The Meisterstück 149 Calligraphy Appreciation Thread

[fpupulin]

6 hours ago, TheDutchGuy said:

Today I had the opportunity to try this pen. When I unscrewed the cap and looked at that nib, I was certain I would buy it... but there was one other contender which I also tried today. After spending some time writing, I bought the other pen. That was a hard choice to make, the main factors being size (the 149 is at my upper limit of comfort), line width (the 149 wrote a wider line than I’d expected with zero pressure), appearance (the other pen... well, you either get it or you don’t 😁), price and mojo.

 

Demand for the 149 Calligraphy seems to be going through the roof right now and potential customers seem to be facing Conid-like waiting periods. I was really fortunate to have a chance to try it personally. It’s going to be a long time before I see another one.

 

What a great experience may have been, having in your hands two pens that you coveted, and the chance to buy your preferred one!

 

Was your experience in a real shop? It seems to me a very long time since I had a chance to visit one...

 

Maybe I have guessed which other pen won the splendid game, but I imagine I’m not alone looking for a pic.

[fpupulin]

2 hours ago, como said:

@fpupulinI much enjoyed reading about your New Year’s tradition since childhood, the setup details of your calligraphy section, and your thoughts. Your notes bring back memories for me. As a child, I often behaved extra well on New Year’s Eve, doing extra homework, helping with cleaning etc, as a gesture to my parents for the guilt I felt misbehaving and not achieving in the past year, and a hope to myself that I could be better. It was not a tradition but a pattern that was hardly long-lasting into the new year :-)))

 

May 2021 bring you much peace and joy, pen and otherwise! 

 

Have a great year you too, my friend!

[lionelc]

thank you for posting your photographs and calligraphy fpupulin, inspires me to work harder with my 149 calligraphy - have it inked up with toffee brown for the moment.  i note the hasselblad swc - wow.  happy 2021!

[TheDutchGuy]

7 hours ago, fpupulin said:

Maybe I have guessed which other pen won the splendid game, but I imagine I’m not alone looking for a pic

 

That’s why I linked to it 😉 . It’s an Omas Tassili NOS and it’s very special. It was sweet torture to choose. The Omas had just been made available for purchase and is basically a one-time chance. The 149 was returned by a customer who didn’t bond with it, so it was an inked pen and as such I could try it. I was sure I would buy the MB. The Omas, I could not try because it’s a NOS, never-used, never-inked pen. I carefully examined the nib with a lens and tentatively concluded that it might just be great for me. Thankfully, my hunch was right. In the mean time, the waiting list for the 149 is going through the roof so it’ll be a long time before I’ll see another one, if ever. On the plus side, I have a few vintage flex and semi-flex pens that work well for me. And with all due respect for the 149, but it’s not going to make me write like you. I can practice fine writing just as well with my vintage pens.

 

[KJY]

On 1/4/2021 at 6:14 AM, fpupulin said:

At home, as children, it was tradition that on the first day of the year some things were done as a wish to be able to do them all year round. We studied or worked at least a few minutes, and did the things we love the most. Since I can remember, I have always written a few lines to be able to put on the leaf the date of January 1st, I often drew some scribbles, when I was older I wrote a few lines of an article or a book and I took at least one photograph.

 

Also this year I did my part. I did it by calligraphying a thought on the feeling of the first day of a new year, what for me has been and continues to be an experience of rebirth and facing a world still intact.

 

In my thought I wanted to say that loading a pen is, in practice, filling it with ink, but conceptually it is also filling it with still unwritten words ...

 

The words of the pen may have colors, nut most of the things I write in honest handwriting are black words. In fact, my black pens with pointed calligraphy nibs are all loaded with black ink. The two vintage "calligraphics" that I own in pearl gray celluloid are never loaded with colored inks, for fear of indelibly staining them. But for the concept of this new year writing, "black words" was no good, because it sounded pessimistic and gloomy. "Blue words" was better, a blue of sky and hope, like indigo.

 

So, I emptied my 149 Calligraphy of the Black Permanent ink, washed it well, and loaded it with Blue, to give the writing an aesthetic sense. Blue Permanent, pretending it's indigo.

 

Then I chose a large sheet, so that there was room for some squiggles. Beautiful and difficult paper, perfect for thin strokes, obstinate for thicker ones, where it forces the nibs to railroad frequently: the Ingres by Hahnemühle absorbs, it dries up the nib. On the upper right corner, the rooster symbol of the German paper mill can be seen in filigree. I would need the white Ingres, which behave better with blue inks, but I don't have any more: the cream one does its duty anyway. I drew the guiding lines: since there is enough space on the sheet, I drew them at the right distance.

