Fountain Pens, a childhood friendship

Fountain Pens, a childhood friendship

Not long ago I discovered a small but passionate population who love fountain pens. Unlike most ballpoints, fountain pens are not meant to be disposable. When your fountain pen runs out of ink, you reach for your bottle of ink, and refill it. My interest in fountain pens stem from the fact that they were my first pens. That was a time when snail mail was just mail, and most people who wrote little else, did write letters, and if they didn’t use a pencil, they used a fountain pen, because ballpoints hadn't become popular yet.

Starting with the closest: Lamy Safari, Kawaco Sport,
 TWSBI ECO, and TWSBI MINI.

This was near the end of WWII, and like many other southern African Americans, my mom and stepfather and I moved north seeking jobs, and to escape the Jim Crow south. We moved to northern Illinois from Mississippi. Mom’s mother and sister had moved to Washington DC and later to Los Angeles, to be with other relatives who had moved there. Then there were those who were still in Mississippi, so letters were flying all over the place. Mom always had one or two fountain pens, and between outgoing letters they were mine to play with. I scribbled with the pens until I learned how to write real words. When I became old enough to earn an allowance I bought cheap fountain pens of my own, but when Paper Mate and Parker ballpoints started showing up in magazine ads, I vowed to get me one.

Parting of ways

When ballpoints became available in stores in the late fifties, it wasn’t long before I had my first one. It was a Paper Mate with a brown barrel, and gold colored top, (as I recall). Ballpoints were just a new kind of pen, and that’s where my interest in pens led me. Paper Mate and Parker were my original ballpoints of choice, and remained so for a long time. Of course BIC and others flooded the market with disposable pens but I never got into any of those. They simply weren’t interesting enough. So what was it about a pen that made it interesting enough? I’m not sure, but rollerballs, and some jell pens were interesting enough so I hung out with those for a while, but none made a deep enough impression to cause a lasting memory.

Sometime in the seventies, I ran across a pen called “Big Red”. It was a Parker ballpoint, but looked like no other ballpoint I had seen. It was not retractable, but it had a cap, and with the cap on looked like a fountain pen. Compaired to pens I had become used to seeing it was kind of fat, and it was red. Where I first spotted it I’m not sure. I’m betting on K-Mart, because this was during their heyday and we spent a lot of time there. As a person who is capable of getting excited over a pen, I immediately reached for my wallet.

I carried Big Red everywhere. If somebody handed me a form to fill out, and slid me some kind of regular old pen to fill it out with, I would slide the regular old pen back and pull out Big Red. I wrote letters with it, I signed checks with it, and if somebody said,  ”you got a pen I can borrow?”, I handed Big Red to them. They must have been selling pretty good  because they started popping up everywhere, even in drug stores, and they weren’t always red. Some were white or blue or yellow, and there was even one with white and red vertical stripes on the body, and the cap was blue with white stars. Over time the prices start dropping, and I bought several more. My favorite other color was yellow. The price drop was probably a sign that popularity was dropping also, because they soon became harder and harder to find until they just disappeared. Today you can find them on Ebay at greatly increased prices than they would have sold for in stores. When I researched them, recently I discovered that the design was based on a very popular Parker fountain pen from the 1920’s called the “ParkerDuoFold".

That affair with Big Red left me infatuated with fat pens, so for a while the Paper-Mate PhD, which, I think, used to be Sanford PhD, and Pilot Dr Grip were at the top of my favorites list. These fat pens held my interest until I discovered the Sharpie pen. The Sharpie pen is a skinny pen, but it boasts a fine felt like tip. I think my handwriting has improved a bit, but sometimes it’s so bad I have a hard time reading it, but a very fine line keeps things from running together,so I always went for a fine tip when I could find one, hence the attraction to the Sharpie Pen. I bought a two pack at Walmart, and found it to be a good writer for me. I soon had almost every rendition of the Sharpie pen except the retractable, I don’t like the looks of it. I referred to the internet looking for other opinions of it and that’s where I ran into a blog called the “The Pen Addict”. 

They still exist

The Pen Addict is a guy named Brad Dowdy, who blogs about pens. He had hundreds of followers. Wait!!!, you mean I’m not the only person who makes a bee line to the stationary section of every store he goes into? So he has reviewed almost all the pens you see hanging on the racks, including the Sharpie pen. He liked it. The Pen Addict eventually became a podcast, co-hosted by Brad Dowdy, the Pen Addict himself, and Myke Hurley, a British Podcaster, and of course they talk about pens, ballpoints, rollerballs, Jell pens, felt tips, and fountain pens. It was these guys who replanted the thought of fountain pens in my mind. They informed me that fountain pens still existed and that I could actually have one.

After all this time from the early sixties until 2015 I hadn’t thought about fountain pens. I hadn’t imagined that anybody was using them, I hadn’t imagined that companies were manufacturing them, and that there were retail outlets selling them. What I came to realize about the whole thing was that in some parts of the world they hadn’t died out to the extent that they have here in America.

My other primary influence is a YouTuber  named Brian Goulet of Goulet Pens one of  the prominent online retailers dealing in all things fountain pen, such as inks fountain pen compatible paper in several forms, and of course the pens themselves. Brians YouTube channel is a treasure chest of knowledge for the fountain pen newbie as well as the hardened pen geek.

Friends reunite

With these two influences I gained enough knowledge to create a shopping list. I had decided that after fifty years I would soon purchase a modern fountain pen and I would start with something on that list. The list included the Lamy Safari, one of the Kaweco Sports, and maybe something by TWSBI. Having made up my mind to buy a fountain pen I went to a place familiar to me, Amazon. I ordered a Lamy Safari, a pack of cartridges, a converter, and a bottle of Lamy blue black ink.

The Safari is a good writer, but the cap came off in my pocket a few times and I decided it was not a good pocket pen, for me, so my next order was a Kaweco Sport Ice in blue. The cap screws on and it’s very small when capped making it a great pocket pen. I also ordered cartridges, and a couple converters  neither of which would fill completely. I solved that problem by using a syringe ordered from Goulet Pens to refill the cartridges, a solution I learned from one of Brian Goulets Youtube videos.

I stated that TWSBI was on my list but I held off on that line because none of the ones I knew about at the time were made to be posted. I’m used to posting from my childhood experience with fountain pens, and could not imagine not doing it. To me a pen without its cap attached looks like half a pen. 

After some time they introduced the TWSBI, ECO. ECO means economical, because this pen costs in the range of twenty some dollars, as opposed to the others which were in the fifty to sixty dollar range. It is a piston filler, and holds a great deal of ink. They were introduced with a black or white cap which screws in place, and the body is transparent so you can see the inside parts and the ink, when filled up. I ordered the black, which lives in my bag with notebooks and other stuff. Later I bought the TWSBI Diamond mini AL with blue aluminum accents just because I think it's a beautiful little pen. The cap screws on, and it posts.  It is now my pocket pen. My oldest granddaughter gave me a blue Cross fountain Pen this past Christmas, and so far those are all the fountain pens I own at this point.

It’s so good to be reacquainted with my old friends and play mates, fountain pens, again after so long a time, and along with them a variety of ink colors that I never knew way back in the old days. Fountain pens are not for everybody, but if any of this interest you at all check out the links provided. I just spot lighted the two that started my journey in the service of keeping this short, but there are many more blogs, and youtube channels that are all about fountain pens. If you are familiar with the internet you will surly find them. With what ever pen you use, happy writing.