On the Gift of Longhand | Hacker News Reader

On the Gift of Longhand

themillions.com

35 pointswawayanda22 comments

I’ve worked with a fountain pen daily for decades. It’s funny how they become linked in your mind to event. This is the one I signed my marriage license with. This is the one I wrote the bar exam with.

Now I’m teaching my children to write. I got them a fountain pen, and they love using it. It’s exacting, so they have to form letters properly, and if they don’t mind their non-writing hand they will end up smudged and inky. I was reluctant at first to hand a kid an ink-filled fountain pen - but it’s turned out great, and they are so much better with it than pencils and ball points.

> daily for decades

Did you yourself learn to use one as a kid?

Nope. “Decades” here is roughly 25 years. I picked one up in middle school because I was going through a “retro” phase. I no long where vintage shop fedoras (I still maintain they are cool though), but I never went back once I started writing with a fountain pen. I started with this neat looking waterman they sold in the gifts section of Office Depot. I still write mostly waterman Florida Blue Ink… I was in that 50/50 era of laptop use v. hand writing in high school and even in college people mostly seemed to start on paper before typing final copies up in Word. That might be a contributing factor. I can’t think and organize without a pen in hand . Closest I’ve come is the Remarkable tablet - but I still find myself using a real fountain pen daily.

ah ok. Here in Germany it was (and I think still is) common to learn/be required to write with one in elementary school, so having on at kid age is normal, including the occasional mess...

My first three years of school were in a little French farm village [0] — even in kindergarten, we wrote in longhand with (literally) pen and ink: We used wooden dowels, about the size of a pencil, with a steel nib at one end, which we dipped into an inkwell in the desk. The teacher would periodically refill the inkwells from a big bottle of ink.

[0] My dad was in the U.S. Air Force and was stationed at a nearby NATO air base; we lived "on the economy" about 30 miles outside the base. My parents always regarded that tour as the best years of their lives. I've been told that when speaking French I still sound like a local (as in, a faint Berrichon accent).

Wow! That’s amazing. I bet you’ve got good handwriting and penmanship habits.

> I bet you’ve got good handwriting and penmanship habits.

Sadly, no: My dad's next duty station was in a small college town in east Texas, where my mother said the local elementary school completely messed up my handwriting because I didn't write "proper." I do wish my current handwriting had the French look.

I bought a hand turned fountain pen recently for around £100, and it is really nice to write with. A little bit like the article author, a nice fountain pen has made me enjoy writing again and I’m probably writing more than I have in years.

Maybe it’s one of those things, but I’d never considered buying a “good” pen before, and now I have I appreciate how poor all the commodity pens are.

You can buy a great fountain pen for much less than that. Lamy Safari costs around $30 and is pleasant to write with. I got 2 with different nibs and played with them for a while till the novelty wore off.

Muji has a good one for something like $20. I use mine daily.

I bought the Muji one just recently after thinking that I wanted a fountain pen, and I definitely recommend it.

Can you say that it has lasted long enough to be value for money ? I've had Muji products that did not last.

Or the pilot metropolitan! I think the pilots have the best nibs on lowcost pens. Stay away from most german fountain pen makers, they are superrrt inconsistent with whether their nibs are tuned well out of the box.

It’s hand turned, profiled, and lacquered. It’s really nice. And the nib is fantastic.

I have two Lamy Safaris (fine, extra fine) and they're good pens. I think the barrels are ABS plastic - very durable, good if you're going to toss the pen in a backpack or aren't too careful about how you carry it around, easy to clean. The converter was saving me roughly 5 - 10 times over the cost of ink cartridges. The drawbacks: The grip seemed a little slippery, even though it's sculptured. The extra fine nib produced a line that was a little wider than I wanted. The converter doesn't hold much ink.

I switched to the TWSBI Eco extra fine. The line is tight and precise (good for subscripts with subscripts), the pen is easy to grip, the piston fill gives roughly 3 times the ink capacity as the Lamy converters, and the clear barrel allows you to see how much ink is left. The TWSBI is roughly the same price as the Safari.

I do much more writing since I started using fountain pens, and it's changed my work habits. I think better when writing than when typing (maybe) - but in any event, it's fun to write with good instruments. Reading physical books and writing with pen and paper are good ways for me to resist the urge to stare at a screen.

(I get my pens from JetPens. I noticed a while ago complaints on Amazon about some of the Lamys possibly being counterfeits - no way to confirm, don't know if it's still an issue.)

It's really funny how culture can shape perceptions.

I grew up in the 90s in Germany, so every single child between 6 and 12 had these - before you became "too cool" for them and started using anything else to rebel against the system (tm).

So while I believe you that it's a good product, and I see that there is nothing obviously childlike about the design, I still can't separate it from that image in my mind.

In Csikszentmihalyi's book "Creativity", pg 119, Barry Commoner is quoted:

> I write with this pen [he removes a fountain pen from his breast pocket and holds it up]. And it’s very clear to me that my ability to think and write at the same time depends on the flow of ink. The thing I enjoy most is the flow of my own ideas and getting them down on paper. I will not write with a ballpoint pen, because it doesn’t really flow. That’s why I use a fountain pen. And only a fountain pen that really works very well.

The Pen Addict is a one stop source for info. He does a top-5 in every practical category.

As a gear junkie I started with a Pilot Metropolitan, went into all sorts of directions and price points and landed back on the same Pilot I started on.

My advice for my younger self: Get one in medium and fine, upgrade to their premium ink (iroshizuku), and get to writing. check back every 5 years to see if anything changed (it won’t have)

I use a Cross with their refillable ink cartridge. Couple of bottles of a beautiful dark-blue (blue-black) hue of ink from Japan. And when traveling, I converted a medicine losenge tin (think similar to Altoids) to hold a possible spent refillable ink cartridge without it getting too messy - The bottles of ink do not travel well, potentially creating quite the mess. Instead, once it runs out (dozens of pages of notes later) I switch to disposable cartridges of blue-black ink.

And I keep a .9 mechanical pencil handy, just in case I am really prolific and supply stores are not easily found :)

During my childhood the gift of longhand was a regular Unsatisfactory on my report cards. I briefly broke the streak in third grade--my teacher must have been really something to motivate me. These days I write cursive for notes and Christmas cards, and that's about it.

The Twsbi line is really impressive; the Eco, in particular, is an especially great value.

(=> I'm in my 50s and started to retrain my longhand during the pandemic & concurrently dove into the fountain pen rabbit hole.)

Notes on the iPad recently added a fountain pen and it’s pretty amazing how good it makes hand writing look.

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