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With the recent Stipula Etruria thread that was posted in this sub, I thought it was high time we had a dedicated photo thread for the Montegrappa Extra. This can include the earlier Classica and Historia models, along with the more modern variants including the Extra, Extra 1930 and Extra Otto. The key here is to share what you have no matter the size of your collections or your photography skills, so that we may appreciate, discuss and enjoy the variety of trims, nibs and colours these exquisite pens are available in. My hope is that this will breathe a little more passion into this model and to see our own interpretations of how we use them in the 'real world'. This will also provide a valuable resource for those looking to research the model and perhaps make their own decision to one day acquire an Extra or two. Let me kick us off with two of my favourite Extra's in my collection; an Extra Otto in Lapis Blue with a Fine nib, and an Extra is midnight blue celluloid with the older style barrel imprint and a Medium nib. I am soon to add another one when it arrives from Italy, will post a group shot then. I hope that others will follow with their shots

Botany is not a quick science. The job of giving a face and a name to the diversity of plants that populate our planet is made up of patient checks and comparisons with what has already been discovered and revealed to science in the nearly 280 years of history of modern botany. We already know a little less than 400 thousand species of plants and every year another 2000 recently discovered are added to the list. Almost 10% of all plants with flowers are orchids, and the comparison work with the thousands of existing names, frequently published in old and difficult to find journals and books, with museum specimens not always in the ideal conditions for their study, takes time. Almost exactly three years ago, on the pages of this same forum, I wrote about how you can use a fountain pen, among many other things, also to describe a new species of orchid, and not only in words, but also by tracing on a sheet its unique and distinctive characters (you can read it here). A couple of photographs showed my notebook and my Montegrappa Extra 1930 in Black Bamboo celluloid (the botanist's perfect pen, with that air of a linfous plant shoot) struggling with the first draft of description of a new orchid species from Costa Rica: Dichaea auriculata, this was the name that could be read noted in the notebook. Three years later, that name finally became real in the baptismal deed of the new species (which botanists cryptically call a "protologue"), published this April in the scientific journal Blumea, an international journal on the biodiversity, evolution and biogeography of plants, published by the National Herbarium of the Netherlands. On the pages of the journal you can read the short Latin phrases written initially in pen, and observe the drawing whose details had been sketched with the fountain pen in my notebook. And here it is again, my dear Montegrappa Extra 1930 "Acque del Sile", with the old notebook I had in use three years ago and with the new one, which I have been using these days. Not much has changed in these three years: a few more pens, a few more publications, a few more years old ...