fountain pens

I try to not be a materialist, but I love fountain pens. I don't collect them, but I adore them somewhat. Not all, but a few.

LAMY Safari

I first started being interested in fountain pens through my very first fountain pen: the LAMY Safari. I really researched the pen until I needed to try it out, and I did. It felt light. Smooth. I didn't know what to expect. Writing with a fountain pen felt weird: were you supposed to tilt the nib to change your writing? What?

I love writing by hand. Before I started using fountain pens, I only used pencils. Lead middle. Sharpened by hand. The manual process of writing was, for me, slower than typing on a computer.

Writing by hand allows me to slow down. I write differently depending on my mood. When I'm distraught, characters come out looking like a Ralph Steadman-style painting. When I'm focused and at ease, words flow out and look very different.

Platinum 3776 Century Urushi Maki-e Sakura

My second fountain pen was a Platinum 3776 Century Urushi Maki-e Sakura. It was even lighter than the LAMY Safari, and felt very different. The nib was gold, 14K, and it just flowed over paper.

Speaking of which: paper. I love Tomoe River paper. It's brilliant for use with fountain pens. It's thin, so a single notebook can contain 400 pages. Pens don't bleed through the page. It's beautiful. There are other papers that I also love, for example, Rhodia. And yes, there's a vast difference between different types of paper. The thinner the nib, the harder it'll be to write on paper of bad quality. Also, it's important to note that bad paper easily feathers, meaning the paper quality is poor and ink bleeds through fibers that go all over the place.