If you've ever seen Top Gear on BBC America you basically know the theme: 3 middle-aged men talking and test-driving cars. On the Top Gear special where the three lads drive the length of Vietnam in 8 days, their transportation was motorbikes which left one of them in a week-long foul mood. So he played a number of pranks on his two companions, one involving crushing a camo-colored bike helmet and then offering a replacement-in shiny, sparkly pink--all the while explaining that color was purely a cultural phenomenon and in Vietnam pink was the color of a warrior. Snicker, wink, snicker..
No matter how much we may object, pink is for girls and always will be whether it's lipstick or gel ink pens. But if you want a pink that isn't your usual pale, frail, pink then what to do? Well, check out Pilot Hi-Tec-C, where you'll find the 05 gel ink pen in Elegance Pink from the the Cosmetic Colors (!) line. It's a very dark pink, not necessarily hot pink but definitely a strong color that might have a touch of blue in it.
Like all the Hi-Tec gel ink pens, this one writes smoothly, while the 05mm is my favorite line width. Looking at the color next to the Hi-Tec Strawberry, the Elegance Pink definitely looks dark with a blue tinge to it. The Muji Plum in the accompanying pic looks pale and a tad washed out next to these two strong colors. So Elegance Pink is a perfect dark pink that doesn't yell out to the world "I still dot my i's with tiny hearts."
This essay began when Norman Haase of His Nibs invited me to contribute to the writers’ page on his Web site. I’m a “reviving penman”, and a semi-retired technical writer and advertising salesman. Recently I finished a book-length commentary in manuscript on health care, and I’ve written a whole lot of unpublished ephemera for my own amusement and uplift. The thoughts below are pretty much a sales pitch for fountain pens to myself and the readers.
F irst off, the ballpoint pen knocked out the fountain pen for good reason. Take a look. Reliable and disposable stick pens can be had for as little as a dime each when bought in quantity. Inexpensive disposable fountain pens start out at about $3, or thirty times as much, if you can find them.
Still, the fountain pen survives. With steel nibs made of newer alloys (a thought suggested to me by Brian Gray of Edison Pens), modern fountain pens by my guess also benefit from improved inks and better manufacturing methods. I’d wager that today’s pens are consistently better than those made in the 1930s. (I have an unproven pet theory that “flexy” gold alloy was adopted as a nib material partly because nib makers had difficulty maintaining consistent manufacturing tolerances, especially in the nib slits.)
I told Norman I’d suggest a fountain pen to any student or writer for the purpose of changing up, or breaking out of a bad groove. I’d been an amateur drummer, and sometimes you can climb out of a musical rut by changing your tools, such as working the toms, or laying on the wire brushes.
So how do fountain pens stimulate the writer’s and thinker’s instincts?Fountain pens offer an enormous variety of materials, such as lacquers, plastics, and common and precious metals. Embellishment and varied designs, many imitating architectural motifs and the natural world, are popular even among inexpensive fountain pens. Think of engraved handguns, highly polished watches of precious metals, and pocket knives sporting Damascene blades tucked between handles of rare wood, all small utilitarian objects where decoration adds to the experience of ownership and use. Among some folks, especially collectors and high rollers, the pricier fountain pens offer bragging rights and social prestige.
Remember Simon and Garfunkel giving elephants and zebras characters and occupations in “At the Zoo”? Well, the pens in my modest desk rig have personalities, too. My Jinhao Evening Stripes is dignified and statesmanlike; my Duke #962 is the pen you’d see a harried Manhattan businessman using on a cross-country train trip in the 1920s; the Crocodile Silver Rain is a chromed-up new Cadillac from 1957, or part of an astronaut’s desk rig at his Cape Canaveral office. My disposable Pilot Varsitys and Sailor Ink Bars seem like something you’d see in a Vietnamese café or Lagos bar. Ergonomically designed and tipped by a wonderfully smooth, plain nib, my Lamy Safari is like a nicely worn sofa or comfort food, and it tickles me that Europe still manufactures pens that Americans can afford. My venerable Parker 75---well, I really can’t “place” it, I guess because its restrained appearance and use of gold and sterling silver seem universally “bourgeois”. Psychological gimmickry? Sure, but it adds interest to writing, and stirs up the gray matter.
