Classic fountain pens

I'll mention: Another way to go are $1-$5 fountain pens from China. You can get about a dozen for the cost of a single Pilot, or about a hundred for the cost of the Montblanc. The quality is mixed, but if you buy a few, you'll get a couple really good ones, a couple typical ones, and maybe a broken one. My better ones are every bit as good as the Pilot.

The nice thing is that at that price, if you lose one, it's not a tragedy.

And at that price point, you can also get a bent nib, a flexy nib, a wide nib, etc. just for fun.

If nothing else, it's a great way to start experimenting and seeing what you like before you buy a more expensive pen to see what you want.

One addition on the really cheap end - Pilot Prera - which comes with a wonderful calligraphy nib as well (CM). Also, the Pilot Vanishing Point is available with a calligraphy nib (I retrofitted mine of 20 years vintage with one, and it has been a great joy).

Mnemosyne notebooks are what I use. Comb bound, so can lie flat, and very good paper.

One thing I’d like to mention is the difference between Japanese Fine and European Fine, with Japanese being much finer.

I found Metropolitan Fine to be scratchy while love Lamy Safari Fine. I’ll recommend Metropolitan Medium to most people who are starting with fountain pens, or a Lamy Safari Fine.

Noodler's Navy is also very good. (I have many bottles from this brand.)

But if you want a safe-in-any-pen, just works, generally great ink, I'd have to recommend Pilot Blue-Black in the 70ml bottle. The bottle has built-in ink well, so it ensures you get a good fill all the way through the life of the bottle. The ink is middle of the road for wetness (Pilot Iroshizuku inks are wet, this is in the middle, not dry like Robert Oster inks, for example).

I would say that Platinum 3776 belongs in between these levels and not alongside the 2000 and Vanishing Point. Other entries on this level may include:

- Faber Castell Loom: Faber Castell steel nibs are absolutely buttery smooth. My favourite steel nibs and better than most gold nibs. The grip section is a bit slippery.

- Twsbi 580ALR: Beautiful colours, piston filler, good nibs, great value.

- Platinum Curidas: A capless pen like the Vanishing Point but in cheaper materials. Still a great option at a lower price since it's such a unique type.

- Pilot Custom 92: If you can source it from Japan. North American prices are crazy.

I suspect a lot of FP users are in it for the same reason as me. I'm not writing tens of pages a week, I use them for occasionally taking a few notes, in a really pretentious way just to be extra, partly as a protest against the trend of not having any hobbies besides eating and scrolling. It's like a living history project every time you use one!

My penmanship is already terrible, I don't expect to dance over the page effortlessly, I'd need probably years of practice to not need to constantly think about each movement, no matter what the pen is.

So to me, choosing a $10 pen by what looks cool is totally valid as long as there's enough reviews to be mostly sure it won't leak or just not work at all or something.

Even low end ones provide a lot of value if you just want to write without anything too 21st century ruining the low tech aesthetic, and it only costs $15 or so to get into.

Just be sure to get a modern pressurized pen as a backup if you don't spring for the nice fountain!!

I'm very tempted to buy the actual Pilot Vanishing Point insert and swap it so I have a 18k nib.

Originally released in 1963 it really is a really cool piece of engineering. Highly recommend the Pilot Vanishing Point or the Chinese replica as a daily writer.

My daily driver for nearly 20 years was a Vanishing Point. They write REALLY well, feel smooth, and the cartridge ink is entirely acceptable -- which was important to me when I was traveling often for work.

These days I alternate between a TWSBI, a couple VPs, a Safari, and a nicer Aurora my sister gave me for Christmas.

A Pilot Metropolitan is approximately the same price and at least in my view, it's better as it uses standard international cartridges. A TWSBI Eco is more expensive, but not by that much, and it's an absolute reliability monster.

And if you like them, well then, have fun with your new hobby!

Safaris are suitable for people who write daily; others should look elsewhere.

I also tried the Pilot Metropolitan, for some reason this awful pen is recommended as an alternative to the Lamy. Doesn't even compare, got rid of it fairly quickly. The ridge along the grip was very uncomfortable for me.

I am a huge fan of the larger nibs. I tried getting into calligraphy, but haven't managed the eye for it, yet. Tons and tons of fun, though.

Link?

I concur with your point about the ink. I used to use private reserve but recently shifted to Waterman and I'm happy. I prefer the colour of the later. Another important thing is the paper. It needs a bit of a bite that produces a scratchy sound. Also, older paper that's exposed to humid environments tend to bleed the ink causing bad writing.

Very important warning regarding Parker 51s or any modern Parker. Do not buy the modern Parker 51!! The brand Parker is now owned by a company that is choosing to take advantage of people who remember the Parker brand and foisting total garbage on them.

If one doesn't mind jumping through a hoop or two regarding shipping, vintage Montblancs are just about as cheap from Japan as the 51 is in the US, and sometimes cheaper. The 12/14/32/220/etc are smaller than the flagship Meisterstucks, but they're also about 1/10 the price and really quite nice quality. Recently I've paid 30-50$ per pen to develop a little collection; the 220 was most expensive at 70$.

Piston fillers that are still going strong after decades, minimal maintenance, pleasant gold nibs.

There are great, actually classic pens, and being from a time when they were meant to be used, they can be far more interesting. Parker 51s are ubiquitous and reliable, and vacuum fillers in general seem significantly better than modern cartridge and converter pens. For mid century technically-interesting pens, I'm fond of Sheaffer snorkel fillers, where the pen can be quickly refilled without the nib ever touching ink and changing the line thickness or becoming messy. Even earlier, Waterman and other pens with fine, flexible nibs offer nib styles that range from very difficult to impossible to get in modern pens.

