I got this pen today

[Penguincollector]

17 minutes ago, AmandaW said:

Well that definitely has your name on it. 

Quite so 🐧🐧🐧🖤🖤🖤 

[Prof Drew]

@Misfit, yes, I dreamed of the wall of bookcases with a ladder. I now have a wall of bookcases but my apartment is not tall enough to merit a ladder.  They also had a lovely spinner bookcase and barrister cabinets. Ah....

 

@Penguincollector, I had never heard of a Penguin Pen. Love the nib, which looks somewhat Japanese. There is a female Japanese fountainpen reviewer on YouTube called Penguin Hall. Her videos are interesting. You can have YouTube do autotranslate and follow along if interested. I love penguins, especially the books. Years ago I transformed two Penguin (Press) tackpins and made them into French cuffs. I can't wear them often here, but it was a fun easy project. At library conferences you can follow the Penguin bookmobile.

[Prof Drew]

@Penguincollector, I recognized a Sailor nib and found the pen you got. Impressive that you got a collaboration with "Chiharu Sakazaki, who is well known for his [should be her] illustration of Suica penguin."  Suica is one of the main railpass cards we use to buy train / subway tickets in Japan. Maybe you already know about her, but this was interesting for me [link].

 

 

[Misfit]

16 hours ago, DilettanteG said:

Now you get to start the quest for the perfect ink pairing.

Well, since in her review at Gourmet Pens, Azizah was using Noodler’s Navy, I bought Midori Navy ink before I found the Kyoto, to be ready for the Kyoto. It has Midori Navy in it as a first ink. 
 

I’m not sure if it was a grail pen. Is a grail pen a pen you really want?

[pan101]

New pen day! Just arrived this lunchtime a Laban Mento with medium nib (looks fine) and it's a whopper! I will be inking it with Havasu Turquoise and changing my pen for today.

[Misfit]

 Very pretty pen @pan101

[pan101]

21 minutes ago, Misfit said:

 Very pretty pen @pan101

Thanks Misfit, I hadn't heard of Laban pens until I saw this for sale on eBay a few days ago and the resin pattern spoke to me.

[Beechwood]

14 minutes ago, pan101 said:

Thanks Misfit, I hadn't heard of Laban pens until I saw this for sale on eBay a few days ago and the resin pattern spoke to me.

 

Laban also make for others, especially designer brands.  I had a Hugo Boss branded pen made by Laban in piano black, it was a stunner, I bought it in 2000 but it was stolen at the Barcelona pen show some years later, Laban also make pens for Cerruti and they are not expensive.

[MarcoA63]

I got this amazing and old Astoria #2 Safety

 

[MarcoA63]

I also got a Pelikan 140 from the 50s

 

 

[Penguincollector]

5 hours ago, Prof Drew said:

@Penguincollector, I recognized a Sailor nib and found the pen you got. Impressive that you got a collaboration with "Chiharu Sakazaki, who is well known for his [should be her] illustration of Suica penguin."  Suica is one of the main railpass cards we use to buy train / subway tickets in Japan. Maybe you already know about her, but this was interesting for me [link].

 

 

  Yes, it’s the Sailor X Chiharu Sakazaki collaboration for MITSUKOSHI ISETAN (copied for spelling accuracy, sorry about the all caps) from 2021. I love penguins in general, but Suica penguin has become a favorite. I got Suica penguin memo pads in my Xmas stocking last year. Sailor has made quite a few pens featuring penguins, including another one with CS, I am slowly but surely chasing them down. 
 

  Thank you for the links, it’s always good to have more information. I would love to buy some original works from the artist for my home. 

[Penguincollector]

5 hours ago, Prof Drew said:

@Misfit, yes, I dreamed of the wall of bookcases with a ladder. I now have a wall of bookcases but my apartment is not tall enough to merit a ladder.  They also had a lovely spinner bookcase and barrister cabinets. Ah....

 

@Penguincollector, I had never heard of a Penguin Pen. Love the nib, which looks somewhat Japanese. There is a female Japanese fountainpen reviewer on YouTube called Penguin Hall. Her videos are interesting. You can have YouTube do autotranslate and follow along if interested. I love penguins, especially the books. Years ago I transformed two Penguin (Press) tackpins and made them into French cuffs. I can't wear them often here, but it was a fun easy project. At library conferences you can follow the Penguin bookmobile.

 

  Oh cool, I love pen reviewers!  While this particular pen is a Sailor, there was actually a sub brand of Everlast Pen Company here in the US called Penguin Pen. I have only seen evidence of one of their pens ever, and it was in a sketchy Craigslist ad, all the way in Chicago, so I didn’t buy it, but I am always looking out.

  I also love the Penguin publishing house and that they have penguin merch. Books and penguins are a wonderful combination! Those cuff links sound great!

 

[pan101]

27 minutes ago, Beechwood said:

 

Laban also make for others, especially designer brands.  I had a Hugo Boss branded pen made by Laban in piano black, it was a stunner, I bought it in 2000 but it was stolen at the Barcelona pen show some years later, Laban also make pens for Cerruti and they are not expensive.

Thanks Beechwood, it's a shame someone stole your pen. First impressions, I like this pen a lot. Good looks, finish and very large in hand, slightly longer than my Messenger and as fat as my 9019. The only fly in the ointment was the converter (Schmidt) had a split in the collar that fits onto the feed and wouldn't draw ink. I had a spare converter so not a big deal really. I looked at Laban's website and they are not too expensive but the postage from Taiwan is pretty steep and makes them comparable with cheaper Leonardos for price.

