Ranga Bamboo Demonstrator: misty marvel

Just received in the post, the pen I wasn't sure about. First, I wasn't going to join the group buy on Fountain Pen Network - I'd maxed out my pen budget for several months to come on the Pink Pelikan; but then I remembered I'd always wanted one of the bamboo pens. (The smaller of the two sizes offered, as I have fairly small hands.) And then, I wasn't sure whether to get the demonstrator, or one of the rippled ebonites; but Vaibhav Mehandiratta, who had arranged the group buy, made my mind up for me, so I ordered the demonstrator and waited...

And here it is.

Most people who got demonstrators ordered a bakul (matte) finish with polished ends. I ordered bakul throughout. Hm. I wasn't so sure about that choice when it arrived. I looked at pictures of people's pens with polished ends and thought they looked so much nicer than what I'd got.

So far, so unconvinced... but then I put the pen in my hand. Oh, it felt good. Comfortable, just the right size, with a long and slightly curved section, the threads a long way up and out of my fingers' way. The curves of the bamboo pattern fitting nicely into the web of my hand. Light, warm, suited. My hands were convinced even if my eyes weren't.

I love the bakul surface. It looks misty and mysterious, particularly when the pen is inked; it's a network of tiny scratches, and has an organic feel to it which seems to go particularly well with the bamboo idea. It's really nice to hold, on the section; not slippery, and not rough, either, just gently keeping my fingertips in place.

The workmanship is good. The curves of the bamboo are nicely regular, the tiny indented rings between the nodes are precise, the gently conical ends have lovely snowflakes of bakul if you look closely, and you can't even see where the barrel and cap fit together once it's properly closed. The threading is precise, and in line with Indian eyedropper usage, fairly deep - several full turns to take the cap off. 

(One small gripe; there's a little swarf around the breather hole in the cap. I might just want to clean that up as I seem to get my fingers right on it every time I cap or uncap the pen.)

Better fill it up, then. It came in a nice little turquoise-lidded box, which inspired me to break out the Diamine Havasu Turquoise. Careful eyedroppering (keeping a watchful eye on the apparently sleeping cat on the chair next to mine... she's already spilled coffee all over the table), feeling confident in the well threaded section and the silicon grease already applied...

And here we go with the Ambitious Flex nib, a new direction for me. It's totally plain - nothing written on it anywhere, just the single slit all the way up the nib - and I like that aesthetic. Applied to paper, it will flex, about twice the width without pressing unduly, but I've found I can also use it to write without any flex at all, just as a medium fine nib. It's nice. Just occasionally it's dried up for a couple of downstrokes (but then I've been using it on rather bad paper, because that's what's at hand and I have my tax return to finish). Generally, the feed seems to keep up with it pretty well.

(Ranga Pens included the 'regular' nib and feed in my package as well as the Ambitious nib in the pen. I appreciate that. I might want to swap - then again, I might have another pen that needs it. In fact, the total package, with an eyedropper, and a little Fellowship pen as a gift, was really nicely put together. Compare certain pen manufacturers that sell you a nearly £100 pen and don't bother to include a converter, and you'll see why I love Indian pens. Not just good value - good service too.)

So, a few pages later on.... I'm really enjoying the pen. And as I use it, I'm beginning to come to like its looks, as well.

It makes me wonder: how much is our attitude to a pen affected by our experience of holding it and writing with it? and how much just by looks? Is it love at first sight, or do most of us come to find our favourite pens by a long period of acquaintance, getting to know their virtues, their oddities, their occasional vices? And it's obvious from the number of very nice, hardly used pens for sale on FPN and FPGeeks that people do fall out of love (or never fall  in love in the first place) with pens that they thought were a match made in heaven.

Anyway, my Ranga Bamboo is staying - and joining my collection of much loved Indian pens.

Now it's got personal

I have had a horrible three weeks - wheelchaired back to my partner's place in France thanks to the good services of Eurostar (I couldn't actually walk on to the train - they got me through all the controls, lifted me to the train, got me off and into a taxi the other end, and were wonderful, throughout), and after one night of misery, stretchered into hospital unable to move.

That's not about fountain pens? Well, it's Rheumatoid Arthritis. Which hits all joints, whenever it feels like it. That gives a lot of people problems using pens, and a desire to find more ergonomic and comfortable pens to use.

