Should I Get Into Fountain Pens?

May 4, 2016

A side bar to this discussion:

The Bar Mitzvah Speech

"Today I Am a Fountain Pen"

Sometimes the punch line of a joke becomes better known than the joke itself. Such has been the case with a joke about becoming bar mitzvah. The joke, in fact, is often repeated via this one phrase: ... and today I am a fountain pen.

In the past, a frequent gift at a bar mitzvah was a fountain pen. Before the popularity and price of today's ball-point, a fountain pen was a prized, cherished item not too far removed from a pocket watch. It signified accomplishment, achievement, responsibility, position, and arrival. The giving of the fountain pen was the acknowledgment of entry into adult life, with responsibilities accompanying it.

The cliché bar mitzvah speech usually began with "Worthy (or Honorable) Rabbi, Beloved Parents, Relatives, and Dear Friends," and ended with the forceful declaration of, "today I am a man!' To hear a 13-year-old assertively utter this always brings a wide smile. With the giving and receiving of the adult tool, a fountain pen, it was synonymous to joke, "Today I am a fountain pen."

...http://jewishwebsight.com/lifecycle/mitzvah.html

And today, most of those pens are likely sitting in a drawer and waiting to once again hear the call and response.

May 4, 2016

It's God's way of telling you that you have too much money.

May 4, 2016

Some people have a hobby of collecting fountain pens. All hobbies have their own internal logic, not worth trying to explain or defend to those outside. But it is worth mentioning that some people just use a nice pen for writing, and one or two pens and a bottle of ink meet their need. I mention this because I would not want our young friend to think it is like some sort of irresistible path to financial ruin.

May 4, 2016

Common sense is not common. It is gained by experience; the best and cheapest experience is carefully observing others experiences; and not paying for the experience your self.

Do Not join the Pen of the Week in the Mail Club!

Nor the Pen of the Month.

If you join the pen of the quarter club....you get a much better pen, that you have researched and know That Is The One. You also have so much more time to save enough money to buy a much better pen.

One can get top of the line in used: semi-vintage or Vintage pens, for less than what a new 'medium' priced pens costs....one with real nibs....and not the modern substituents. (For later Japanese do offer some good nibs, in some have spring to them.)

To start and to be well served.

What you will need is an EF in nail, for small writing. A nail B for it's wetness, boldness and flare.

The Lamy is a nail, and it only costs @ $7.00 for the next nib.

IMO for your 3rd-4th pens, you should dip into semi-vintage....pens before say 1997 to the '70's, that have springy 'true' regular flex nibs (depending on the brand***). I call them 'true' regular flex, in most modern are semi-nail, instead of regular flex. However if one don't know that, might think the normal nib that comes on most modern pens....must be 'regular'. You can pick up good, used C/C pens, here on the sales section....where you can complain if something is not right....in the folks here value their good names. Sometimes it pays in the long run to pay a fair price for a pen.

Also the seller knows which flex the nib has....so it is not the gamble of buying on Ebay.

((***Parker was a nail since the '30's. You have ages to look such things up. Some Shaffer semi-vintage are 'true' regular flex, some are nails. Pelikans are even used a bit out of your reach. German Ebay you can pick up a '50-60's Geha piston School pen, for 12-15 Euro, that has a nice springy regular flex nib. And are still perfectly usable.) Do Not Buy any of the cartridge Geha pens, in the cartridge is no longer made. (I do like piston Geha's, having four 790's, a 725 and a piston School pen.)

You need an M and F in 'true' regular flex. They give you a good ride. I find both work well with some of the shading inks.

Later, in a few years you will get a semi-flex. There are inks that shade well or better with semi-flex. There are also shading inks that work better with regular flex.

M is a good nib size to have. I picked up a prejudice here along with most against an M nib. Many wish the narrowest line they can have and refuse to adjust their script to wider nibs. Most or many western pens come with an M, and folks want something different. I went B-BB others go F-EF or XXF.

Using MB Toffee, a brown shading ink.

F gave me light line with darker trails.

M gave me 50-50 Breaking the M prejudice I'd picked up on this com.

B gave me a dark line with light trails.

There are free templates that you can print lines on your paper, thin, medium or wide....matching the nib you wish to use. It is easy to adjust your script to narrower or wider lines, with the width of the nib.....Some folks, for some strange reason take an extraordinary amount of pride of writing so tiny the teacher can not read what they wrote....I think for a lesser grade too. They refuse to have fun with wider nibs or shading inks.

Shading inks don't shade well enough to see with using EF and narrower nibs. Then you are condemned to using only supersaturated vivid 'boring' inks.

