Baby’s First Fountain Pen

It was inevitable. It was bound to happen. We couldn’t stop it. I had obtained all the pencils on the market so I started looking at pens. My first venture was whilst ordering some custom pencils from Viking, when I decided to toss one of their lovely fountain pens into my pannier. Of course, that order was going to take a while to arrive, so in the meantime I decided to stop into my favourite stationer, Nota Bene, and speed up the process.

Nota Bene has a huge selection and a madly enthusiastic staff, in particular their “pen guy” who has helped me a couple times with non-pen-related purchases when I’ve visited previously.

This time I announced to the man that I was ready to lose my fountain pen virginity, and he hooked me up with a nice inexpensive “débutant” pen from Prefounte of Japan, along with some lovely Kaweco inks. I’ll talk more about the other things I bought on that visit in another post. I’ll also plan on posting some writing samples.

Not too long after this my Viking pen arrived. It was beautiful. I’m not sure who manufactures Viking’s pens, but if anyone is privy to this, drop me a line. The nib was bigger than the one on the Prefounte, so it was a completely different writing experience. And definitely a different writing experience than the ballpoints, gels and fine liners I’ve been accustomed to using when I’ve needed pens in the past. And it was for sure different than writing in pencil, which has been the vast majority of all my writing in recent years. I will need to practice because right now my writing is quite slower and sloppier with fountain pen than with pencil.

Believe it or not, my third pen is ordered and on the way. I can’t wait to experiment with converters and other inks and really start doing some new work with ink. Pencils are still in the foreground here, but they have company!