The nib-and-ink combination is where fountain pens arguably offer technical superiority over ballpoint pens. Try the Point Test. Take a fountain pen and gently press your writing paper with it to make a point. Do the same with a ballpoint pen. You can’t draw a point with a ballpoint, can you, not without twisting the pen? Try the Line Test. Draw a line with your fountain pen, then with a ballpoint pen. Note the difference in writing pressure. When you think of fountain pens, picture Teflon-coated ice skates on wet ice at 32° F. When you think of ballpoint pens, imagine mud-covered roller skates on hot asphalt at 115° F. The differences in ink viscosity and pen tip coefficient of friction can be striking.
According to the pen community bloggers, some folks with arthritis prefer fountain pens for their ease of use, and those of us with weaker eyesight may find some highly saturated fountain pen inks better suited to them than ballpoint pen inks. Less hand- and finger-cramping are reported at least once. The fine and extra fine nibs (available on some pens) mounted on unposted fountain pens may be ideal for those with smaller hands or handwriting.
Imagine if nibbed pens had disappeared for centuries, then only recently been rediscovered by an enterprising manufacturer. How would a pitchman hawk fountain pens today at your county fair, or big-city street corner? “Ladies and gentlemen, the wisdom of the Pharaohs and the words of the prophets were written with the technology that’s in these amazing, never-before-available pens! Just ask yourselves, folks---how can you do better!!?” Tough sell to be sure, but I’d find some buyers, and I’m pretty confident they’d enjoy their pens.
Today’s fountain pen retail deserves a fuller treatment in a separate article. Unless you live in our largest cities, or a handful of smaller towns with specialty retailers, you’ll be buying over the Internet. Complaints that I’ve read are few, and center almost exclusively on disagreements over the condition of used pens sold on eBay.
Fountain pen prices have remained remarkably consistent over the last eighty years. A plain student’s pen cost maybe two or three hours of a low-wage American worker’s pay then; a high-end Parker or Waterman maybe 40 or 50 hours’ pay. That price spread roughly holds today. Yet, Monsieur Bich’s stick pen is available nowadays for as little as two or three minutes of a low-wage worker’s pay!
So, you’re thinking about a fountain pen, but you have that lousy feeling you’re going to make a darned fool of yourself. Think about this. Many of the poorest American households the last twenty years have been persuaded to buy a “writing” instrument that costs as much as a high-end European or Japanese pen, and will barely last five years on average. Yep, it’s that picoliter-spritzing computer printer with the ink cartridges at $15 a pop, twice as much per milliliter as many generally available fountain pen inks. So, go ahead, you’ve spotted the fountain pen you want from an Internet retailer you’re willing to trust. Write that check, send the Paypal transfer, you’ll be okay.
You all know the solitary pleasures of the study, which for me is often the kitchen table. There’s a special sanity---the word is not too strong---that takes over when you set pen to paper. Maybe you’re drafting a love letter, or composing that essay that finally speaks the truth to power, or working out how your protagonist will get himself out of a scrape, or compressing a blog post into 150 well-chosen words. Sure, I’m keeping my inexpensive ballpoints and disposable mechanical pencils. But, it’s my small clutch of fountain pens that lend a sense of occasion and gravity to my writing.
Proof of the pudding is in the eating. This morning I sent a postcard to a woman I’ve known for years who’s traveling in Washington State. I used my Jinhao Evening Stripes (right), described by Norman as having a Western-sized medium nib. What Linda will see is an ink (Private Reserve’s Velvet Black) that’s remarkably darker than what she’s used to, and something unexplainable about the handwriting---the nibbed pen’s variation in line width. She’ll guess I want to make an impression on her. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?
I love the Maruman Mnemosyne line, with the slick black cover and bright neon yellow sheet on the inside explaining who Mnemosyne was (the Goddess of Memory and the mother of the 9 Muses).