Now I've got some ink in it so far I've found it writes quite nicely with a fine/medium line and a little bounce but no line variation. 

[Prof Drew]

@MarcoA63 Congratulations on the vintage Pelikan. I have a 140 of the same vintage. I love the classic green stripes and the nib is perfect. Thanks to Rick Propas (The Penguin Pen). Happy writing!

 

@Penguincollector, I had never heard of Everlast Pen Company or the Penguin Pen Co.

Good detective work. It is always fun to look up provenance or histories of things we collect. Do you ever watch the BBC's Fake or Fortune? It is fun to see how they examine art with an eye for science and art history research.

 

Yes, Mistukoshi-Isetan are amazing Japanese department stores, sort of like Macy's (which also is a result of great stores merging). It's cool that Japanese department stores (at main branches) still have great stationery departments with pens. Service at Japanese department stores is always amazing.

[inkstainedruth]

14 hours ago, Penguincollector said:

Lookit! 

Oh that is AWESOME!  And just so you!

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[inkstainedruth]

19 hours ago, Prof Drew said:

The newest of these NHK Taiga Dramas (just being released this year and slowly being uploaded to Dramacool) is about the world's first novelist -- a woman who wrote "The Tale of Genji.

Having read that, and also at least some of Murasaki Shikibu's  diary (both in translation, of course) that sounds very interesting.  

The problem for me, though is that I would hate to be watching something like that on my laptop, instead of on something faintly resembling a big screen (and  even our flat screen TV isn't that large, because we got one that would fit in the console we bought to fit our old tube TV in.  

Years ago, I recorded an interesting film off TCM's "Sunday Night Silents" -- it was the first feature length animated film (made about a decade before the first full length Disney film was released), called The Adventures of Prince Achmed.  It's a totally different STYLE of animation as well, being done with cut and torn paper, and mimics the style of shadow puppets.  I really wanted to track down a video of it -- until a few years later, when it was shown on the big screen at one of the theaters involved with the Pittsburgh Film Festival.  And it wasn't until I saw it in a theatre that I realized how much of the *detail* I was missing! For instance, one part of the story is set at the palace of the Chinese Emperor, and there is a scene of him in a pagoda, with his attendants flanking him to the left and right of the screen.  And when I saw it in a theatre?  I realized that ALL of those attendants were DIFFERENT (kinda the same way that the full size terracotta figures of the attendants and warriors "protecting" the tomb of the Chinese Emperor Qin She Huang at Xian in China are all individualized....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[Prof Drew]

Hi @inkstainedruth. I haven't seen The Adventures of Prince Achmed. Interesting observation.

 

If you have an apple TV or other type of Smart TV you can do "screen share" over wifi from your computer to your TV. That way you can see things better. As I get older with reading glasses or bifocals I realize that how I place the monitor or TV makes it more possible to enjoy, especially with subtitles. Reminds me of when I was young and tried to watch an opera with subtitles from the Italian. I thought I would be OK with the cheap balcony seats since I had opera glasses, but it was very hard to watch the supra-titles and the acting. I think at some point I just closed my eyes and enjoyed the music

[Penguincollector]

1 hour ago, inkstainedruth said:

Oh that is AWESOME!  And just so you!

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

 Thank you Ruth 💜 

[inkstainedruth]

40 minutes ago, Prof Drew said:

Hi @inkstainedruth. I haven't seen The Adventures of Prince Achmed. Interesting observation.

 

If you have an apple TV or other type of Smart TV you can do "screen share" over wifi from your computer to your TV. That way you can see things better. As I get older with reading glasses or bifocals I realize that how I place the monitor or TV makes it more possible to enjoy, especially with subtitles. Reminds me of when I was young and tried to watch an opera with subtitles from the Italian. I thought I would be OK with the cheap balcony seats since I had opera glasses, but it was very hard to watch the supra-titles and the acting. I think at some point I just closed my eyes and enjoyed the music

I don't know if we can do that on our TV, or through FIOS, our current provider.  We don't have any of the streaming services either (although my husband keeps making noises about looking into Roku).

I watch enough TV on the regular networks as it is -- especially with the new (post SAG/Writers Guild strikes) seasons.  I really wish that we could pick and choose what channels we get but they're all tied in to "packages".  And recently we've been getting glitches in the screen, which seem to be independent of what channel we're on).  But it's still better than when we had DirecTV, and we got told "Oh, we can't do anything -- there's a tree in the way and OMG we can't move the dish to the ROOF!  We'd have to cross the Spanish tile!"  Well, the tree was there the entire time and since it's in the nextdoor neighbor's yard, we can't exactly cut it down, either.  And the dish was ORIGINALLY put on the second floor back corner (so, issues with OTHER trees) and then moved to the front corner, first floor, so we were always worried about whacking it with one of the cars, since it's next to the driveway.   And they wouldn't REMOVE it either.  I'm tempted (and have been for a long time now) tempted to remove it, smash it into little pieces, toss it in a box and send it back to DirecTV postage due....

Although I do kinda miss the NASA channel.  And was more than a little annoyed with FIOS because they dropped AXS-TV recently.  And a couple of years ago they dropped one of the NETWORKS (including all the subsidiary channels associated with it) while having a price dispute.  (They had similar feuds with other networks in other parts of the US).  And my response was along the line of, "So... just how much are you trying to low-ball the networks by -- or how much $$$ are you trying to extort out of them?"

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

 

[antares1966]

17 hours ago, Penguincollector said:

Lookit! 

Username checks out…