Brain Candy #40 - Pen & Ink

I've always liked fountain pens, but I've grown up in a ball point world. Then, "magic markers" arrived. Personally, I feel that they're finally getting them right; I've got an extra fine line pen in front of me that I think is actually decent to write with. It hasn't run out of ink with a few days' use either. But it still isn't a fountain pen. I've owned fountain pens from time to time and I like them. As a kid, they fascinated me. I bought a few cheap ones and inherited an old fountain pen from an ancestor. As a college student, I'd buy another cheap one from time to time, but of course, they weren't very good and they didn't last very long. Until recently, I'd never bought a really good fountain pen.

Given our habits, it isn't surprising that Catherine and I have wound up on vast numbers of mailing lists, so we get tons of catalogs. One of these was from a company called Levenger (www.levenger.com) which specializes in writing instruments and materials. They aren't exclusively dedicated to fountain pens, but they have a fair number of them. I found a Rotring that attracted me. I resisted, but I found that I kept thinking about it, and after many months, decided to go ahead and buy one. It's a big, heavy, retro-looking, silver-bodied, German-engineer-type beauty that turned out to be even nicer in real life than in the pictures. One of the ad bylines I've seen called fountain pens "Jewelry that you can put to work" or something like that. One fountain pen is all the jewelry I have, beyond my wedding band and a watch I almost never wear. On that basis, I could justify it.

Like most modern fountain pens it can use ink cartridges or a converter, which lets you use bottled ink. I started getting curious. Cartridges are easy, but the color choices are limited compared to bottled ink. I had a little problem, though. Klaatu, our smoke Mau cat, shredded the manufacturer's instructions for using the converter a few days after the pen showed up. Fortunately, I found a card that Levenger slipped into the order that told me how to use it. I started looking around on the web for more information.

I've only reviewed a few pen links so far, but I've found some really helpful ones. A good place to start is home.earthlink.net/~bjanz/fpfaq0700.html, the alt.collecting.pens-pencils Fountain Pen FAQ. It's aimed at novices and so focuses on topics of interest to them, like where to buy them, how to pick them, who makes them, how they differ, how to clean them and, what I was looking for, ink issues. One ink specialist, Greg Clark, publishes a book showing actual samples of over 200 commercially available inks, including pH, sun fade and water resistance testing. There is even a page devoted to samples of his collection of vintage inks from the 1930's through the 1950's. You can find his page at www.inksampler.com.

I wanted some recommendations on inks; a site which provided them was Pen Envy at members.home.net/penenvy/. The author, Donn Weinberg, regularly uses 30 pens, filled with different inks, so I thought his suggestions would be worthwhile. Based on his recommendations, I've got a gold, two brown and two gray inks on order from www.inkpalette.com. Once they show up, I'll clean my pen, load one up and start to write.

As an addendum to last month's article where I discussed the details of adding a CD burner to a PC, just days after I sent my article in, a three part series on the same topic was posted to the O'Reilly website (www.oreilly.com). O'Reilly publishes superb books, mostly on computer and health topics. These articles are very technical, but if you're going to tackle CD burners, too much information is far better than not enough. The first article can be found at windows.oreilly.com/news/pchardnut_0900.html. It has links to the second and third articles. The authors are Robert Bruce Thompson and Barbara Fritchman Thompson, who have just published PC Hardware in a Nutshell, a book for those who wish to create and build their own system, or upgrade an existing system. You can check out a sample chapter, Designing a PC, at www.oreilly.com/catalog/pchardnut/chapter/ch25.html.