The main objective of this blog will be to collect my thoughts on the fountain pens I own. Yet another pen review page is probably not needed, but then again, for some of the pens I own I couldn't find any reviews or even proper pictures online before buying them.
In the area I live in there is no proper pen shop, so I had to buy almost all of my pens online, with varying degree of success...
I only very recently started spending way too much money on pens, so it might also be interesting to track the way into this addiction for people to recognize the first signs of this bad habit.
After the usual early Pelikan Pelikano experience at school I stopped caring about pens for a long time. At university I did not really attend any classes, so no need to write down any notes either. When writing my thesis I started getting interested in typography. At some point, trying to escape working on the actual contents, I even at some point made it an option to typeset the document in Fraktur (German blackletter typeface). While doing my research in this area I learned about the older German forms of handwriting such as Sütterlin and Kurrent, but while finding it entertaining not to be able to read less than a hundred years old letters in my native language, I never bothered actually learning to read it. Also writing in it would have required having a fountain pen due to the required line variation.
Only a year or two after finishing the thesis I really started getting interested in handwriting. At that point, roughly a year ago, a weird colleague of mine occasionally started asking questions about notes he read on my notepad that was stowed away in my personal drawer. So far I had mainly used a Parker Sonnet ballpoint pen on extremely cheap college blocks provided by my employer. This terrible writing experience together with the mild invasion of my privacy sparked the idea to switch back to a fountain pen and at the same time start writing in Sütterlin so other people would not be able to easily read my notes. Also part of the idea was to make taking meeting minutes more fun, of course.
In the future posts I will chronologically go through the list of fountain pens and occasional dip nib I purchased since then. I will explain the intentions behind the purchases (if more than just the good looks of the pen) and the experience using the pens. Also I will add some pictures of them and probably will also provide some writing samples, probably mostly in the weird style of Kurrent I currently use to write in.