The 188 in particular is a favorite, size A5 (almost the same as a Rhodia No. 16, but the 188 is about 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch longer) with one-sided gridding of pale brown-gray-green ink that doesn't get in the way of writing or reading. The paper is nowhere near Rhodia quality of 80gsm, but it's fairly close (possibly 70gsm to 75gsm).
I'd actually say this paper is more pencil friendly than ink-friendly, even gel ink will leave a heavy shadow that makes using both sides impossible. The cover and back material are actually a bit thicker than Rhodia and don't wear down as fast or as obviously.
I like the way the pencil looked and felt gliding over the paper as I tested it out with my strawberry Hi-Tec-05 gel ink pen and a Koh-I-Noor pencil. I didn't notice any obvious smearing, either. So the 188 is a good work-day notepad, expensive as all get-out but worth the money if you want something that's sturdy and good-looking for projects of any and all sort.
While wandering the National Stationery Show I noticed a lot of booths featuring pencils, and one booth in particular was showing off woodless pencils. I've been thinking of those for some time now, and so went looking on eBay. What I found was the Koh-I-Noor Progresso, a dark gray, lacquer-coated pencil made of Hardtmuth graphite.
While I don't know much about pencils, I do know I like a softer pencil, such as HB, but then I hate the smearing. So I chose the standard 2B instead, and am definitely impressed by the laydown and staying power of the graphite. Smearing was minimal, and writing was soft and smooth and a bit strange. I kept looking for line between graphite and wood, but the pencil is one gray color, no lighter wood to mess with. The pencil is also quite weighty, solid grahite being heavier. Most of all, I love the idea of writing with a pure graphite pencil, and as a bonus there are no wood shavings to clean up. While I purchased mine from eBay, there are other places to buy so check them out if you can.
Pilot never ceases to amaze with their many Hi-Tec variations: Hi-Tec, Hi-Tec-C, Hi-Tec-C-Cavalier, and this one that I've been doodling with: the Hi-Tec-05. It's a .05mm tip, which I like a lot (nice wide line) but the Strawberry ink is what makes it fun. Not as red as a real strawberry, more like cherry pink, but the ink in the barrel and the colored plastic ends means this pen will never get lost on my desk. And now that I think about it, the pen is much less likely to be "borrowed" and casually left on the colleague's desk. A conspicuous pen is hard to walk away with, much less use in front of a grieving, de-penned co-worker.
There's one thing I did notice right away, large the needle point tip and ball are on this .05mm tip. The pic up top isn't very clear, but you can see the 05 compared to my Hi-Tec-C in Usuzumi (light grey ink), which is .04mm. The 05 is noticeably bigger, and there's a sturdiness to the point that I find lacking in the Usuzumi. But YMMV, and it's really the colors that make these fun.
Over July 4th weekend I went out to Long Island to visit my friend Joe, and we went to see the finally-completed Buddhist Temple. The Temple was started about 5 years ago, but the group ran out of money and so the outside was completed but the inside bare. Now the Temple is finished, and a few weeks ago the group held an open house and consecration of the space and grounds.
Besides the gold statues and flowers and candles was this interesting round wheel, a meditation or prayer wheel perhaps. In the pic above, with the wheel on top of the large steel stand, you can just make out that the paper wrapping around the wheel and base are dollar bills, something I often meditate on and enjoy thinking about.
We're on the 29th Floor of an office building that faces the Hudson River, up near the George Washington Bridge. A few minutes ago my boss came running to tell us there was a rainbow right outside her office window. Fortunately one of my office mates, who is a professional photographer, got her camera out so my out-of-focus pics won't be the only mementos of this amazing sight.
Update 12:12 PM: Better picture from my co-worker.
uch we may object, pink is for girls and always will be whether it's lipstick or gel ink pens. But if you want a pink that isn't your usual pale, frail, pink then what to do? Well, check out Pilot Hi-Tec-C, where you'll find the 05 gel ink pen in Elegance Pink from the the Cosmetic Colors (!) line. It's a very dark pink, not necessarily hot pink but definitely a strong color that might have a touch of blue in it.
