Pen/Ink/Paper Trios

[Bo Bo Olson]

Thanks for bringing Sandy 1 back to life for this thread.

As soon as I hit the lottery I'll hire someone to do that.

 

It appears  Penmann sapphire was somewhat a paper matching ink.

 

And over the decade that I had them,  the cartridges evaporated to 50%..

 

..................

And there I was in the middle of my 40 year trek in the ball point desert, when Penmann, came and went...with out me noticing it.

 

 

There were troubles with those Penman inks, causing pens to need repairs. .....that could well have been, that no one 'knew' about cleaning out a fountain pen of it's ink every three months or so. Just a thought...not a fact.

[USG]

8 hours ago, Mercian said:

 

I bought some cartridges of all of the Penman inks right at the end of their production by Parker.
Penman Sapphire as-manufactured was a very intense blue - it was not a dark blue, but was instead an intense colour that ‘popped’ off the page. I had never seen anything like it. I was transfixed, and awed. I fell completely in love with it right away, even if I regretted its propensity to smear.
If I had to try to give a name to its colour, I would call it ‘Very Blue’ 😉 The ink’s ‘awesomeness’ was increased by the fact that it shaded and provided red sheen too.

I used-up all my Sapphire very quickly, and then went back to the store to buy a full bottle, only to find that the Penman inks had been discontinued 😢

 

Once I found that out, I bought the store’s last pack of cartridges of Emerald - and then hoarded them, along with my cartridges of the other colours. I used them only on ‘special occasions’, in the hope of preserving my access to these inks for as long as I could.

I still had cartridges of most of the other colours until very recently, but I am now down to maybe one or two of Emerald.

My experience with these old cartridges has, of course, been that the volume of ink has reduced in them as the gas-permeable plastic has allowed water - and other components - to evaporate out of them.

When I have had to ‘restore’ the ink in my Penman cartridges by adding water, I have found that the ink colours come out as less-vibrant than they did when new.
I assume that one of the components that has evaporated was a dye-stabiliser, or that oxygen has got-to the dyestuffs in the 20+ years that the cartridges have been waiting to be used.

 

@Bo Bo Olson I am shocked - shocked, I say! - by your impression of PPS. I had to clutch my pearls to my throat when I read it! 😉
Having had the ink when it was new, I wholeheartedly agree with Sandy1’s enthusiastic thoughts about Parker Penman Sapphire in her review of it. (I recently restored most of her photos to her text, in a post which can be found here. Please click the ‘Expand’ link to be able to see her photos restored to her review text.)

 

I am indebted to Beechwood, who pointed me towards a review that contains the best - i.e. most-representative of the ink’s capacity for sheen - photos of PPS that I have seen.
That review can be found here.

 

Nowadays there are many blue inks available that have heavy dye-loads, and several replicate the capacity of PPS to give sheen, and to shade too. But PPS was (as far as I know) the very first ink to offer this experience to users.
Those of use who were lucky enough to get it when it was new were wowed by this exciting new ink, and its disappearance from the market - long before any similar inks were available - made us lament its loss, and only increased its appeal.

 

Slàinte,
M.

 

Sorry, that wasn't my experience.  I bought it when it came out and my bottle and cartridges never looked bright or popped off the page.  Penman Sapphire IMHO was a very concentrated Turquoise leaning toward Teal ink, as evidenced by the color of the water when you washed it out of the pen.  Penman Sapphire was never a blue ink.  We've all washed lots of blue ink out of our pens and the water runs blue, not turquoise.

 

If this rendition from "Mountain" was a smidgen more teal, it would be close to what my Penman Sapphire looked like.  Nice and dull and nothing to write home about.

The main pen I used it in was my Peal and black Doufold.  I never had a clog or any problems with the ink and I still have some left because I didn't like it enough to use it all up.  I remember reading all the oohs and aahhs about the ink and how some people called it the "truest blue", but I couldn't see it on the very fountain pen friendly Staples Ampad paper I was using at the time.

 

[Mercian]

52 minutes ago, USG said:

Sorry, that wasn't my experience.  I bought it when it came out and my bottle and cartridges never looked bright or popped off the page.  Penman Sapphire IMHO was a very concentrated Turquoise leaning toward Teal ink, as evidenced by the color of the water when you washed it out of the pen.  Penman Sapphire was never a blue ink.  We've all washed lots of blue ink out of our pens and the water runs blue, not turquoise.

