These vintage Conway Stewart pens will be the wagging finger in my face. “Leigh, you said you were going to focus on Japanese pens. You said.” I will eat my words. I always do. This pen is too pretty. Produced between 1957 and 1963, the 85L has a slim, tapering profile and a single band …
Danitrio boxes are heavy. Between my black handbag and a Danitrio box, entire universes collapse into singularities. All my previous Danitrio pens came in a plain black box. This one is deep red with “Urushi” and “Mikado” silkscreened on the cover. My new arrival, though, is no Mikado. (Danitrio’s Mikado size is simply too large …
One of my favorite commercials of all time is Anthony Hopkins doing the big boy thing for Barclays Bank. If the copywriter had decided to include a line about signing a big contract with a big pen, and if the big client did not insist on a big English pen (in which case this entry …
When the Kindle takes over the known universe, we won’t be able to casually glance over someone’s bookshelf and say ah, that’s what you’re like. (Unless I push through with my LED necklace that goes online and downloads your RSS feeds and makes them scroll across your chest.) So in the spirit of historical preservation, …
Kokuyo paper, Waterman 7 Pink flexible nib inked with Sailor black, taken with the Nokia N85 in low light. This is today’s phone wallpaper.
I have walked many streets with this song in my ears. It is a triumph of songwriting, from the internal rhymes to the conversational cadence. It’s about time I did a video for it. Also, you see a little more of me in this one, because the instrumental bridge was a wee bit longer than …
One of the best things about working in advertising is I can shoot myself writing in my notebook during internal meetings when only 4% of my brain is required.
It is a sign of how much I love pens that I am just as happy seeing someone else get a pen in the mail. That’s a fantastic nib. It’s a double-broad stub. I can understand why my friend had to have it.
There’s something about ink that’s not quite this or that color. Greenish-grayish is delish. That’s Noodler’s Zhivago; it is not straightforward black, or dark gray, or dark green. It is blackish-greenish-grayish, and delightful because of it. I must say I was underwhelmed by it at first. I used it in a plain fine-nibbed pen, and …
What can I say? I doodle. My brain cannot handle meetings without doodling. As I have at least five meetings a day, I have doodle opportunities the poor one-meeting-a-day person can never hope to have. I doodled this one over several meetings, using a Nakaya with an EF nib, a Stipula Ventidue with a 1.1 …