I've done a bit of browsing through the available options on the web, and there are a few useful threads on FPN, too. One thing stands out.

You can have a nice pen. Or you can have one you can write with. But not (often) both.

For instance the Rotring Skynn, one of the ugliest pens going, is fantastically ergonomic.But horrid. Some pretty pens like the Sheaffer Fashion and Targa are so slim they are painful to use.

There are some good fountain pen options for arthritic users and collectors. Generally, the following characteristics seem to be important;

• a reasonable amount of girth at the grip,
• a non-slip grip, whether that's textured, soft rubber, wood, matte ebony,
• a taper to the section helping the fingers maintain place,
• light weight, enabling a relaxed writing style (release the grip of death!)
• good, nib-end-heavy balance,
• a nib that's smooth and wet and consequently not requiring much pressure to write.

A slight turn-up to the nib might help (as in fude and Waverley nibs) by enabling the section to be fatter without forcing a higher writing angle.

The Laban Mento and Edison Collier fit the bill for fat-but-light well, and I like Edison's style and production values, so there may be more coming along if my pen budget is up to it. Equally, my fatter Indian ebonite and acrylic pens will remain favourites - light, girthy, and good (and I'm wondering how much a bakul grip helps over a polished one. I may be about to find out, as I've a matte demonstrator coming.) But no one seems to have set out to design a beautiful fountain pen specifically for arthritis and other hand pain sufferers (like those with Carpal Tunnel syndrome); it's just that there are certain 'regular' pens that fit the bill.

So, while I've been confined to hospital, I've been thinking, and doodling, and wondering if this might be the thing that gets me into actually making fountain pens.... because there are a lot of us out there (I'm surprised to have found out, now, just how many of my friends have some form of arthritis or RSI), and a lot of us who want fountain pens that are both comfortable and beautiful. And well made.

So please, FP lovers with hand pain - let me know what works and what doesn't. And I'll be adding more on this subject as I find out which pens in my collection make the cut, and which will be heading to eBay or the classifieds.


Fortunately, I've never collected Slimline Targas.

X-ray vision - ink vue style French celluloid

A nice little pen that I acquired recently at a French car boot sale. I particularly like this 'x ray' celluloid, which seems to be very much a French thing - at least, I've never seen it on an English pen, and it doesn't seem to be common in Italian vintage either. This is particularly nice because the colour is a sort of orangey pink like rose hip syrup.

It's a Matcher pen - Matcher Colombes was a French manufacturer that's not terribly well known but seems to have turned out rather nice pens. Or put another way, I've managed to find five or six over the years and they've all been good quality.

Unfortunately I'm going to have my work cut out with this one. I'm pretty sure the clip is a replacement, and it doesn't fit all that well, and the cap rings are missing. But it's still a stunning bit of celluloid.

Hello Kitty! a Waterman with a purr

Many collectors focus on top of the range pens, but school pens and 'fun' ranges provide plenty of fun too. Trying to track down all the variants of the Sheaffer No-nonsense. Pelikan Pelikano or Waterman Kultur can be addictive.

And one thing I do love about school pens is their quirky nature. Pelikan's various youth ranges have some splendid prints, and here's a Waterman that amused me with its little cats chasing mice along the barrel. (Sorry, I got them upside down in the picture.) There's even a tiny mouse on the end of the barrel.

Now if only I could get a Nakaya version...

A modern 'Safety', the Harley Davidson Spirit

This little pen is quite an oddity. Its proportions - cap to barrel, turning knob to barrel - are those of a safety pen; the cap is relatively short. And like a safety pen, it has a nib that twists out when you turn the little knob.

It's not a safety, though. Like the Pilot VP it's a cartridge/converter pen with a retractable nib.

It's quite an attractive little beast. Quite sleek, in dark blue anodised metal and black plastic. That sleekness is maximised by having the wide clip flush with the body - it's only when you push on the top of the cap that the clip pops up ready to grab your shirt pocket. There's also a nicely understated detail of knurling at the cap lip and on the barrel end of the turning knob.

I'm not as much an admirer of the branding, the Harley-Davidson logo on a little black cartouche on the barrel, but it's discreet and robustly applied - it's not going to fall off or rub off when you use the pen.