Because Ball Point users are mostly Ham Fisted. Yep, me too, at the start. The pen companies decided to go to a harder nib, so they wouldn't have to repair so many nibs; explaining the modern semi-nail. A nails a nail, be it gold or steel, why waste paper and ink money on a gold nail????? (for later thought.) There are some real blingy steel nail nibs to be had too.

Because many Ball Point Barbarians refuse learn or do not know how to hold a fountain pen, they had to make the point fatter so the 'newbies' could continue to hold the fountain pen like a ball point.

= blobby boring nibs.......true they are or should be 'butter smooth', but there is much more to the joy of fountain pens than 'only' butter smooth.

Look up 'classic tripod' in the search section. A fountain pen 'rests' at 45 degrees after the big index knuckle, or 'rests' at 40 degrees at the start of the web of the thumb, or really, really rests in the pit of the web of the thumb, if it is very long or very heavy. By letting a fountain pen, 'rest' where it wishes it will give you less fatigue in you will need less pressure by forcing a fountain pen to be at 'only' 45 degrees. It will help you develop a lighter Hand.

A fountain pen's nib floats on a small puddle of ink, so no pressure is needed....easy to say, harder to do. A ball point is like plowing the south forty with out the mule.

Holding a fountain pen like a ball point minimizes the puddle of ink, and is like plowing a furrow in the paper....causing skipping, and if ham fisted enough knocking the tines out of alignment. 95% of scratchy is misaligned tines or holding the fountain pen like a ball point.

Hold the fountain pen lightly, like you would hold a featherless baby bird.

Do Not make baby bird paste.

You will find out later that nib width is @ only; in each company has it's own standards, different eras also. Then there is tolerance/slop. It is possible for a skinny M to be exactly as wide as a Fat F, and be in tolerance. A different company's nibs, that would never ever been a Fat F or Skinny M, but middle of their F or M.

Back when there was a pen store on every corner, the pen company had market surveys of what did their customers like in nib width. Why not make all the nibs 'standard'? Back in the day of One Man, One Pen, and a man buying a new pen every 7-10 years, Parker did not want their customers being confused .... the nib widths were what their customers wanted.....if Parker made a skinner nib like Sheaffer ... a horrible mistake could be made; they could buy a Sheaffer not seeing any nib width difference.

I did a Factory tour of Lamy, where for the steel nibs they have 10 m long nib making machine, there is still slight variance. By hand with gold nibs there will be more.

Japanese nibs are for the western market miss marked one width. Those sizes are for Japanese tiny printed script. It was not until the late '90's that Japanese pens became popular.

If your first pen is Japanese, you will think all western pens are Fat. If your first pen is Western, you will 'know' Japanese pens are miss marked one size too small. Really not that important, but some folks can't make the cultural jump. Your eyes get calibrated as a 'noobie' to the western or Japanese nib widths.

Nibs no matter what it is marked, come in real real skinny, real skinny, skinny, medium, wide and real wide.....letting the size marked on the nib irritate you is a loss of karma. Each company is going to be different. In Japanese nibs Pilot is the skinny one, Sailor the fat one.

OCD/AR behavior is counterproductive, go with the flow.

Go over to the Sheaffer sub section, in the pinned section is Ron Zorn's visit to the Janeville's Sheaffer factory just as they closed down. He was able to get their nib width tolerances. It is well worth reading some time this month.

Nib width also depends on ink, paper and how much pressure the writer uses....so there is no reason to get OCD, that even another nib of the same width of the same company, is not exactly the same as the other.....much less some other companies or a different era.

Unless you have all your nib reground exactly to your very own standards, nib width is @ hand grenade close.

Oh, by the way, some fine poster did a 'nib' check on some ball point cartridges They were just as off as fountain pens for sizing.

Remember LA was not built in a Day. There is no hurry needed with fountain pens, they will be there next year or the next decade.

We are here having fun, and with patterns in color, nib width, flexes and inks on this or that paper.

The golden rule is there is no perfect pen, nib, ink or paper. There are an occasional perfection of that nib, on that paper with that ink. That is the grail.

Do Keep a Record!

It is hell to have had it and forgotten...to write it down.

I suggest eventually chasing chasing the nib, instead of make and model. One can subordinate make and model to the nib of course. I don't see any reason for having all 51 colors and models of the P-51 if they are all nail nibs.

There are some 45 nib widths and flexes....50 if one is AR about it. Time is on your side.

Greed of being in the Pen of the Week in the Mail Club is ...Sigh, I know. Well, 50 % of them are still ok....but I could have done better had I not been cheap greedy....the worst kind of greedy.

Pen of the quarter is the way to go. And Used pens....be it modern, semi-vintage or vintage is the best way....after your first couple of new pens.

