Unboxing of the His Nibs pen from Newton Pens

Monteverde Regatta Sport

See the series here.

Monteverde Intima Volcano Grey

Announcing the re-stocking of the Monteverde Intima Volcano Grey. Available as a fountain pen or ballpoint, the Intima is also available in the following patterns: Neon Green, Neon Pink and Glacier Blue. The Volcano Grey is the only one that's exploded so far. See all the colors and more details here.

Art Brown's venerable pen store closes its doors in Manhattan

Adam Frank reported on Pentrace this weekend about the sudden closing of the venerable (next year would have been their 90th year) Manhattan pen shop, Art Brown -- a family business.

All reports indicate that this was due to an increase in rent that could no longer be sustained (some report an increase to $50,000 per month!).

What a sad event.

The Artisanal Signature

A wonderful interview and photos of Maki-e artisan Michifumi Kawaguchi, the creative force behind the 2012 Namiki Limited Edition Fountain Pen, the Namiki Archer on Horseback.

"Late in the movie Margin Call, Jeremy Irons’ reptilian financial shark schools his team of predators in his business paradigm: “There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat.” Being first and getting away with cheating often involves a fair degree of luck to and this is something an avowed traditionalist firm like the Namiki Manufacturing Company did without in 1918. Indeed, founder Ryosuke Namiki famously wanted to succeed purely on the merits of his product and the hard work of everyone at the company. To this end, he reportedly opened one of his factories deliberately on the most inauspicious day of the year so that no one could credit the company’s success to luck."

Read the article here.

A gorgeous horror movie about a pen trying to murder the letter "D"

"This is D, a truly bizarre vignette from the Venezuelan studio Chiguire Animation and Closed Eye Visuals. In this wonderful little animation, a pen with sinister inclinations wants to connect a dot labeled with the letter "D." The letter has no desire to be stabbed by ink, so it attempts to escape off the page."

The Visconti Titanic LE Fountain Pen

I wrote about an earlier version of this pen about 7 years ago, at the beginning of a blog entry here.

Sylvester Stallone: My Pen Is Ridiculously Ugly

National Archives Discovers Date Change on Lincoln Record

"Washington, DC…Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero announced today that Thomas Lowry, a long-time Lincoln researcher from Woodbridge, VA, confessed on January 12, 2011, to altering an Abraham Lincoln Presidential pardon that is part of the permanent records of the U.S. National Archives. The pardon was for Patrick Murphy, a Civil War soldier in the Union Army who was court-martialed for desertion.

Lowry admitted to changing the date of Murphy’s pardon, written in Lincoln’s hand, from April 14, 1864, to April 14, 1865, the day John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC. Having changed the year from 1864 to 1865, Lowry was then able to claim that this pardon was of significant historical relevance because it could be considered one of, if not the final official act by President Lincoln before his assassination....

Against National Archives regulations, Lowry brought a fountain pen into a National Archives research room where, using fadeproof, pigment-based ink, he altered the date of the Murphy pardon in order to change its historical significance."

Click the title bar to see a video and photos of the alteration

Collector’s ink hobby draws pen customers

Click on the title to read the article about Robert Bradford and Bradford Ink.

How you should take pen to paper, and why

How you should take pen to paper, and why

By EDWARD A. IANNUCCILLI

"I fell in love with fountain pens when Miss Casey taught us penmanship in the third grade. My penmanship was just promising — my letters were small, did not slant enough, and hugged the bottom line, never quite reaching the one above."

Read the article in its entirety here.

Duplicity

A quote from the movie 'Duplicity', spoken by Paul Giamatti as the character Richard Garsik: "Who writes with a fountain pen? How friggin' pretentious is that?" :-)

Sheaffer Pen Commercial Vivian Vance 1950's

Pocket Blonde -- Guest review by Jack Labusch -- Jinhao Evening Stripes Fountain Pen

A wonderful review of the Jinhao Evening Stripes fountain on Diane Fennel's great blog, 'Pocket Blonde'.



Click on the title to go to the review, and here to go to the pen's webpage

Which Makes the Better Writer: the Hand or the Keyboard? Age Is a Part

"05 October 2009
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: we talk with an expert on children and handwriting.

RS: Virginia Berninger is an educational psychology professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. She tells us about a study which found that children sometimes do a better job as writers when they compose the words by hand than when they type them on a keyboard.


VIRGINIA BERNINGER: "And this was a chance to follow over two hundred children -- it was about two hundred forty -- longitudinally, once a year for five years. And I looked comprehensively at writing development. And what we found, which was very surprising to us, is that they wrote longer essays, they wrote the words faster. And, in the paper just published, they wrote more complete sentences in fourth and sixth grade when they were writing in handwriting by pen than when writing on keyboard."

Click the title bar to read the full interview

A Little Luxury to Honor India's Man of Modesty

Gandhi Loyalists Appalled by $23,000 Commemorative Pen



By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, October 3, 2009

NEW DELHI, Oct. 2 -- Images of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the father of modern India and an icon of asceticism and nonviolence, have ended up in some unlikely places before, including in ads for Apple computers and on counterculture T-shirts.

But it's fair to say that the latest incarnation may be the most ironic: Gandhi, in his signature loincloth, hawking a $23,000 fountain pen named in his honor.

The limited-edition Montblanc fountain pen in 18-carat solid gold is engraved with Gandhi's image and tricked out with a saffron-colored mandarin garnet on the clip and a rhodium-plated nib. Unveiled in honor of what would have been Gandhi's 140th birthday on Friday, the pen has prompted howls from Hindu groups and Gandhians, who say the sticker price is the lifetime income of many of India's poor while the Center for Consumer Education in the southern state of Kerala has sued to stop sales of the pen, calling it "a mockery."

Click the title bar to read the entire article

Dunhill Fighter Provenance Fountain Pen

by Jared Paul Stern



"The new Fighter Provenance Fountain Pen from London-based luxury goods firm Dunhill does not take its name in vain: the limited edition writing instrument is made from the original aluminum engine casing taken from the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine of the legendary World War II Spitfire MK1 fighter plane. Produced in very small numbers due to the scarcity of the material, the pen's details also reflect this iconic aircraft - the bolt and rivet effects in the original aluminum; the tapered edges echoing the aerodynamics; and a window feature on the side of the barrel displaying level of ink and even the pen clip design directly references the shape of the spitfire propeller. The cap is also created using plexiglass which is exactly the same material used for the bubble canopy of the late 1930's and early 1940's fighter planes."

Pen

A fun little animation entitled 'Pen'.

Britain came close to dropping poisoned darts on German troops - Times Online

"Britain considered dropping millions of poisoned darts on German troops in the final stages of the Second World War, secret files made public have revealed.

...Designs show three different types of dart. One looks like a fountain pen, the others like a flat penknife."



Read the full article here.

E-mail, texting push penmanship aside | CITIZEN-TIMES.com | Asheville Citizen-Times

"Have you heard that some people believe it would be a good thing if cursive writing — or script, if you will — went the way of the horse and buggy? All those years of learning and struggling for a beautiful “hand” will be for naught.

But think of it: When was the last time you wrote cursive except to sign a check or legal document or pen a note to your grandmother? And when is the last time you got an actual hand-written letter?

Most of us write on keyboards, or we Twitter or send phone messages now. It's all very legible, and the recipient can read it with no trouble. Word processing creates a level playing field for those of us whose writing isn't so great."

Read the full article here.