given a specific left handed fountain pen to write with, but I always had to write at wonky angles to try and keep it legible, and it never really worked very well anyway. Pushing the pen instead of pulling it generally gives bad results. I have experimented with trying to do mirror writing, like Leonardo da Vinci, but obviously nobody else can read it like that
As a fountain pen enthusiast with some beautiful pens that will probably become rare in the future, it makes me somewhat sad that my only son is left-handed.
Don't feel sad. I'm left handed, too and use fountain pens specifically. I hold my pens as a right handed person would, so my hand is very far from what I write, and I never smudge anything.
Hopefully you can impress on him that they are important to you, and rare, and while he may not use them, he can still respect them for what they are, and look after them
I am a fountain pen convert myself, and use them almost exclusively these days for my algorithmic plotter art. This website is a fantastic resource that I’ve referred to countless times.
Readit News
I have a Lamy Safari that I got in 2012 and works just as well today.
It's what I still recommend to anyone who asks what to get.
Just get the pen, with its cartridge, add more cartridges -- you can stay here and already you're way better than with most standard ball pens that you'd be using otherwise.
Then, get the small converter, plop it in, get your first bottle of ink -- and again you can stay here and enjoy your pen-and-ink experience for a long long time.
Now if you want to try a few different inks, do that next. Maybe get a second pen, see whether 'fine' or 'medium' sized nibs is more your thing.
Go further than that if you want, but you don't have to.
Either way, that first step is enough to improve your life a lot
Many people like to write also like to write with fountain pens a lot, hence we go exploring. Collecting pens, inks and paper.
I carry three pens. Three colors, three widths, three manufacturers (it's not a rule, but my current rotation is like that). What I currently have is a result of my own curiosity, and I would do the same if I have started over.
The best hobbies are usually both irrational and completely unnecessary.
There are few things in modern life which are lifetime buys and you can use every day of your life, a good pen is one of them, enjoy it instead of feeding into the endless search for something better. 99% of what I have written for the past ~decade has been with one pen, it is an old friend at this point. I picked my ink by it being a reputable brand and sold in bottles big enough that it would last years, and when it was time to order another bottle I had to pull it out to check what it was so I could order another because I had forgotten what it was. I am sure there are better pens and better inks but I have no real issues with what I have and anything else will be lacking in something more important than the supposed benefits offered by those better pens and inks.
The secret sauce of Lamy and Faber Castell is, their lower and higher end pens use the same feeds and nibs, so the lower end pens are very dependable, too.
You can leave a simple Lamy Safari (one of my favorites) to your grandchildren, and they'll be happy with it, too.
The only thing is, a good gold nib is a very comfortable thing to use, if it's your cup of tea, but modern steel nibs are very enjoyable to use, too.
On the ink side, if you want to have a single ink to depend on, give Montblanc Royal Blue a go. My dad used to use only that ink, and when I used it for the first time, I told my dad how wonderful to write with that, and he answered "yeah, it is" with a grin.
And that’s the moment you fell into the trap.
My second pen was filled by piston and I bought some cheap Diamine samplers, and it was both simple to use and cheap.
I found converters to be often hard to use which results in messes.
E.g.:
* https://www.lamy.com/en-us/p/lamy-z-28-converter
For one thing, limiting yourself to pre-filled cartridges locks you out of 95%+ of the fancy ink out there, which is sold bottled for use with internal reservoirs.
Yeah, Waterman is not that "fancy", but being able to carry 8 long cartridges of Serenity/Florida blue with a dependable pen is hard to beat if you are on the go.
Clearly you've never tried being left-handed.
(I joke, but I also wish fountain pens wouldn't fundamentally be incompatible with my way of writing. And I was taught to write with a fountain pen using cursive in school, so it's not like I didn't try.)
Very useful!
Noodlers makes some unique pens and inks. I have a Noodlers Ahab, for example, that has a very flexible nib. Different than any of the more conventional pens I used before.
But one thing that bothers me about fountain pens is that they are messy. Some of it can be avoided. You don't need a piston filler to dip into your special ink bottle to refill your pen if you don't mind using regular cartridges. But one thing that seems unavoidable is that the "section" (the part where you hold the pen) gets messy when you put the cap on it. I wonder why every fountain pen seems to have this design. One would think that a smaller cap that only covers the nib would suffice.
I wonder if there are fountain pens like this. I feel another rabbit hole calling.
