Basically title. Me personally a friend had one and I figured it’d be fun. I got a £4 black forest (or something) from AliExpress and it’s been utterly fantastic.
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I was honestly just looking for a nicer rollerball pen to stick refills into (like the Pilot G2 or the Pentel Energel refill), and one of the videos that I watched on YouTube suggested a fountain pen video to me. I think it was a video from Goulet?
Once I clicked on it, I really went down the rabbit hole. Coincidentally, my very first pen was a Lamy 2000! I started with my grail and then worked backwards through other interesting ones. Now I have a full case of pens! :D
@buhala A few months ago I bought a fountain pen and a bottle of ink to see if using one would reduce hand/wrist strain. I now have a handful of inexpensive Chinese pens and a handful of inks.
I’d like to find a decent but inexpensive pen with a 1.1 stub nib. I have several X750 but have discovered that I want an even broader nib so colored inks will really show more than they do with an M nib.
I’m really happy with my Twsbi Eco 1.1 stubs! Now I need one in every color…
I second TWSBI! I’ve got one with a B nib and it’s very broad, works great with fancy inks!
I hated writing with a fountain pen as a child. Fast forward 30 years later, I read an article on Neil Gaiman raving about his Pilot 823s. Now I have about 15 fountain pens 😅
I was doing a thing with a friend who had moved where we corresponded via snail mail as if we were characters in a fantasy world. I was getting into physically roleplaying the writing process – 3D printed a wax seal for the letters and ended up buying a Kaweco Lilliput Brass when looking for a copper or brass fountain pen to write the letters with.
Next thing I knew I had more pens than sense and more ink than I’ll ever be able to use.
I can also vouch for the Hongdian black forest being surprisingly decent!
I had been buying stationary from JetPens for a while and they kept putting out videos on how good fountain pens were. I kept telling myself I’d just buy a cheap one to try but no further… and now I have 3 lol
I found a link to JetPens’s best pens of 2023 guide while I was on vacation in Japan, and I had to see what all the fuss was about. It’s been two months and I’ve already bought 8 pens and four inks!
I bought a black forest knockoff (made by yongsheng or something) and even that has been good, maybe I should try the real thing
Are fountain pens only for people with nice hand writing?
Not at all! But using a fountain pen may have the side effect of wanting to improve your handwriting.
Having nice handwriting is as simple as being intentional. Buy a french ruled notebook and you’ll teach yourself to use it and your handwriting will improve. It’s as simple as that.
I would say that getting calligraphy gear and spending countless hours studying letter shapes has improved my handwriting much more than any fountain pen. One can be a gateway drug for the other, so there’s a pretty good chance getting into this hobby will result in having better handwriting. I started with absolutely awful handwriting, and now it’s slightly above average.
Seconding what leclownfou said. I never really cared about my hand writing until I was using fountain pens. It really makes you want to improve your penmanship.
It’s really not as hard as it sounds, I was able to teach myself cursive in a few days, and it’s been generally touted by people who look at it as the nicest handwriting they’ve seen
Definitely not! With a fountain pen, you don’t have to press as hard when you write, so it’s easier on your fingers and hand (as long as the pen fits your hand and grip style decently). So, it can be an ergonomic boon. It can also be more environmentally sound, as you can refill a cartridge many times from a recyclable glass bottle of ink (instead of throwing away and entire pen each time the ink runs out). Also, it just feels nice to write with a nicely working fountain pen. Much nicer than with a ballpoint.
I have no idea how fountain pens work, do they have an upkeep? Like do you have to clean them every time you use them?
If you’d like to experiment with no commitment, look for a Pilot Varsity or Pilot V Pen. They are sealed disposable fountain pens.
There is some minimal upkeep. It depends strongly on what types of ink you use. If you use a very dependable brand like Parker/Lamy/Pilot, and only use that brand of ink, then the most you need to do is flush out old ink with water sometimes. This is not always required, but can avoid an odd stage where you’ve just switched to a new color of ink, and your handwriting slowly fades from the old color to the new color (some of us enjoy this, and some do not). The other time you might need to rinse is if you don’t use the pen for a long time, and the old ink dries out in the pen. The crusty dry old ink can clog your pen.
You should rinse out a brand new pen before first use, to avoid any traces of oils from manufacture messing with your ink as well.
However, a lot of the fun is the vast array of colors in the ink spectrum. If you are filling a pen from bottles of ink, always read reviews of that brand and specific ink color. You can usually find out if an ink is prone to issues or best in a certain type of pen or nib before you buy.
As a teenager, I was not into handwriting, but I did like History, gadgets, and cool colors of ink. A teacher at my school offered a calligraphy elective, and several of my friends took it, and several more took up the calligraphy hobby. My handwriting did not translate well into calligraphy, but the pens were cool in a gadgety/historical way (and far more ink colors were available than with ballpoints). Then, a friend and I discovered Parker Vector “normal” fountain pens at a discount store for around $9 (with several cartridges of ink!). That was the beginning!
I was in college, scrolling reddit and found /r/fountainpens. Bought a Lamy Safari afterwords and have been hooked since.
I only got into fountain pens a couple months ago because I originally wanted a slightly nicer looking ballpoint or rollerball pen and discovered Lamy when looking. I couldn’t help but admire all the fountain pens they had to offer but initially decided it wasn’t for me. A few weeks into enjoying my new ballpoint pens I thought that fountain pens may be a better way to go as I liked the look of all the ink colours and just the overall aesthetic of them.
I got a Parker Sonnet and a few different Diamine inks and have been loving them ever since!
Just happened to walk by a Lamy display in a store while I was killing time before a lunch, tried the tester and loved how smooth it was to write with one. I have a safari and an al-star now and they’re basically all I write with at this point.
I started using fountain pens because they were compulsory at school. I had a nice old green Parker Junior with a broad gold nib that a relative gave me. I really liked writing with that pen so much that I’ve used them ever since.
I learned to write with a pen (Hero, lots of bad memories), but my Dad was into pens and a big fan of Waterman. He bought me a Waterman pen when I was in high school, then I got another Waterman (Audace) when I was at uni. For many years they’ve been sitting unused, the first one in my parents’ home, the other one somewhere in my desk drawer.
This year my daughter turned 10 and I noticed that she wrote with a pencil. I bought her a Lamy Safari. While looking for a pen for her I suddenly discovered, after all these years, that there were thousands of ink colours out there! I had no idea! I’d always had Parker Quink Blue/Black and that was it :-D
I’ve always loved pens & stationery. When I got my first full-time job at a printers & stationers I picked up a Parker Jotter fountain pen which I loved using, but I would get annoyed with how quickly it’d dry up. During the decade I worked there before it went under, I also picked up a Parker 45 flighter and a Cross Century at a huge discount. But after getting really ill those pens languished in a drawer for almost a decade, and the ink left in the Cross well and truly clogged it up.
When I started going to an evening class at college, I wanted to start making use of my fountain pens again. The Herbin pen cleaning fluid made short work of the clogged Cross, and I bought my first bottle of ink—Waterman Intense Black. And that was when I went off the deep end and descended into fountain pen madness. Fast forward to today and I have 108 fountain pens and 115 inks, and it’s constantly growing. I’m trying to get through this month without buying a pen, but it’s a real struggle 😅
I started with a set of disposable fountain pens, but I don’t remember why. I was active on a snail-mail site and I think maybe some people were talking about pens. Anyway, I wanted a cheap test drive and they got the job done for a few months until I graduated to a Lamy. I now have several different pens for several different purposes, and chronically inky paws.
