Modern fountain pens that fill with a cartridge or converter are quite a bore compared to the choices people had in the early 20th century. Aside from the immediacy of the eyedropper, there were matchstick fillers, coin fillers, blow fillers and crescent fillers. Much like today’s fashion houses raid their archives for ideas to update, …
Month: August 2011
Not bad for a five-year old pen that’s seen me through several beaches, countries, relationships. Scuffed, oxidized, patinated, beautiful. I have always liked dragons. Phoenixes come close. I think it’s only when you’re on the other side of young that you can say, yes, things do look better with age. I love new and shiny, …
If it’s not pens, it’s pencils. What can I say? I’m a sucker for packaging. And bananas. Who couldn’t live without a towel and bananas? Inside the tube is a pencil sleeve, a mechanical pencil, eraser refills and lead refills. The lead is 1.15 mm, which makes Retro 51 the only manufacturer I know of …
“I wish that I believed in fate, I wish I didn’t sleep so late. I used to be carried in the arms of cheerleaders.” “Hey blue, there is a song for you, ink on a pin. Underneath the skin, an empty space to fill in.” “You put a big bird in a small cage, it’ll …
In my mind there are two kinds of safety pens: the Moore kind, and the Waterman kind. Like eyedroppers, they are designed to hold ink in the barrel; unlike eyedroppers, they have a mechanism (usually a built-in seal and a retractable nib) that ensures ink doesn’t leak when the pen is in any position other …
I didn’t really want one, but I saw Caloy’s. Damn. The M101N in brown tortoiseshell is a replica of a Pelikan model from 1937. I want to lick the tortoiseshell celluloid. All right, I won’t. Like mother-of-pearl blended with Bakelite, the surface has a subtle shimmer over pesto and pistachio green, with streaks of dark …
This is me blathering on about my agency’s new logo in an AdoboLive! segment. 1) I can’t believe my hair was that long 6 months ago. 2) My hands look like they have Saint Vitus Dance. 3) My dress is of legal age.
If I were to be reincarnated as a pen, I’d like to be a Nakaya. In my next life I would like to be serene, subtle, quietly reeking of artistic merit, and fully functional, instead of frivolous, clumsy and more obvious than a horn on a unicorn. During a quick trip to Aesthetic Bay a …
If you use fountain pens for journaling, and want to add texture to your doodles, consider adding a waterbrush and water-soluble graphite to your case. My old comic strips were unrelieved black and white, with an occasional foray into gray. Even now, I find relief in grayed pink, grayed turquoise, grayed color – pure shades …
Demonstrator pens are blatant about what they do, and how they do it. In the Obviousness Sweepstakes nothing comes close to the Pelikan M1005 demonstrator. The M1000 is the largest in the Pelikan range. The “5” refers to the white trim (palladium-plated in this case). Ink fetishists with poor impulse control should not bring this …