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, pen manufacturers occasionally combine nostalgia and marketing to appeal to the modern fountain pen user.
(That was a pedantic paragraph. I apologize. It must be the rain.)
Nostalgia + marketing + Pengallery’s summer sale = Leigh has another Stipula when she said she didn’t really need another Stipula.
“Stipula” and “Made in Italy” are engraved on the barrel without fanfare.
The ring has a gap. Spin the ring so the gap meets the crescent, press the crescent to depress the rubber sac inside the barrel, then release to let the resulting vacuum suck in ink.
I chose the 1.1 mm nib. Fancy filling systems need fancy nibs to match.
Stipulas are temperamental and troublesome, in my opinion. I always feel like an inveterate gambler every time I buy an Italian pen. I fall for the style and end up adjusting the nibs for erratic flow, squeak, misalignment, and other functional failures. This nib worked out of the box, much to my relief.
I filled the pen with Platinum Carbon Black. At first it wrote on the wet side but now it seems to have settled down. It’s probably feeling a little petulant now. In the face of hurricanes and tropical typhoons, nothing else can be much of a disaster.