 

If this rendition from "Mountain" was a smidgen more teal, it would be close to what my Penman Sapphire looked like.  Nice and dull and nothing to write home about.

The main pen I used it in was my Peal and black Doufold.  I never had a clog or any problems with the ink and I still have some left because I didn't like it enough to use it all up.  I remember reading all the oohs and aahhs about the ink and how some people called it the "truest blue", but I couldn't see it on the very fountain pen friendly Staples Ampad paper I was using at the time.

Interesting.

My own PPS was very similar to the ink shown on ‘Mountain of Ink’. A vibrant shade of ‘medium’ blue that was very vivid, had ‘pop’ and shading and sheen. It was full of ‘majik’.
But (on appropriate paper) my PPS was more-inclined to give shading than the ink on MofI’s photos.
The range of ink/hue density shown on her swabs, and the colour and density-range of her writing on Leuchtturm 1917 paper, most-closely match my memory of my PPS.
My PPS was never any kind of turquoise/teal colour.
But my Quink ‘Black’ and Quink ‘Blue/Black’ has always turned teal-ish (the ‘Black’) or very teal (the ‘Blue/Black’) on many papers, even in closed notebooks (not that this phenomenon could ever have had any effect on ink that you were washing out of your pen! 😁).

 

I shall have to see if I can find anything that I wrote with PPS.

Most of my ink got used for letters & cards that (obviously) I posted away, but I will see if I can find any books that I ‘inscribed’ with it. If I can find anything I’ll take a picture of it and post it.

[Mercian]

@USG the following are photos of the best example of my writing with PPS that I could find.

It is my inscription that I wrote in the front of a book to record the date & location of my purchase.
I chose this one because the paper on which I wrote it is white (the other one that I could find was on yellow-ish paper).

 

This is what my PPS looks like after 22-years-plus on this paper:

 

 

 

And now a shakily-zoomed-in ‘close-up’:

 

 

You can see a bit of feathering and a bit of smudging from this very-saturated ink.
The paper is absorbent, so there is no sheening or shading to speak of here. And the ‘bright’ quality of the ink has either been suppressed by the absorbency of the paper, or by exposure to paper & oxygen for over twenty years.

 

With my caveats made, I hope that this (poor-quality) photo (that I took under an old-ish fluorescent tube/strip-light) at least conveys a good impression of the ‘true blue’ nature of the colour of the ink.
There is - to my eyes at least - no ‘turquoise’ or ‘teal’ here.

 

Then again, I know that we each have our own unique levels of sensitivity across the different bands of colour-perception.
Perhaps you can see a bit of green-ish tinge in this?

[Bo Bo Olson]

I see a dull blue.........not even up to 4001 Brilliant Blue level and that is not a real fancy dancy blue.

100% cotton seems to suck the life out of ink.

100-50% cotton absorbs the ink too well........I like 25% cotton where some shading can happen. The ink sits on top longer.......could well be a better paper for that ink.

 

......................................

 

[USG]

2 hours ago, Bo Bo Olson said:

I see a dull blue.........not even up to 4001 Brilliant Blue level and that is not a real fancy dancy blue.

100% cotton seems to suck the life out of ink.

100-50% cotton absorbs the ink too well........I like 25% cotton where some shading can happen. The ink sits on top longer.......could well be a better paper for that ink.

 

......................................

 

 

I see dull blue too... 

 

3 hours ago, Mercian said:

@USG the following are photos of the best example of my writing with PPS that I could find.

It is my inscription that I wrote in the front of a book to record the date & location of my purchase.
I chose this one because the paper on which I wrote it is white (the other one that I could find was on yellow-ish paper).

 

This is what my PPS looks like after 22-years-plus on this paper:

 

 

 

And now a shakily-zoomed-in ‘close-up’:

 

 

You can see a bit of feathering and a bit of smudging from this very-saturated ink.
The paper is absorbent, so there is no sheening or shading to speak of here. And the ‘bright’ quality of the ink has either been suppressed by the absorbency of the paper, or by exposure to paper & oxygen for over twenty years.

 

With my caveats made, I hope that this (poor-quality) photo (that I took under an old-ish fluorescent tube/strip-light) at least conveys a good impression of the ‘true blue’ nature of the colour of the ink.
There is - to my eyes at least - no ‘turquoise’ or ‘teal’ here.