FYI, there are fountain pens with a retractable nib that don't have a cap, including for example the:
- Pilot Vanishing Point/Capless/Decimo (there's a cheaper Japanese "Special Alloy" version as well)
- LAMY dialog
- Platinum Curidas
I don't know if they fix your inky fingers issue but if taking the cap on and off is a hassle then these might be worth looking into.
EDIT: formatting
I've never ever had a section get messy. Ever.
I actually think you have it backwards. Hobbyists drive the economics of almost all gear used for creative pursuits. For every artist making meaningful objects and sharing them with the world, there are a 100 dabblers who fantasize about being that, buy a bunch of stuff, but never really use it.
This is a strange but ultimately harmonious economic arrangement. Hobbyists increase scale, which helps gear producers lower costs, which benefit actual artists.
In IT circles, computers and tablets are the most coveted tools for note taking due to processing flexibility it provides, but while less visible, writing is there, evolving.
From personal experience, writing with pen and paper unlocks a different mode in brain. Personally, I can concentrate better, think deeper and clearer, hence I work with pen and paper a lot, incl. software/architecture/algorithm design, free-form thinking while working on other things. I keep "lab notebooks" for software I develop. I also keep a hand-written diary, which again feels and affects very differently when compared to writing to a text document on screen.
There's another sub-culture who writes for the sake of writing (people generally transcribe books by hand). I don't judge them, but that's not my taste.
Some writing inks are very cheap (Pelikan 4001 / Lamy Standard / Parker / Waterman comes to my mind), but some pigments and dyes are very expensive and inks are produced in limited quantities. Companies like Noodler's produce very interesting chemistries and try to keep their costs low to provide the most ink for the buck, but they also make some exotic inks. It's not uncommon to ask a producer why an ink is not produced anymore, and getting "they don't make the dyes anymore, we got their all stock they produced for the last couple of years" as an answer.
So, tl;dr: Writing has evolved, but it's not going anywhere soon. Some of us are writing a ton, with purpose and intent. And no, some inks are not cheap, but "standard issue" inks are optimized for cost and performance, and they are very good inks, indeed.
If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer.
I can write 20x faster with a keyboard and I won't have cramps after a few minutes. And I don't think painful hands are a prerequisite for deep thought.
Of course, all things Stationery, I occasionally continue to watch JetPens. Unfortunately, for my liking, they seem to be more and more Kawaii.
https://www.youtube.com/@JetPens
He's a nice guy.
The last pen I received from them was broken. They would not take it back, asked me to deal with the manufacturer directly. Horrible customer service. After so many expensive pens (Pelikan, Pilot and Visconti), I won't be buying from them again.
In addition to deteriorating service and slow shipping concerns compared to alternatives, there’s a view that purchasing from the company directly funds anti-LGBTQ owners and organizations. The owners cofounded a branch of a church whose pastor made wildly anti-LGBTQ remarks. The response to the controversy was not well handled by the Goulets (essentially radio silence then an highly misleading statement). The controversy came around the same time a well beloved podcast employee Drew was fired.
There was also the prior controversy with Noodler’s Inks and the Gaulet’s rehabilitating him after anti-Semitic imagery was placed for a second time on his bottles.
Because so much of the original megathread was deleted (whole lot of subreddit moderation drama occurred because of this incident) I’m linking a later summary for those curious.
https://www.reddit.com/r/fountainpens/comments/1heveiu/the_2...
If you talk with him, and if you can relay this, I'd be glad.
I like to use as fine a pen as possible if I'm just trying to work something out (diagrams, small notes, etc), and I've found that a Unipin Fine Line (currently a 0.03) does work well, though I've been having some issues with ink flow recently (though the pen is probably nearing the end of its life at this point anyway). I have liked the feel of Uniball Eye pens in the past, though they have a similar smudging problem if used for prose. Other than that, the cheapest Bic ballpoints have been the most successful for me, since the ink dries super fast and they feel good enough to write with.
In school I was given a specific left handed fountain pen to write with, but I always had to write at wonky angles to try and keep it legible, and it never really worked very well anyway. Pushing the pen instead of pulling it generally gives bad results. I have experimented with trying to do mirror writing, like Leonardo da Vinci, but obviously nobody else can read it like that
I use Iroshizuku Kon Peki, Oxford Optik paper, Pilot Prera and Kakuno in M width.
I’ve even written my take on why they’re such great devices for machine art: https://lostpixels.io/writings/fountain-pens-plotters