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The aesthetic value of fountain pens is undeniable but for the left-handed amongst us who refuse to twist their writing hand into some bizarre contortion, the fountain pen will never be viable. My personal left-handed recollections of using fountain pens all involve smears of ink on the side of my hands and smudged lettering.

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I'm left-handed and there are several techniques for writing left-handed with a fountain pen. They don't all involve twisting your writing hand into "some bizarre contortion".

I collect vintage fountain pens, mostly about a hundred years old with flexible nibs that allow for fancy copperplate calligraphy. These kinds of pens are very delicate and some of them are so sensitive that if you don't know what you're doing you can destroy them pretty easily. With a little bit of work and a little bit of practice I was able to learn to write with them the way they were intended.

If you had an interest in fountain pens, don't let something like this kill it. With a small amount of effort you can find a technique that works for you without being uncomfortable.

> I'm left-handed and there are several techniques for writing left-handed with a fountain pen. They don't all involve twisting your writing hand into "some bizarre contortion".

I'm just curious if you've ever tried the mirror script technique? I remember reading in Isaacson's biography that Da Vinci wrote everything in the mirror script not to code it but because that's how left-handed people were taught to write. I figure that it'd work just as well in modern days, though obviously not if you needed someone else to read it.

I tend to scrawl directly over the path of the text I'm writing. I'm aware of several writing techniques that I could adopt although I have to say that I've never even considered the mirror technique. I'm very surprised that they even bothered teaching an alternative method to left-handers to write during Da Vinci's era as I was always under the impression that, up until fairly recently, the strategy simply was to force people to write with their right hand regardless of their natural inclination.

I was under that impression as well, but Isaacson implied that that's a more modern way, relatively speaking, at least when compared to Renaissance Florence. Which is partially why I was interested in seeing if you had tried it.

I am left handed but I write under the line (also known as an underwriter). This allows me to use fountain pens without smudging.

My daughter is a left handed overwriter and I am working with her to get her to position her paper so she learns to write under the line as much as possible without the hook of the hand. She likes fountain pens but smudges them. I used to overwrite st a young age but switched to underwriting when I got frustrated of having ink on my hand every day.

I am left handed, and have no real problems with writing with a fountain pen at all. Smearing is not an issue, I assume because I hold the pen fairly straight, and don't have my hand curled around in a reversed 'U' shape as I notice some of my left handed compatriots do when writing.

I have FAR more problems with binders, with the rings or clips getting in the way - so much so that in school, I used to write on the BACK of the pages so that the rings were to the right of my hand.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Look up underwriting - by writing from below the text you can write with a relaxed grip without any fear of smudges.

I learned about this as an adult and felt like such an idiot for going through school without learning the trick. And maybe a little mad at my third grade teacher.

Paper at a 45 degree angle + hand below the line I'm writing be works like a charm.

My introduction to rollerball pens forced me to learn how to do this, otherwise, I was smearing everything I had written. I did some research and found out that curling my hand around the pen was the wrong way to hold it.

I'm a lefty and while I avoid writing, a fountain pen with fast drying ink and a BOLD tip is very lefty usable.

The trick to lefty pens is to get BOLD tips!

When you have a thin needle-like tip, as you know, you end up stabbing or scratching the paper. But if the tip is either a big round rolling ball or nib, then it glides across the paper on its roundy edge.

I can definitely recommend the Lamy Safari with a 1.0 bold tip, or any Pilot ballpoint pen with a 1.0 bold tip. (I carry a Pilot Precision 1.0 Bold ballpoint pen with me at all times.)

I'm a lefty, and with fast drying ink, a fountain pen doesn't smear. Unlike ballpoint or pencil does when your hand moves across it. The "bizarre contortion" is needed anyway to get the stroke weighting correct, unless you use one of those weird offset nibs, which aren't readily available in quality pens.

Off topic, I once got a B+ on a high school physics test, but the teacher told me he marked me down from an A for having the temerity to use an ink pen.

I did about half of my high school trig class with a neon orange gel pen. After I handed in one test, the teacher informed me that it was the last she would accept from me in that color. She never marked me down, though!

I was the same, I always did my work in ink and crossed errors out with single lines. Surprised that physics would prefer pencil over ink, most science classes require pen for lab notebooks just to get people in the habit.

Well, high school, and we both were chuckling about it.

I’m left-handed and write with fountain pens without too much trouble. The key is to find the right combination of fast-drying ink and absorbent paper: a combination of Iroshizuku inks and Baron Fig or Field Notes notebooks have been great for me. The smooth, sheen-y “fountain pen friendly” paper like Rhodia and many of the Japanese brands unfortunately do not work as well.

I've had good luck with Pilot Varsity disposable fountain pens as a left hander. Surprisingly not very smudgy.

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