A few months ago I got interested in fountain pens in earnest. I’d been interested in them for a few years, to be sure, but it’s one thing to have a latent interest; it’s another entirely to actually do something about the issue.
My first pen, purchased last August (a birthday gift to myself?) was a Lamy Al-Star in aluminum silver, with an LH nib (a medium nib designed for left-handers). I took to it right away.
Here we are, a few months later, and I seem to have a significant collection of them now: several Lamys (a 2000, a couple of Al-Stars including the one above, and a few Safaris), a Marxton lever-fill from the 1920s, a Parker 51 from 1947 (the year my mother was born, to put it into context), and a 1980s Sheaffer 313, plus ten Hero 616s – the cheapest pen in my arsenal (about $2 each) and not a bad writer, actually, if you use the right ink with it. The current problem is that fountain pens like regular use and I have 11 pens with ink in them, so I need to downsize that list.
The interesting thing about diversions such as these is that often, you end up going in other directions as a result. I find myself journalling now (in a lovely Moleskine notebook), and have joined a journal-by-mail project where we keep a journal and every couple of weeks, send that journal to the next person on the list. I think we have six people in the project so by the time you get your own journal back (we started in January; I get mine back on Monday next week) you have a massive conversation to read and to which to reply. It’s quite fun.
Of course, every time you journal you can use a different pen and a different ink, and different pens have different nibs. You can write very fine lines or very broad ones, or use nibs with little or lots of flex. The character of the writing is different with each.
And the different inks… pretty colours! You’d think a guy would be happy to write in black or blue but then you find out there are hues of blue out there and then you try a green and see that it really fits your mood sometimes, and you find out that brown complements a slightly creamy paper perfectly…
It’s a vicious circle. What can I say? But it’s fun.