Sometimes you’ll come across a fountain pen that feels slightly scratchy when you use it – the nib might write smoothly in one direction but…
Many people find that buying pens, inks and paper from Japan is a good way to both save money and access a wide array of…
The world we live in has become full of highly charged opinions competing for your attention but what should you believe? What is the truth…
Background Back in the late 1950s & early 1960s Pilot made a series of pens called the “Super” which eventually morphed into the single-letter E…
This is a question that gets asked a lot in the fountain pen world and I’ve given it some thought and seen a few really…
Nibs are some of the most distinctive design features of any fountain pen – they are the part we connect with the most because they…
Here are some of my Sailor pocket pens, in date order … or as accurately as I can achieve. From 1960 – 1971 date codes…
Here are some of my Pilot pocket pens arranged in manufacturing date order. I thought it might be interesting to photograph each one in a…
In early 1960s Japan office fashions changed and male workers started to wear the newly designed “Hong Kong shirt”, which combined a formal collar with…
This year we’ve witnessed a massive reduction in the number of insects nationally – to such an extent that even the national media have been…
One of the most fundamental things we do is to work out what things are – it’s a very human interest. We like putting a…
There’s always a lot of debate in the wildlife world about common names vs scientific names so I thought I’d try to sum up some…
There has always been a bit of negativity surrounding some Chinese pen brands because some people consider many of their pens to be “copies” of…
It might seem a simple thing but when you own a good pen you want to be able to pick it up and write, first…
I’ve been interested in Japanese pocket pens since I bought my first Pilot E95S from Amazon Japan back in 2023. Fountain pen enthusiasts consistently rate…
Identifying exactly which slimline pen you have can be quite tricky, with the numerous small changes and subtly different models available from 1959 to 2008.…
Recently I’ve been looking at the possibility of using fountain pens to write my specimen data labels. These are small labels pinned under a specimen…
Between the years 1960 and 2010 Montblanc produced a range of slim-bodied fountain pens in a new sleek and modern design. To this day they…