If it’s from St. Louis Art Supply, chances are that pen was tuned by their fountain pen specialist before it went to you. Regardless, I hope it gives you a ton of joy to write with.
Truth be told, I am actually pretty new to fountain pens and have to go pretty cheap. This is the first pen I have that’s actually got parts and inks available to purchase online. Plus it’s perfectly sized for my tiny baby hands. It looks adorable when I clip it through the rings of a notebook.
Or people like me have Autism and ADHD, this lacking the fine motor control for handwriting.
My “handwriting” ended up with me being the only kid in school that was permitted to hand in all my written work by typing it up on computer and printing it out. In 1990.
I ended up on the opposite side of that. Writing was one of my obsessions growing up, so my cursive is very classic and neat. I need to get back into writing more than work notes, actually.
In America at least, The headline is just not true. Computers, phones, and tablets are killing cursive, full stop. Ballpoints killed fountain pens as a general purpose writing instrument, it's true, but that was literally fifty years ago in public schools in the US. Cursive however, kept on truckin'. Even in the 80s and 90s, we learned with pencils, and did exams and in-class writing with ballpoints and maybe a fancy-pants rollerball. By college, I was using fountain pens because I'm a dork who never found the obsolete text-generation tool I didn't find interesting, but the rest of my classmates were contentedly doing their papers with their Bics. Even the article from the 60s, cited in the story, was written by a "researcher" who worked for a private company selling handwriting lessons.
It's only as laptops became so common as to be practical and permitted in classrooms that the mindset changed. Keyboarding had a brief heyday as a skill for everyone, but now even that is fading as students are most comfortable with touch-screens of various sizes. My nine year old doesn't touch type, but merely being familiar with the location and uses of the keys on a fullsize keyboard has set her apart among her peers. Her kids will probably wonder how she managed to get along without full-time transcription. Funnily enough, her manuscript is god-awful, with so many unconnected loops and ascenders that a letter could sometimes be any of three or four, but the little bit of cursive they have learned, encouraged by her dear-old chicken-scratch dad, is more legible. I don't want to imply that's the norm, though. Most people's cursive is much harder to decipher without context than their printing. Then, as we write by hand less overall, the need to optimize for speed and comfort becomes less pronounced. Easy, legible letter forms that are just slower to make are fine.
So that being said, are fountain pens in good working order and with ink in them nicer for cursive? Hell yes, of course they are! They were generally built to last, so more thoughtfully designed for a writer, the technology allows for less pressure (though the required pressure for writing on a single piece of paper can sometimes be overstated by us enthusiasts) and more "personality." That said, 95% of people didn't care about any of that enough to want to stick with fountain pens even when ballpoints were less mature than they are now. That was doubly true because we as colelctors have some serious survivors' bias around the brands that have lasted and particularly the vintage pens that hung around. Anything cheaper than an Esterbrook J barely matters to a collector, but that the leaky plastic bananas of many a bulk-lot Ebay listing made up the vast majority of fountain pens most people were dealing with. They are literal garbage now, but they weren't far off back then.
Cursive or print, most people just want a convenient stick to put ink onto paper.
Eh. I graduated in 07, and literally the only time I’ve ever used cursive was when I was made to. Cursive itself seemed kinda pointless, as every year I was taught cursive, I was told “it won’t be required this year, but they won’t take your work unless it’s in cursive next year”. Then, next year, they said the same thing, and again and again, and tomorrow never came. At some point it just felt like this vestigial organ, especially as it becomes more and more apparent that anything important was going to happen in print (tests, government forms, emails, etc etc). And we didn’t have laptops in our classrooms. So, from my point of view, it’s more that it’s utterly obsolete than it is to do with computers invading the classroom.
Things happen at different paces in different places, and I am about a decadeish older than you, but the broader trend has just been that long form writing will be done on some sort of keyboard, so the purpose that cursive exists to serve mattered less and less. Your experience was a bit different, but I don't know that we're describing completely different trends, neither of which has anything to do with the poor innocent ballpoints, LOL.
