A proper fountain pen
Dec. 14th, 2025 10:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
baroque_mongooseRecovery really is three steps forward and two steps back. I was at least relatively chipper on Friday and managed to make banana loaf; yesterday I wasn't quite so good; and this morning it took me two attempts to sit up in bed. The overall trend is upwards, at least, but it is very frustrating at the moment. (I should say that once I do manage to get vertical I'm not quite so bad, but the initial push in the morning is always difficult just at the moment.)
So I'm going to talk about pens.
When I was a kid, there were some very strange ideas about writing. Children had to write with a pencil (not a ball point, because they "ruined your writing"), until they got to the upper years of primary school, at which point they would be not only allowed but expected to have a cartridge pen. Even at the time, I strongly suspected that "ball points ruin your writing" was one of those grown-up true things, and now I'm fully convinced that it was... which, if you missed the previous post about what "grown-up true" meant, means it was totally false. There's no way a ball point can ruin anyone's writing. However, obviously you wouldn't give a child a decent ball point, and the cheap ones were inclined to blot and make a mess; and it was much quicker for adults to lie to children than to explain that ball points needed a little extra care to avoid that. (I did, in fact, have one; I'm not sure how that managed to slip past the censors. It did not ruin my writing, but I used to keep a tissue by me when I was writing with it and use that to mop up any excess ink.)
My parents weren't very pleased that I had to have a cartridge pen at the age of 9 or 10. They really wanted me to go on using a pencil till I was deemed old enough to own a proper fountain pen. These two things were quite different at the time. Cartridge pens were cheap, not very good, and basically intended for children, because obviously you wouldn't give a child a decent fountain pen. It was an article of faith among adults in general that there were no dexterous children, at all, anywhere, and any child would automatically make a mess or break things up to the age of 18. (Well, that may be a slight exaggeration; but only a slight one.) Fountain pens, at the time, were for adults (though a teenager could be allowed one if given enough dire warnings); they all filled by means of a long narrow rubber bulb which you squeezed with the aid of a metal strip that ran alongside, and, in the fullness of time, the rubber would start to perish, and you'd get some leakage no matter how grown up you were. I was allowed one at secondary school, but I think only because my parents thought cartridge pens were an embarrassment that reflected on them personally; and, to be honest, given what cartridge pens tended to be like at the time, I do kind of get that.
As I went up through secondary school, cartridge pens started improving quite a lot, and it wasn't long before I started seeing advertisements for quite fancy ones which were clearly aimed at adults. Then when I got to university, I discovered the rollerball, and for many years after that I never looked back. You got a nice fine consistent line, it didn't leak or smudge, you could write really fast with it (great for taking lecture notes)... what wasn't to love?
Well, I still like rollerballs. I have the Uni-Ball Eye Micro ones, which are great for quick notes. But eventually I decided I needed a proper fountain pen in my life again, and went looking for one online... only to discover that everything that came up was, in fact, a cartridge pen.
I didn't want a cartridge pen. I wanted one I could fill with ink, preferably in an interesting colour, from a bottle. When I bemoaned online the fact that I couldn't find a fountain pen, everyone else (all much younger than I) was astonished. Fountain pens, they assured me, were easy to find. I said, no. Those are cartridge pens.
They said "those are fountain pens."
I said "no, they're not. Or at least, they weren't when I was growing up."
It appears that, while my back was turned, cartridge pens pretty much took over the entire fountain pen market; but I knew you could still get the other sort, because I'd seen bottled ink for sale. In the end, in some desperation, I e-mailed Cult Pens to explain my problem and ask what I should be looking for. I got a very nice e-mail back to say that pen terminology changed so fast that even they sometimes had trouble keeping up with it, and the search term I wanted at the moment was "piston filler".
Piston filler. OK. That actually sounded a lot better than "rubber bulb with metal strip".
And that was how I managed to get hold of an inexpensive but remarkably nice fountain pen. It literally is a piston filler, though they do still make the rubber-bulb ones and those are filed in the same category. Because there's no bulb, there's nothing to perish; moreover, the entire barrel holds ink, so you can get a lot more into it than you could with the bulb-fillers (I've used it quite a lot since I bought it, and it's still on its initial fill). I fill it with "Little Pip", a rather oddly-named ink which I could not like any better if I'd designed it to my own specifications; it's a dark purple - more or less to purple what Quink blue-black is to blue - with an extremely subtle gold shimmer which doesn't appear on every type of paper. It works best on the shinier types. Anyway, you can't get that in a cartridge.