The section is gently tapered and has a small lip to prevent your fingers sliding down. Turn the knob and out comes a rather nice steel nib, a two-tone nib with vertical lines giving it a slightly Art Deco feel and no branding at all. It's quite austere and it fits the overall aesthetic of the pen quite nicely, besides being slightly reminiscent of the Harley shield with its bar across.

The section unscrews, giving access to the nib carriage, a metal insert which accepts a mini cartridge (haven't tried with a standard international).

It's a long pen, nearly 14cm capped, and it's pretty heavy, too.

I do like this pen, but I wonder why it's retractable? The big advantage of retractable pens like the Lamy Dialog or the Pilot VP/Capless is that you can simply press to get the nib out, so they're really convenient for writing occasional notes. This pen, though, has to be uncapped, and then you have to twist the nib out too, so it's even less convenient than using a standard pen.

With the safety pen back in the 1920 or 1930s, of course, the retraction of the nib closed off the ink reservoir, preventing leakage in your pocket. But this isn't a safety pen - it's just a disguised cartridge/converter. So the twist mechanism doesn't fulfil any useful purpose.

It does write nicely. Although it's a fairly heavy pen I've found it really enjoyable for longer stretches of writing. The section is comfortable and the pen is nicely balanced; I think most of the weight is in the nib carrier.

Harley doesn't make its own pens. There's a  Waterman Kultur that was made for Harley, in three versions, with rather lurid printed designs, but I don't think Waterman made this pen. I have heard that it may have been put together by Stypen, another French manufacturer (which was acquired by BIC in 2004), but I don't have any evidence for that, though it does seem to use a similar mechanism to the Stypen UP (http://fpgeeks.com/forum/showthread.php/7408-Stypen-Up-a-cheap-retractable). The section even looks slightly similar.

Final verdict? Well, the engineering is really lovely, but it's not all that useful. But all in all, it's a successful pen, and I think does a good job of extending the Harley branding both as regards design and mechanical nous.

Postscript - a new version found!

Remarkably, I've managed to find two of these pens this year, although unfortunately the second one came without its cap. (I had a good ferret in the bottom of the pen box, but no, it was nowhere to be found.) This one is in a rather fetching pinstripe.

Pen manufacturers and the online community

Ninety percent of pen blogging is about particular pens. Reviews, repairs, likes and dislikes. What do you think of the new Pelikan vibrant blue, the latest TWSBI, the new Lamy lilac? What about TWSBI cracks, Ahab idiosyncracies, a nib that's a nail or a wet noodle.

But occasionally a post comes along that makes you think. Bruno Taut's latest did just that. Are things changing? Are pen manufacturers finally waking up to the existence of the online community?

The fountain pen ghetto

I've had the same experience in quite a number of shops. It's the experience that tells me they have no idea about who's actually buying fountain pens. No idea about why we want them.

We all know that anyone buying a gel pen or rollerball or marker wants choice. They want a choice of widths of pen, they want a choice of colours, they want a choice of metallic and fluorescent inks too. So the pen display is absolutely full of different options.

But fountain pens? You can have: a medium nib. You can have: blue ink, black ink, blue-black ink. And they come in the following colours: black, chrome, and pink (that's for lay-deez).

The little fountain pen ghetto seems to belong to a different world.

The worst thing is that the big pen companies don't know better, either.  One of the best things about fountain pens is that I can change character and mood with a change of ink - I'm not stuck with one colour. It can be the rich Murasaki-Shikibu purple one day, Herbin Stormy Grey with its metallic glints the next, or Waterman Turquoise... Or it can be Cross black, if I have forms to fill in or want to do some drawing with my EF nib. Yet Parker, Cross and Waterman really don't have extensive ranges of inks, and even worse, don't manage to convince most stores to stock more than two or three colours (which inevitably include black, blue, or blue-black).

I think they may have missed the fact that the world is now divided increasingly into two kinds of people - there are people who just don't use fountain pens, and there are fountain pen lovers who are increasingly well informed and adventurous with their choices.

Staff in such stores often tell me there's no demand for fountain pens. I've given up arguing. They're right - in a way.

There's no demand for the fountain pens they're selling. There's no demand for boring fountain pens.

After all, would they stack all their shelves with the same Pentel rollerball, in red and blue only?