If you can get past the if-it’s-Monday-it’s-the-maroon-tie sobriety of its design, the Pilot Custom series can be a nib discovery tour. The 742 and 743 series come with music, stub (or sutab), coarse, wavily (akin to Sailor’s zoom) and falcon nibs, aside from the usual fine, medium and broad. The falcon nib, also known …
Available for 180 pesos at the Rockwell Urban Bazaar, this Moleskine lookalike will not make fountain pen users happy. However, as a gift for our friends who use gel pens and ballpoints, it can be a welcome go-anywhere notebook.
If you’ve always wondered exactly what “elastic” means when it comes to Nakaya nibs, this video should give you an idea.Â
Three years ago, I didn’t even know oblique nibs existed. Oblique nibs are cut at an angle, rather than straight across like an italic or stub, or rounded like most nibs. There are left-foot and right-foot obliques. I have a old Pelikan M400 with a left-foot OBB nib, an oblique double broad. I’m told that …
If you can gauge a pen by its name, then this pen has to be a heavy hitter. You can’t tell by the way it looks, though. The name refers to the nib, not to the body. A nib that deserves three nouns should be able to do anything short of tweeze eyebrows and squeeze …
I’ve always found it fascinating, that Waterman color-coded their nibs. Richard Binder’s site, richardspens.com, features an ad from 1927 headlined “Pick your pen point by color.” It’s a concept alien to the one-ballpen-fits-all generation, and the what’s-a-ballpen generation just around the bend. It doesn’t have to be. Writing by hand is one of the last …
I can’t find my “upload image” button, my “add link” button, and all sorts of other useful things. WordPress 2.7, this had better be worth it. Ah, so. For some reason critical buttons like “upload/insert” and “screen options” weren’t loading. Now they are.
Oh brown, downtrodden, touted as the new black every three years but never given the uptown crown, you are my favorite ink color, if that counts for anything. Noodler’s Walnut is a blackish brown, Golden Brown is similar to Kiowa Pecan but a touch more brown than gold, Beaver is Pelikan Brilliant Brown with less …
Stubs are the smartly-cut jackets of the pen world. They can make anyone (and their signatures) look better. Stubs make broad vertical strokes and thinner horizontal strokes. Unlike italic nibs, the corners of the stub nib are rounded, so upward strokes don’t bite into the paper. Here’s a sampler of my stubs. They’re all factory …
Jupiter and Venus are the eyes, and the smile is the crescent moon. I hope everyone who saw it tonight smiled back.