It's a far cry from the Quink Washable Royal Blue we were made to use at school!
So I'm going to talk about pens.
When I was a kid, there were some very strange ideas about writing. Children had to write with a pencil (not a ball point, because they "ruined your writing"), until they got to the upper years of primary school, at which point they would be not only allowed but expected to have a cartridge pen. Even at the time, I strongly suspected that "ball points ruin your writing" was one of those grown-up true things, and now I'm fully convinced that it was... which, if you missed the previous post about what "grown-up true" meant, means it was totally false. There's no way a ball point can ruin anyone's writing. However, obviously you wouldn't give a child a decent ball point, and the cheap ones were inclined to blot and make a mess; and it was much quicker for adults to lie to children than to explain that ball points needed a little extra care to avoid that. (I did, in fact, have one; I'm not sure how that managed to slip past the censors. It did not ruin my writing, but I used to keep a tissue by me when I was writing with it and use that to mop up any excess ink.)
My parents weren't very pleased that I had to have a cartridge pen at the age of 9 or 10. They really wanted me to go on using a pencil till I was deemed old enough to own a proper fountain pen. These two things were quite different at the time. Cartridge pens were cheap, not very good, and basically intended for children, because obviously you wouldn't give a child a decent fountain pen. It was an article of faith among adults in general that there were no dexterous children, at all, anywhere, and any child would automatically make a mess or break things up to the age of 18. (Well, that may be a slight exaggeration; but only a slight one.) Fountain pens, at the time, were for adults (though a teenager could be allowed one if given enough dire warnings); they all filled by means of a long narrow rubber bulb which you squeezed with the aid of a metal strip that ran alongside, and, in the fullness of time, the rubber would start to perish, and you'd get some leakage no matter how grown up you were. I was allowed one at secondary school, but I think only because my parents thought cartridge pens were an embarrassment that reflected on them personally; and, to be honest, given what cartridge pens tended to be like at the time, I do kind of get that.
As I went up through secondary school, cartridge pens started improving quite a lot, and it wasn't long before I started seeing advertisements for quite fancy ones which were clearly aimed at adults. Then when I got to university, I discovered the rollerball, and for many years after that I never looked back. You got a nice fine consistent line, it didn't leak or smudge, you could write really fast with it (great for taking lecture notes)... what wasn't to love?
Well, I still like rollerballs. I have the Uni-Ball Eye Micro ones, which are great for quick notes. But eventually I decided I needed a proper fountain pen in my life again, and went looking for one online... only to discover that everything that came up was, in fact, a cartridge pen.
I didn't want a cartridge pen. I wanted one I could fill with ink, preferably in an interesting colour, from a bottle. When I bemoaned online the fact that I couldn't find a fountain pen, everyone else (all much younger than I) was astonished. Fountain pens, they assured me, were easy to find. I said, no. Those are cartridge pens.
They said "those are fountain pens."
I said "no, they're not. Or at least, they weren't when I was growing up."
It appears that, while my back was turned, cartridge pens pretty much took over the entire fountain pen market; but I knew you could still get the other sort, because I'd seen bottled ink for sale. In the end, in some desperation, I e-mailed Cult Pens to explain my problem and ask what I should be looking for. I got a very nice e-mail back to say that pen terminology changed so fast that even they sometimes had trouble keeping up with it, and the search term I wanted at the moment was "piston filler".
Piston filler. OK. That actually sounded a lot better than "rubber bulb with metal strip".
And that was how I managed to get hold of an inexpensive but remarkably nice fountain pen. It literally is a piston filler, though they do still make the rubber-bulb ones and those are filed in the same category. Because there's no bulb, there's nothing to perish; moreover, the entire barrel holds ink, so you can get a lot more into it than you could with the bulb-fillers (I've used it quite a lot since I bought it, and it's still on its initial fill). I fill it with "Little Pip", a rather oddly-named ink which I could not like any better if I'd designed it to my own specifications; it's a dark purple - more or less to purple what Quink blue-black is to blue - with an extremely subtle gold shimmer which doesn't appear on every type of paper. It works best on the shinier types. Anyway, you can't get that in a cartridge.
It's a far cry from the Quink Washable Royal Blue we were made to use at school!