 

Then again, I know that we each have our own unique levels of sensitivity across the different bands of colour-perception.
Perhaps you can see a bit of green-ish tinge in this?

 

I'm not saying that your PPS is anything other than what you represent it as.

 

What I'm saying is that my bottle of ink and cartridges are obviously not the same as yours.  I've read a great many reviews and there are a lot of people who got your color of ink.  I'm not one of them.  The ink I have is a truquoise teal.

 

If yours is a true blue, put a drop of water on that ink sample and see if it's blue or turquoise. 

 

I vividly remember the first time I washed out my Doufold from PPS.  The water ran bright turquoise.  I have a feeling the Dread Pirate Roberts thinks yours would run turquoise too.

 

I also have another theory about a lot of the current PPS that's around.  Because there's such a premium on that ink, I think a lot of it is counterfeit.  So unless you bought the ink when it was available in stores, like we did, you don't really know what you have.  Plus IIRC, there were different batches of that ink.

 

I found this in our archives: (LINK)

You can make your own Penman Sapphire look-alike.

1) Start with a nice deep, pure, blue like PR American Blue

2) Darken it with a little pure blue-black. I make mine by using 1 part of Parker Quink Black to 10 parts of PQ Permanent Blue.

3) Add a green tinge with a little aqua blue like Diamine Aqua.

Ratio of Blue:Blue-Black:Aqua should be about 5:1:1

 

[Penguincollector]

  My recollection of PPS when it came out was of a bright blue with teal/turquoisish undertones, more intense than the Washable Blue. Unfortunately, my pen disliked it. It stopped working right in the middle of a long AP European History lecture. Luckily, I had my erstwhile Berol Fontaine in my Trapper Keeper zip bag. I bought it in 1993-94 sometime. 

[Bo Bo Olson]

7 hours ago, Penguincollector said:

my pen disliked it. It stopped working r

That was the reason why they had to stop making it....and I don't know how much repairs that ink cost, but remember reading about folks here on the com having had to get their pens repaired from using Penman inks.

 

It might well have been no one knew about cleaning a pen out then..(and is is was perhaps the first supersaturated ink)..like in my day of the '50-60's....when the phrase 'clean your pen' would have been answered with a big HUH?

We were more ignorant of pen maintenance back in the day before Google. At least I was....and everyone I knew.

[Penguincollector]

@Bo Bo Olson  I started using pens in the ‘80s, and was taught to clean my pen after emptying a cartridge or converter fill, especially before changing colors. I could see it being less of a thing in the lever fill days, but I am pretty sure it was noted in the instructions of my cartridge pens to flush your pen with water regularly.

[Bo Bo Olson]

I never remembered reading any instructions, on cartridge boxes....that ended up in the ultra-modern five hole zip-lock bags in one's three or two ring  binder.

Being a working man's son, I lived on borrowed cartridges...which were expensive...so I was constantly in debt.

 

Somehow once i ran into a little box of skinny ball point re-fills, I think there was ten in the box for 10cents....so I had a year's worth of ink.

Mostly the re-fills even the skinny ones were cartel expensive.

[txomsy]

No major warnings on mine either.

 

I used the pens daily, and the most demanding advice was that of Montblanc pens (which is still the same) about giving them a flush about once every six months or a year, maybe when switching inks (though I distinctly remember the inconvenience of having mixed colors when switching inks because no one would think of cleaning the pen, and whenever I would do -usually after a staining red ink- the inconvenience of getting diluted ink until the water in the channel washed out with the new ink (waiting for it to dry? that was even rarer, after all they were made to have water solutions constantly in, weren't they?). And leaving inks forgotten filled with ink was normal too: you'd set aside for a short while the pen fully inked so it would be already filled next time you took it (like a BP) -after all they were waterproof, weren't they?- and if the next time was years after, it would have dried... and you filled it with water and wen on with business as usual.

 

OTOH when you do use it daily, the continuous flow does maintain the channels more or less clean. Parker Penman inks were special in that they were among the first (if not the) supersaturated inks, and few of us would think of the need for special cleaning. I know I never cleaned pens after using PPRuby until relatively very recently. And even now, only if switching inks.

[txomsy]

Added: that's why I say I am a pen barbarian.

[Mercian]

13 hours ago, USG said:

I'm not saying that your PPS is anything other than what you represent it as.

