Fountain Pens

I hated writing with a fountain pen as a child. Fast forward 30 years later, I read an article on Neil Gaiman raving about his Pilot 823s. Now I have about 15 fountain pens 😅

I was doing a thing with a friend who had moved where we corresponded via snail mail as if we were characters in a fantasy world. I was getting into physically roleplaying the writing process -- 3D printed a wax seal for the letters and ended up buying a Kaweco Lilliput Brass when looking for a copper or brass fountain pen to write the letters with.

Next thing I knew I had more pens than sense and more ink than I'll ever be able to use.

I can also vouch for the Hongdian black forest being surprisingly decent!

I was honestly just looking for a nicer rollerball pen to stick refills into (like the Pilot G2 or the Pentel Energel refill), and one of the videos that I watched on YouTube suggested a fountain pen video to me. I think it was a video from Goulet?

Once I clicked on it, I really went down the rabbit hole. Coincidentally, my very first pen was a Lamy 2000! I started with my grail and then worked backwards through other interesting ones. Now I have a full case of pens! :D

@buhala A few months ago I bought a fountain pen and a bottle of ink to see if using one would reduce hand/wrist strain. I now have a handful of inexpensive Chinese pens and a handful of inks.

I’d like to find a decent but inexpensive pen with a 1.1 stub nib. I have several X750 but have discovered that I want an even broader nib so colored inks will really show more than they do with an M nib.

I was in college, scrolling reddit and found /r/fountainpens. Bought a Lamy Safari afterwords and have been hooked since.

Just happened to walk by a Lamy display in a store while I was killing time before a lunch, tried the tester and loved how smooth it was to write with one. I have a safari and an al-star now and they're basically all I write with at this point.

I found a link to JetPens's best pens of 2023 guide while I was on vacation in Japan, and I had to see what all the fuss was about. It's been two months and I've already bought 8 pens and four inks!

I bought a black forest knockoff (made by yongsheng or something) and even that has been good, maybe I should try the real thing

I only got into fountain pens a couple months ago because I originally wanted a slightly nicer looking ballpoint or rollerball pen and discovered Lamy when looking. I couldn't help but admire all the fountain pens they had to offer but initially decided it wasn't for me. A few weeks into enjoying my new ballpoint pens I thought that fountain pens may be a better way to go as I liked the look of all the ink colours and just the overall aesthetic of them.

I got a Parker Sonnet and a few different Diamine inks and have been loving them ever since!

I had been buying stationary from JetPens for a while and they kept putting out videos on how good fountain pens were. I kept telling myself I'd just buy a cheap one to try but no further... and now I have 3 lol

As a teenager, I was not into handwriting, but I did like History, gadgets, and cool colors of ink. A teacher at my school offered a calligraphy elective, and several of my friends took it, and several more took up the calligraphy hobby. My handwriting did not translate well into calligraphy, but the pens were cool in a gadgety/historical way (and far more ink colors were available than with ballpoints). Then, a friend and I discovered Parker Vector "normal" fountain pens at a discount store for around $9 (with several cartridges of ink!). That was the beginning!

Are fountain pens only for people with nice hand writing?

I started using fountain pens because they were compulsory at school. I had a nice old green Parker Junior with a broad gold nib that a relative gave me. I really liked writing with that pen so much that I've used them ever since.

I remember using a dip pen in secondary school for art class. Later in life a friend of mine got me interested in them and I eventually acquired the aluminium Muji fountain pen as my first one.

Since then I mostly use three Lamy Safaris and one Pilot Prera, the Prera being my current most used pen with Sailor Sei-Boku ink. Although, my all time favourite ink might be Rohrer und Klingner's Alt-Goldgrun

I've always loved pens & stationery. When I got my first full-time job at a printers & stationers I picked up a Parker Jotter fountain pen which I loved using, but I would get annoyed with how quickly it'd dry up. During the decade I worked there before it went under, I also picked up a Parker 45 flighter and a Cross Century at a huge discount. But after getting really ill those pens languished in a drawer for almost a decade, and the ink left in the Cross well and truly clogged it up.