May 4, 2016

I'd actually speak against Bo Bo Olson's post, at least for our young OP. I already know I enjoy fountain pens, and have tools, supplies and knowledge to do basic restorations with reasonable confidence. I've also got a job where I can afford to spend $60- $100 a month on pens, which is sounds like our friend here does not. Depending on local labor laws, he might not have much in the way of chances to really earn more money than he already receives.

I'd say get one pen that really speaks to you, and a bottle of black or blue-black ink that you like the look of. Get something with a Japanese Fine (Pilot) or German Extra Fine (Lamy, TWSBI Eco) to minimize worries about cheap paper. Whichever you get, just enjoy the pen that you have.

There's a wealth of knowledge here for you if you decide you really like fountain pens and want to pursue them a bit more. We already tend to be a bit more confirmed in our love/obsession with our writing utensils, though. Sometimes we get a bit hung up on finding "the greatest and best writing setup there ever was!" That can be fun, but sometimes it causes us to maybe lose focus a bit, and always be looking for that one step better, the first stages of which Bo Bo has laid out above.

I often find I get the most out of this hobby when I stop paying attention to what everyone else is doing/getting and just enjoy the pens that I have. There's always going to be someone who has a super rare vintage Montblanc button filler with built in spell check that costs $8,000 that you just can't afford no matter how cool you might find it. The important thing is to enjoy the pen you have. You can always upgrade later, or take your time learning to restore pens if you want to go that route, but just enjoy yourself, and go at your own pace. The rabbit hole only goes as deep as you want it to.

I'd say go for it. They're still often quite practical and even a cheap metro is a very nice writing experience.

Edited May 4, 2016 by Baalberithim

May 4, 2016

I second the suggestion that the OP should first try asking family member, friends and relatives if they have any unused pens lying around they'd be happy to give away. Fountain pens were commonplace in the past and the chances are good that there are still many lying forgotten in desk drawers and cupboards waiting for a second life! (Although, I did that and the yield was... a Platignum calligraphy set. )

Also, writing with a fountain pen (as opposed to collecting, or if that word is distasteful as it all too often seems to be! accumulating fountain pens as a hobby) need not be expensive. All one really needs is a pen, preferably two, that write well and a bottle of ink. Good writing pens need not be expensive ones. One of my favourites is the humble Pilot Kaküno.

May 4, 2016

You could get into fountain pens--that is, get into accumulating the objects for themselves. Or you could get into really paying attention to and enjoying the act of writing, for which a decent fountain pen is a great help. One path requires you to keep buying pens in order to stay happy, while the other requires you to keep exploring and improving your handwriting, which costs next to nothing and can, for some of us, be more rewarding.

ron

May 4, 2016

Bo Bo's advice on purchasing pens suits him perfectly. It may suit you just as well.

It wouldn't suit me, and I took a different route. I bought inexpensive pens every so often, and made an effort to discover what characteristics of each appealed to me and which annoyed me. All too often, the only way to truly know these things was to use a pen for a week or more. I agree with Bo Bo that curbing your acuisitive impulses is prudent.

M nibs do in fact suit many people. The width you prefer will depend on how big you write. I stick with F nibs, because when I write with wider points I have a tendency to have filled in loops without meaning to, especially on e, f, k, and s. I don't know if I ever really got over the 0.5mm mechanical pencils I favored from about 5th grade till I started college. I may miss out on all the cool ink effects like shading and sheening, but I'm okay with that.

I inherited one pen. My dad had a Parker "51" that I estimate was produced circa 1954 (13 years before I was born), and it was his sole pen until the early 1980s. Getting any your relatives have sitting around is a great way to try some pens for (relatively) cheap, presuming they still work.

May 4, 2016

I love it.

I could buy the latest iPhone and in three years it will be obsolete.

Or I could spend the money on a lovely M1000 and it will still perform exactly as the day I bought twenty years from now.

Kind Regards

May 4, 2016

I love it.

I could buy the latest iPhone and in three years it will be obsolete.

Or I could spend the money on a lovely M1000 and it will still perform exactly as the day I bought twenty years from now.

Kind Regards

Like your iPhone, your M1000 can also be used to store phone numbers, write messages, keep short notes (long ones too), count your steps, act as a level ....

May 5, 2016

Welcome to the world of fountain pens!

I also started with a simple Sheaffer cartridge pen from my local five and ten cent store, and it was decades before I had anything else. Fountain pens are fun, and you are the boss of your hobby. I do suggest getting one if you can - I agree that the Chinese pens mentioned in this thread are good pens especially for their price, if you are not inundated with pens when your family finds out you would like one, and write with it. See how you like it. Come back and ask for help if it is not working perfectly for you. Have fun with it. There are practical reasons for Fountain pens, but perhaps the most practical, after all, is the fun.