 

 

The Hasselblad Super Wide C/M is a constant presence on my desk, and since I like its lines very much, I let it stick its nose into the photograph. Moreover, perhaps not everyone knows that the Montblanc Meisterstück 149 and the Hasselblad Super Wide were born very close each other, the first in 1952 and the second in 1954: two objects that have just been modified in over sixty years and still make their work perfectly!

 

What a great pen, my friends!

 

 

 

WOW! Just WOW! Haven't logged in for quite some time but this contribution makes me want to practice with my pens. 

Hope you all will have a great new year my old friends!

[fpupulin]

20 hours ago, lionelc said:

thank you for posting your photographs and calligraphy fpupulin, inspires me to work harder with my 149 calligraphy - have it inked up with toffee brown for the moment.  i note the hasselblad swc - wow.  happy 2021!

 

I highly recommend you practice with various types of ink and on different types of paper. The behavior of the Calligraphy flexible nib can be radically different with different ink and paper equations!

 

In my experience, when you intend to use this nib for pointed calligraphy types, the vast majority of inks (including Toffe Brown) are unsuitable to the purpose because they are too lubricated. Understand me, it's not a problem with this nib, but with the “pointed” handwriting in general. No calligrapher would dream of using dip nibs with an ink that is not expressly designed for calligraphy, mostly iron gall inks, which are decidedly more "dense".

Many of these inks are nevertheless unsuitable for the fountain pen, because they can cause it to clog. However, there are good analogue inks, not iron galls, which use pigments in suspension, specially designed for the fountain pen. They should be used cum grano salis, without letting the ink dry in the pen and washing it thoroughly with each refill, but the results may surprise you. The fine lines actually become very fine and the “spring back” of the tins much more immediate.

 

Among the many pigmented inks available, I highly recommend you try the Montblanc Blue Permanent. Really, seeing is believing ...

[fpupulin]

15 hours ago, TheDutchGuy said:

 

That’s why I linked to it 😉 . It’s an Omas Tassili NOS and it’s very special. It was sweet torture to choose. The Omas had just been made available for purchase and is basically a one-time chance. The 149 was returned by a customer who didn’t bond with it, so it was an inked pen and as such I could try it. I was sure I would buy the MB. The Omas, I could not try because it’s a NOS, never-used, never-inked pen. I carefully examined the nib with a lens and tentatively concluded that it might just be great for me. Thankfully, my hunch was right. In the mean time, the waiting list for the 149 is going through the roof so it’ll be a long time before I’ll see another one, if ever. On the plus side, I have a few vintage flex and semi-flex pens that work well for me. And with all due respect for the 149, but it’s not going to make me write like you. I can practice fine writing just as well with my vintage pens.

 

 

 

Well, my friend, this is a heck of a pen! It is beautiful. What better way to start the year?

 

It was only natural that you succumbed to its beauty and, I would say, its rarity! As an OMAS enthusiast that I am, I haven't seen a Tassili offer in years. Compliments! Use it and enjoy it in good health! 

 

As for calligraphy, you already know how I think: any decent nib can do the job!

[fpupulin]

8 hours ago, KJY said:

 

WOW! Just WOW! Haven't logged in for quite some time but this contribution makes me want to practice with my pens. 

Hope you all will have a great new year my old friends!

 

If what I write and post on this forum were to make only one sense, it would be just that: to entice pen pals to take their jewels out of the box and play and experiment. 

 

Have fun, and happy new year!

[TheDutchGuy]

8 hours ago, fpupulin said:

It was only natural that you succumbed to its beauty and, I would say, its rarity! As an OMAS enthusiast that I am, I haven't seen a Tassili offer in years. Compliments! Use it and enjoy it in good health! 

 

Thank you very much! To be honest, its rarity didn’t sway me. Its beauty definitely did. It stunned me, and still does. And what a great writer it is!

[fpupulin]

Back to the blue, on the quite cheap paper of a Moleskine cahier:

 

[fpupulin]

Preparing for a writing in Copperplate script, instead of the usual Spencerian, the Calligraphy makes exercise on the paper of a faux-Moleskine Chinese notebook, with the Blue Permanent ink:

 

[lionelc]

nice fpupulin, still waiting for my bottle of mb permanent blue to arrive - quick question - do you have any suggestions for paper?

