I am a fountain pen addict. This was not always the case. Like most people of my generation, I was forced to use a fountain pen at school. And, like most people, I found the experience messy (blots on the paper and stains on my fingers), scratchy, and slow.
At university I graduated from ballpoints to felt-tipped fineliners. After a brief flirtation with the Rotring Rapidograph, I discovered the joys of rollerballs and gel pens.
For years, I was a rollerball fanatic – Pentel, Rotring (the late lamented Tikky), Zebra, Uniball. Eventually I settled on the Pentel G-Tec-C4, which gave me a consistent very fine line in what I then thought of as a wide variety of colours. Then, a couple of decades ago, I began to take an interest in fountain pens again. Initially I came across the Rotring Artpen with an extra-fine nib and was surprised both by the fineness of the line and the smoothness with which it wrote.
Since then, I have gradually shifted away from rollerballs to fountain pens for most purposes. I do keep a set of Pentel G-Tecs for special purposes (copy-editing or proofreading on paper – an increasingly rare event – or when travelling by plane – also an increasingly rare event).
Here are some of the reasons I am a convert to fountain pens:
The writing experience. Using a decently made modern fountain pen on good quality paper is a revelation. The nib glides effortlessly across the page. It is much easier on the wrist than the average ballpoint or even rollerball.
A fountain pen is for life. Fountain pens seem far more expensive than ballpoints. Typically, they range in price from tens to hundreds (or even thousands) of pounds, though you can get a decent basic fountain pen for less than £5 (specifically, the Platinum Preppy). But a well-maintained good-quality fountain pen can reasonably be expected to last you a lifetime (in fact, there is a thriving market in vintage fountain pens), whereas even an expensive ballpoint is no more than a fancy holder for a disposable writing mechanism. To give you an example, I have a sixty-year-old Waterman that is still in working order; an equivalent pen today would cost around £120 (that works out at just £2 per year!) If you want to reduce the environmental impact of your writing habits, think about a fountain pen – the only consumable element is the ink.
A bewildering choice of inks. Most ballpoints or gel pens are available in three or four colours (perhaps a dozen if you use something like a Pilot G-Tec-C4 or a Pentel Slicci). But there are literally hundreds of shades of fountain pen ink to choose from to suit your mood or style. You can even find glittery fountain pen inks and scented fountain pen inks. There are also the slightly scary iron gall inks, which lay down a virtually waterproof and permanent (to archival standards) line. I happen to like dark inks (blue-black, dark greens, dark browns), but that preference is hard to satisfy with ballpoints or gel pens.
A fountain pen gives your handwriting character. If you want a pen that produces a line of unvarying thickness, then a ballpoint or gel pen is ideal. With a fountain pen, the thickness of the line varies slightly with the pressure you apply and the angle that the nib makes to the paper. This is true even of stiff steel nibs (at least, I find it to be true with my Kaweco Sport), but it is more pronounced with gold nibs and specially designed flex nibs. In addition, nibs come in a variety of shapes to create a range of writing effects (fountain pens are still the obvious choice for calligraphy). I favour extra-fine nibs (particularly Japanese ones, which are even finer than their European brethren), which lay down a line similar to that of Hi-Tec rollerballs. But I also have a range of italic and stub nibs for calligraphy.
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