The journey started for me in fall 2015. I was looking for a new journal and talking with Mitch about types of paper. He asked me if I had heard of Tomoe River paper, which led to a review on the Pen Habit, which led to Leigh Reyes videos, which led to Goulet Pens YouTube channel.... and down the rabbit hole I went! It's funny because Mitch had showed me his Safari several years earlier and I wasn't interested at the time. I thought it was "scratchy" and told him I preferred my ballpoints. 😜
As with so many things, Mitch was waaaaaay head of me. But when I finally gave it another shot, I fell hard. The first taste is free...
So now that I'm two full years into the hobby, plus change, with a small collection of fountain pens and over 100 inks, my favorite thing to do is get other people started. Here is a collection of where to start. I guess I should back up and talk about what is a fountain pen, how does it work, what types of nibs are there, and so on... but others have already done that so much better than I ever could. Instead I would point you to this gem...
Goulet Pens: Fountain Pens 101
https://www.gouletpens.com/fountain-pen-101
Pretty Fountain Pen Instagram Feeds:
https://www.instagram.com/gourmetpens/
https://www.instagram.com/penfiend/
The hobby doesn't HAVE to be expensive. With just $10 you can get a pen and ink. But I like to start people out with the Pilot Metropolitan because it is basically perfect. It is a smooth writer. It will probably be the smoothest writing experience you have ever had if you've only used standard office supply ballpoints. It has a good amount of weight to it, so it feels like an expensive pen, not cheap plastic. It has a snap cap which is nice and easy to use (rather than a cap that unscrews) and you don't have to worry about it leaking in your bag. It can be fully disassembled which makes it easy to clean and swap out nibs. It has 3 types of nibs including "italic" which instantly improves the look of your handwriting. They come in a wide array of colors. I started out with a black one and a white one, and now I have 6 of them. Like I said about the first taste...
Good starter pens:
Pilot Metropolitan - $20
Pilot Plumix - $11
Jinhao x750 - $7
Fountain Pen Revolution, starts at $9 for flexible nib
Pilot Parallel - $10 <-- can probably find at Michael's or art store
Kaweco Sport - $20-25 for the plastic ones
LAMY Safari - $25
Noodler's Konrad was my first flex pen - $40
Other starter pens
Online Shops:
Goulet Pens
Anderson Pens
Vanness Pens
Jet Pens
Other starter pens
Online Shops:
Goulet Pens
Anderson Pens
Vanness Pens
Jet Pens
Paper:
Nanami Paper (Tomoe River)
Traveler's Notebook (this is a whole rabbit hole in itself, will need a separate post)
Hobonichi (planners)
Field Notes (not always fountain pen friendly, but check out their awesome videos!!!)
Stationery Podcasts:
Favorite Pen People:
Inkdependence, youtube
Hand Over That Pen, blog
SBRE Brown, youtube
The Nib Smith, youtube
Inks:
There are well over 500 fountain pen inks on the market today. As of this post, I have sampled 102 inks. The nice thing about ink is that a sample costs a dollar or two and you can get quite a few pages of writing with just a couple milliliters. So every couple months I buy a dozen or so and if I really like it, I buy a bottle. On the BYOB podcast they talked about a good technique for deciding whether to buy a bottle: if you're sad when your sample runs out then you should buy it. My ink drawer is currently full, so I'm trying not to buy any more bottles. We'll see how long I can hold out.
Warning! ONLY use fountain pen ink in your fountain pen. Do not use calligraphy ink or india ink or anything else.
My first ink was Noodler's Texas Black Bat which is a custom ink made for Dromgoole's fountain pen store in Rice Village, Houston. You can't go wrong with Iroshizuku or Sailor inks. Diamine has some very bold colors and shimmering (sparkly) inks. Robert Oster has some very interesting high-sheen colors. I like inks that have interesting properties like sheen, shading, or sparkle. There are just too many things to cover in this post, so I'll leave you with a couple pictures.
Many pens come with a "cartridge" which is a plastic tube that holds ink. These are convenient, but they come in more of the basic colors. You can't buy every color in a cartridge. To really open up the whole range of inks available, you need a "converter" which allows you to use bottled ink, or samples, in your pen. There are a couple types out there. The Pilot Metro has a "squeeze" converter that works like a plastic eyedropper. You squeeze the converter, stick the pen in the ink, then let go and it sucks up the ink into the sac. There is also a piston type of converter which uses a plunger. You twist it so that the piston is all the way down, put the pen in the ink, then twist the opposite direction to pull the piston and the ink up into the pen. These are nice, too, but more difficult to clean. So I prefer the squeeze converters when available. Some pens have built in mechanisms (like the TWSBI piston filler) so you don't always get a choice.
When I buy inks, I like to sample them on my Col-o-ring ink testing book. I write the name of the ink with a glass pen so that I can quickly get through a lot of inks. Then I use a q-tip to swab the sample. Then I have a handy, visual catalog of every ink I've tried. Sometimes I also put the swabs in a traveler's notebook or currently inked log.
This is enough info for one post, but I have many more things I could talk about: stationery accessories, bullet journaling, dip pens, types of calligraphy, traveler's notebooks, more on inks, pencils (that's another whole story)... let me know what you'd like to hear about! Thanks for reading!
1 comment:
That's more than I ever knew there was to know about pens.
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