When I started going to an evening class at college, I wanted to start making use of my fountain pens again. The Herbin pen cleaning fluid made short work of the clogged Cross, and I bought my first bottle of ink—Waterman Intense Black. And that was when I went off the deep end and descended into fountain pen madness. Fast forward to today and I have 108 fountain pens and 115 inks, and it's constantly growing. I'm trying to get through this month without buying a pen, but it's a real struggle 😅

I started with a set of disposable fountain pens, but I don't remember why. I was active on a snail-mail site and I think maybe some people were talking about pens. Anyway, I wanted a cheap test drive and they got the job done for a few months until I graduated to a Lamy. I now have several different pens for several different purposes, and chronically inky paws.

I learned to write with a pen (Hero, lots of bad memories), but my Dad was into pens and a big fan of Waterman. He bought me a Waterman pen when I was in high school, then I got another Waterman (Audace) when I was at uni. For many years they've been sitting unused, the first one in my parents' home, the other one somewhere in my desk drawer.

This year my daughter turned 10 and I noticed that she wrote with a pencil. I bought her a Lamy Safari. While looking for a pen for her I suddenly discovered, after all these years, that there were thousands of ink colours out there! I had no idea! I'd always had Parker Quink Blue/Black and that was it :-D

At some point when I was a teenager, I bought a super cheap calligraphy pen kit at some hobby store. It was incredibly flimsy, the pen cracked within like a month, but I thought it was super coot to be writing with a fancy-shmancy fountain pen (and a stub nib no less!). But that was kinda it for a while once I burned through the three ink cartridges it came with.

Then, maybe a year later, I stumbled upon Baystate Blue and was like OMG LOOK HOW BLUE THAT IS and had to buy it and a real fountain pen to experiment with it.

Many things were stained in the process. I have no regrets.

I actually had an English professor at university introduce me to them during my first semester. I loved how it felt to write with them, so I decided to look into them more and the rest is history. :D

I can hardly even remember. I think I was just curious to write in a way that was a little classier than disposables. I'm a Blackwing pencil convert, and I decided over the years that if you're going to enjoy doing something (or have to do it), you might as well do it right. The same way they get you to spend big bucks on a mattress, I suppose, but a $20-30 fountain pen has a much lower barrier of entry. It has its shortcomings, but I always come back to my first one, which was a Picasso pen...a 902, maybe? Its nib is a little fat for my tastes, and the cap slips off in my pocket, threatening my pants every day I take it out with me, but that same chubby nib flows over paper like silk. I've got other pens whose caps stay better, or whose nibs are finer, but I always end up using this one because at the end of the day, improved writing experience was why I went down this road in the first place.

I wanted to throw away fewer things, so thought a single fountain pen would be a good idea. :D

I was around 13 when I first got into pens. Basically watched an sbrebrown video, thought that'd be really fun to use for school, and asked my parents for one for Christmas. Fast forward a decade, and I still use my Lamy 2k on the regular for ttrpg campaign notes or doodles.

I found /r/fountainpens and liked the idea, so I bought one.

I got tired of throwing away pens and decided to get a nice one. While researching what pen to get, I ended up reading about fountain pens and thought they were really cool, and also seemed like a good fit. My first pen was a TWSBI Eco, and I liked it, so I ended up making excuses to get this other pen or that other pen. Now I'm about ten years into being into fountain pens, and I've also taken up journaling, mostly because I really enjoy the tactile experience of writing now.

I was having an awful time writing essays in school. Constant hand pain from using a ballpoint. I looked around for a solution and decided to pick up a pack of Pilot Varsities and never looked back.

I was in a situation where I was taking notes regularly but I was not always allowed to bring a laptop with me. I wanted to scan my notes and read the scanned pages on a tablet, but the gel pen that I was using was laying down ink inconsistently. I wanted every word to be as dark as possible from start to finish, but I hate the smell of permanent markers.

Eventually, I settled on wet medium-nib fountain pens. After that, I invented a whole bunch of new reasons to keep using them.