[Karmachanic]

7 hours ago, lionelc said:

nice fpupulin, still waiting for my bottle of mb permanent blue to arrive - quick question - do you have any suggestions for paper?

 

If you read the thread from the beginning you will find many answers to this question

[lionelc]

thanks karmachanic - got a couple leads for laid paper, practice time

[Karmachanic]

👍

[fpupulin]

14 hours ago, lionelc said:

nice fpupulin, still waiting for my bottle of mb permanent blue to arrive - quick question - do you have any suggestions for paper?

 

Would you buy something quite cheap but not inelegant, just to practice, I have found that the paper of the Moleskine Cahier (those sewed, with cardboard cover, usually sold in packages of three notebooks), is quite good for the task. If you use both MB Blue Permanent or Black Permanent, you may easily write on both sides of the page. They have the advantage that you may buy them ruled, that is good for exercise.

[lionelc]

2 hours ago, fpupulin said:

 

Would you buy something quite cheap but not inelegant, just to practice

that's excellent advice fpupulin - i was using an old rhodia cahier but that is perhaps a little too smooth

[GWT1]

On 7/19/2020 at 8:29 PM, fpupulin said:

During the era of orchid fever, some of the plants that today seem very common to us were instead considered true rarities, because they came from unexplored and indomitable places, difficult to reach and dangerous. The orchids of the genus Phalaenopsis, which we find today in profusion on the shelves of the supermarket, were then very popular, because the flowers lasted a long time and were relatively easy to grow in the hot "stove".

 

In 1887, William Boxall, employee of the British company Hugh Low & Company to "hunt" orchids in the Philippines, discovered a species of Phalaenopsis with large, waxy, white or slightly cream-colored flowers, which had strange irregular light purple spots, a pattern never seen in a species of its kind. Boxall sent home his discovery, and eventually a plant reached the hands of the then famous Prof. Reichenbach, known as "the orchid King".

 

Reichenbach named it Phalaenopsis lueddemanniana var. hieroglyphica. The variety name was suggested to him by the flowers "covered with small dots and circles, or curious figures, of cinnamon color". The spots are, in effect, small bars, points and circles arranged so as to resemble the engravings (or glyphs) of an ancient writing. The word hieroglyphĭcus is the Latin adjectival form of a word coined by the Greeks to describe Egyptian writing, hieroglyphikà (grámmata, or sacred engraved letters.

 

Modern botanists - and I agree with this interpretation - consider that the similarities of the variety hieroglyphcia with Phalaenopsis lueddemanniana are only superficial, and therefore treat Boxall's discovery as a valid species. Here at home, Phalaenopsis hieroglyphica blooms regularly in the summer, during the months of June–August, disrespectful of Covid.... The flowers are very long-lasting and barely perceptible with cineol, an aroma similar to that of eucalyptus.

 

 

 

 

After having illustrated it in the distant 1984 and photographed it under any possible light in past years, this year I decided to make it a less "scientific" drawing with my Meisterstück 149 Calligraphy and Permanent Black ink. The Moleskine notebook is one of those with watercolor paper, with a heavy paper that behaves very well with the ink of the fountain pens.

 

 

 

True Talent my friend! Beautiful work.

[fpupulin]

On 1/17/2021 at 2:00 PM, lionelc said:

that's excellent advice fpupulin - i was using an old rhodia cahier but that is perhaps a little too smooth

 

Lionel, glad that you found the advice of your interest: probably like you, I do not love butter smooth paper for calligraphy, aa the nib does not feel the leaf. There are probably a lot of other notebook with a paper comparable to Moleskine cahiers, and likely also less expensive, but my experience is limited and the truth is that I can buy Moleskine here in Costa Rica and I like the combination with the Calligraphy.

 

Today I tried for the first time a Fabriano paper that I don't knew before: the Unica. That is simply fantastic!

 

You would not use it for exercise, as it is a 250gr paper and quite expensive at over 1 dollar for leaf, but if you want to see your Calligraphy working at the best, it is worthy a try! Made of 50% cotton, the Fabriano Unica was developed in collaboration with a group of artists who tested the paper with a host of printing, engraving and other techniques. I wanted to try it with pen and ink, and is simply extraordinary!. 

 

 

[fpupulin]

On 1/21/2021 at 4:24 PM, GWT1 said:

True Talent my friend! Beautiful work.

 

Thank you, my friend. I had forgot that I used the Calligraphy for drawing, but, honestly, she is quite a special pen for anything!