 

What I'm saying is that my bottle of ink and cartridges are obviously not the same as yours.  I've read a great many reviews and there are a lot of people who got your color of ink.  I'm not one of them.  The ink I have is a truquoise teal.

 

If yours is a true blue, put a drop of water on that ink sample and see if it's blue or turquoise. 

 

I vividly remember the first time I washed out my Doufold from PPS.  The water ran bright turquoise.  I have a feeling the Dread Pirate Roberts thinks yours would run turquoise too.

 

Ah, it’s a pity that your PPS wasn’t the same stuff as mine ☹️
The ink in my cartridges really did look beautiful.

 

I was going to try to re-photograph my book-inscription in today’s daylight here, but the day is overcast and grey, and the light is ‘sub-optimal’. Especially as I don’t have a decent camera - let alone the skills to use one!

I shall have to put some drops of water on to the inscription in that book, and allow it soak in.
I am curious to see what results I get from this ‘chromatography’ experiment 

 

 

13 hours ago, USG said:

 

I also have another theory about a lot of the current PPS that's around.  Because there's such a premium on that ink, I think a lot of it is counterfeit.  So unless you bought the ink when it was available in stores, like we did, you don't really know what you have.  Plus IIRC, there were different batches of that ink.

I think that you are very probably right about the high likelihood of ‘fake’ PPS being sold nowadays.
It’s become so pricey that fakers must be tempted.

 

Batch-variation would certainly make sense. And e.g. @Penguincollector says that she got her PPS (which had turquoise in it) in the early days of the Penman inks’ production, whereas I bought mine very near the very end of their production, in around 2000.

[Mercian]

17 hours ago, Bo Bo Olson said:

I see a dull blue.........not even up to 4001 Brilliant Blue level and that is not a real fancy dancy blue.

 

One does need to allow for the fact that I wrote that in August of 2001. The ink on that page has had 22 years to ‘lose its mojo’.

 

And this is before one allows for my bad lighting, my cheap ‘camera’, and my rank incompetence at ‘photography’ 😁

[Mercian]

53 minutes ago, txomsy said:

Added: that's why I say I am a pen barbarian.

One might also say that you don’t suffer from any kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but instead use your pens like a normal human being 😉

 

I tend towards the other end of the ‘bell-curve’.
I flush each of my pens very thoroughly whenever it runs out of ink (unless I am refilling it right away with the same ink).

But this is because I am an impulsive flibbertigget who switches capriciously between his pens and inks, and who likes to use iron-galls and pigment inks as well as dye-based inks.

[Bo Bo Olson]

I have 40-50 pens in two cups, needing cleaning...and some 6 months ago, none.

[Penguincollector]

2 hours ago, Mercian said:

One might also say that you don’t suffer from any kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but instead use your pens like a normal human being 😉

 

I tend towards the other end of the ‘bell-curve’.
I flush each of my pens very thoroughly whenever it runs out of ink (unless I am refilling it right away with the same ink).

But this is because I am an impulsive flibbertigget who switches capriciously between his pens and inks, and who likes to use iron-galls and pigment inks as well as dye-based inks.

  I’m also on this end of the bell curve. I also hyper fixate on cleaning. I might only get a few items on my list done daily, but they will be immaculate, including my pens. 

[USG]

6 hours ago, Mercian said:

One might also say that you don’t suffer from any kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but instead use your pens like a normal human being 😉

 

I tend towards the other end of the ‘bell-curve’.
I flush each of my pens very thoroughly whenever it runs out of ink (unless I am refilling it right away with the same ink).

But this is because I am an impulsive flibbertigget who switches capriciously between his pens and inks, and who likes to use iron-galls and pigment inks as well as dye-based inks.

 

6 hours ago, Bo Bo Olson said:

I have 40-50 pens in two cups, needing cleaning...and some 6 months ago, none.

 

4 hours ago, Penguincollector said:

  I’m also on this end of the bell curve. I also hyper fixate on cleaning. I might only get a few items on my list done daily, but they will be immaculate, including my pens. 

 

I'm on the other end.  The only time I clean a pen is when I change the ink color....

[USG]

Gotta Love Amazon.  Thank you @Mercian Checking out this paper now. 😀👍

 

[Mercian]

38 minutes ago, USG said:

Thank you @Mercian Checking out this paper now. 😀👍

De nada 

 

I hope that you like it 🙂