For example, The Monoc Nib is very new. It didn't exist a few scant months ago. While I hope Ian Schon succeeds and it does become considered a classic, a single-piece titanium nib unit that encloses an Ultem feed is not a typical fountain pen design. (Very cool, just not classic yet... give it 20 years).

The Montblanc, and maybe the Conway Stewart may be the only classic brands there.

The TWSBI Eco is a beautiful, robust, and dependable pen.

For the affordable gold nibs, "Lamy 2000" is generally the biggest competitor to Pilot Capless / Vanishing point. Same price, very similar nib quality, different esthetics / use case.

For the cheap, the aliexpress classics "Jinhao x750" is another gateway drug. It's under $10 and gives an almost infinite ability for tinkering further down the line when the fountain pen bug bites (#6 size nibs that are easy to find / replace and standard cartridge / converter size for easy ink availability).

Which pen would you recommend?

To me it looks like some sort of product placement marketing fluff with "Montblanc" thrown in just to give it a measure of plausible deniability.

Like (perhaps) others, I had been forced to use them in grade school -- we were told that "it would improve our handwriting". It laid a foundation for fluency in cursive, but my actual handwriting was terrible.

However, when I came back to fountain pens (after a couple of decades), it was relatively easy to improve my script to where I'm happy with it. Having the "cursive" foundation probably helped a ton.

There are also a couple of additional variants of the Vanishing Point out there. The Decimo is identical but thinner.

- The mechanism of a fountain pen relies on capillary action and gravity rather than the mechanical rolling action of a ballpoint. This means you don't have to press the point down into the paper almost at all in order to write. This reduces writing fatigue, and can even make writing possible for folks with carpal tunnel or other sources of wrist pain (like healing wrist fractures or other issues).

- Cursive was developed before ballpoints were common. This means that there's a bunch of subtle ways that most western cursive systems are optimized for the low-friction, gliding style of writing with a fixed tip and liquid ink rather than the constant pressure style of writing needed for ballpoints. It's actually less work and strain with a ballpoint NOT to join all your letters together. With a pen that uses liquid ink, it suddenly makes sense why not picking the point up from the page saves effort.

- Fountain pens (can) use less disposable plastic than ballpoints, especially if you're a heavy journaler. A glass bottle of liquid ink will last months or years and there's no plastic inserts or disposable tips to be thrown away. So if you care about that sort of thing, a little bit less waste is an objective advantage.

- Bottles of ink are cheaper per page written than most ballpoint refills. But, this is an invisible benefit to most because depending on how far you get into the hobby you'll inevitably end up spending much more on pens and paper than you would've ever spent on ballpoint refills.

- The ink choices are way more diverse and interesting with fountain pens than with ballpoints. There's many color options available, and some inks have special properties, like drying with fun reflective spots wherever the ink pools or containing microscopic glitter particles to make your writing sparkly.

- Fountain pens, depending on the specific design, are better suited for certain styles of calligraphy than most ballpoint pens are.

But most people who get into fountain pens and ink do so because of aesthetics, not anything objectively superior.

I also find that writing to take notes is much better than notes taken electronically. You can't write fast enough to transcribe. So you are forced to pay attention, process the information, compress it into nuggets (that may only make sense to you) and write those down. The notes aren't the point. The process means you retain more and understand better. If I wanted a transcription (which is certainly easier with electronic methods), I'd simply record.

I injured my wrist and hand a few years ago and simply would not be able to write as much as I do if I had to use a ball point pen.

Give fountain pens another try. A lot of the things that make them "impractical" is only an issue with bottom of the barrel, cheap pens.

To me, the main motivation to use them these days is that it simply feels good to use them. After spending some time tinkering / cleaning / nib polishing, fountain pens give me the same sort of pleasure that one gets from any other good tool - a well sharpened knife that just fits into Your hand, a good screw driver, a nicely worn in shoe, a well maintained / fitted bike... The list goes on. It becomes a sort of a self-sustaining feedback loop. The more You use one, the more You "want" to use one.

Ink flow in a fountain pen is via capillary action (touch nib to paper, ink flows), as opposed to a ballpoint pen where you have to apply a small constant amount of downward force for the ball to have enough friction against the paper for the ball to roll. This might not seem like a big deal, but if you're writing a lot, it means that your wrist & hand will get much more fatigued with a ballpoint over time.

Put another way, ballpoints have absolute advantage over fountain pens, except for "sitting down and writing a lot."

Since I found my match in fountain pens, I've found it impossible to go back to anything else. The small amount of maintenance (refilling and occasionally cleaning) is thoroughly outweighed by the tactile sensation of a writing/drawing instrument perfectly tuned to my preference. But I'm an amateur artist, so finding a well-matched tool is very important to me.

I should mention that the ink can also influence the feel of the pen. There is also that to discover.

Bragging points, perhaps: Aside from the hipster cred (see also: straight razors and pricey shaving products) there is the fact that you have the disposable income to drop hundreds of dollars on this tech. Otherwise there are modern ways to write that I think are superior, and the wide use of other tech suggests that the vast majority have moved on.

I find that I write faster with a good, reliable fountain pen (like a Sailor) than I do with a ballpoint, gel, rollerball, or anything else I’ve tried. It’s my go-to for fast note taking.

On the other hand, there are a lot of cool and fancy fountain pens that are net slower to write with due to unreliability.

There seems to be a variety of suggestions and advice on using pens left handed on youtube.

A lot of ballpoints absolutely suck for lefties too, but you can get good ballpoints that work perfect for left handed writing for 30x-100x less than the fountain pens in the article. And not have to jump through hoops or go through any hassle to get them to work.