I think the exact opposite, most people’s (who are old enough to have learned cursive) handwriting are more legible in cursive. A huge amount of people print AWFULLY.
That’s got to just be practice though, right? If you write primarily in cursive, it’s going to look better. Nowadays, people hardly write at all. As long as I can read my handwriting, it doesn’t really matter in my day-to-day life.
Meanwhile in reality… millions of documents with cursive writing on them from decades ago aren’t legible enough to be transcribed. Being taught cursive DOES NOT mean your cursive is any good. It is far easier for most people to read and write in print which is why you are no longer allowed to use it on any documents of consequence aside from a signature.
As a university instructor, hard disagree. I hate when my students write in cursive. At least with bad print I can figure out what it means eventually. A few squiggles and a loop could be Lom, Foo, Goll, or anything else. Forget the fact they don’t dot their i’s or cross their t’s.
Diamine Autumn Oak, Montblanc Corn Poppy Red, Montblanc Golden Yellow. I'm not sure which if any of these are still being made though, probably not the yellow.
I haven’t done much of it. I have another Pilot Metropolitan with a medium nib which writes very smoothly. The stub nib isn’t as smooth, although my initial experiments have been on paper that’s not especially fountain pen friendly.
I also notice that I have to write more slowly with the stub nib or I get line widths that vary unexpectedly. Pilot calls it a calligraphy nib and I think it really is, rather than something you’d use for everyday notetaking. Perhaps those whose handwriting is more consistent have better results.
It’s too bad because I very much like how stub nibs let colored inks show. I’ve noticed that with narrow nibs, sometimes a colored ink doesn’t really “read” as colored when you look at it.
I find that they’re great for headings, titles, dates, etc - a little emphasis in my notes. With that said, my pilot metropolitan’s stub nib has also always been really scratchy too, and hard starts a lot. It’s always been one of my most disappointing pens.
One of my favorite stub nibs is a Jinhao 80 (Lamy 2000 clone, usually sub-$10). I swapped out the Jinhao nib for a Lamy 1.1 stub, and it writes like a dream!
My most recent ink purchase was Dominant Industry's Earl Grey Tea, and it's a beautiful orange shade that is well-behaved (albeit not quite as red as I was expecting when I ordered it). Absolutely no complaints - I even love the bottle, however I will probably get through it slowly because I don't often use colours that are bright and eye-catching.
By contrast, one of the inks that is in my permanent rotation and I plan to continue purchasing over and over is Diamine Saddle Brown. It's a more subtle, darker brown that can pass for 'serious' writing but still has a personality that I prefer over many other browns. If the orange of Earl Grey is a cozy Autumn fire, Saddle Brown is the tree branches holding on to their last leaves and the damp earth underfoot on a cold, foggy morning - both enticing in different ways.
Nice - I had misread this as Diamine Earl Grey at first, and was very confused (“I’ve used this before and don’t remember any orange tones!”). But it does look beautiful!
Saddle Brown also looks very nice and versatile. Do you think that you need a medium nib to get the full spectrum of shading? I’ve sometimes been disappointed with browns that are too light with an F nib (bought a sample of Robert Oster Caffe Crema, but it really was too light for my daily use unless in an M, B, or stub).
I do expect that you would need a medium or wider nib in order to get a real sense of shading out of the ink.
To your other concern, though, if anything I've found that Saddle Brown goes much darker when used in an F/EF nib. Certainly not to the point of being black, but dark enough that unless you were actually paying attention to the shade it doesn't immediately grab attention as being non-standard; to some people that defeats the point, but I find that sometimes (e.g. at work) I want to fly under the radar a bit while also knowing that I'm using 'my' colour.
It also looks amazing in notebooks that have a slightly ivory/off-white cast to the pages, where the overall sepia effect is something I really enjoy.
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