Conway Stewart: Benign Neglect

It suddenly occurred to me this morning that for reasons I don’t understand, as far as ink goes, Conway Stewart is a neglected brand in blog pages related to pen and ink. Thinking about it now, I can’t recall reading a single ink review for a Conway Stewart ink. What could the reason be?

A quick Google search shows that the choices are severely limited for someone looking to buy Conway Stewart ink. In addition, the available colors have shrunk from few to paltry. Two or three online stores offer blue or black, but nowhere could I find the full palette of eight colors. Pendemonium has in stock seven of them, lacking only the CS Green featured in this review. This situation makes you wonder if Conway Stewart is gradually withdrawing from the market, or if the demand for their ink has fallen off. I purchased a box of four Conway Stewart inks three years ago, and I believe it was from Classic Fountain Pens in Los Angeles. Now they don’t list Conway Stewart ink on their website. The set of four inks I got included blue, black, green and CS Green.

I’ve done little more than try the blue, black and green in an abbreviated fashion, mainly because the colors are too basic, too ‘vanilla’ for my tastes. On the other hand, the 30 ml bottle of CS Green is now almost empty. This is an ocean water blue-green that is beautiful, practical and eye-catching all at once. The occasions where it would be both acceptable and admired are enough to make it a basic, daily-use shade of ink.

The brief list of CS Green qualities in the photograph here reflect good results. On what I often consider to be a difficult 100% cotton paper (Crane stationery), the CS Green in my Pelikan 425 showed no feathering or bleed through. The flow of ink, the lubrication both good. I did something to test the waterproof qualities I’d never tried before. First, I submerged a sample in a bowl of water; a good amount of the ink washed out, but words were still legible. Next, I held the paper under running water for half a minute—still legible. Results were a heck of a lot better than someone leaving the cake out in the rain. (Mmm…Am I dating myself?)

The upshot of it all…If you can find a dealer who still has CS Green ink, buy yourself a bottle.

A Subtle Green

Greeeen!

Something about a green ink that immediately grabs my eye. Perhaps because it has in its different shades the power to spin or support a variety of moods and suggestions. The lighter mixes of green are difficult to use because too often they lack body or weight enough to make the written word easy to read, but there are a number of darker, richer shades that don’t make one squint in order to see what’s written. Most of the better known ink brands have at least one or two robust shades of green, and many of them are very close to being one-of-a-kind. I always felt that Montblanc did something very special with their Racing Green, now sadly discontinued. Private Reserve has a handsome green called Sherwood Forest, though I always found it a messy ink. German master, De Atramentis first thrilled me with the Edgar Allan Poe emerald green, and later the Frederick Chopin pine green. Conway Stewart makes a delicious blend called CS Green. Newest to the fold is the marvelous series from Iroshizuku, which includes the beautiful Shin-ryoku.

But this time I want to focus on a French ink, one in the J. Herbin family of colors — Vert Empire.

In an earlier post, writing about another J. Herbin ink, the very unusual Cacao du Brésil, I compared it to the Charles Dickens ink made by De Atramentis. Now, a couple of days later I find myself going again to the same comparison in talking about the Herbin color, Vert Empire. No, I do not mean to imply that the two are close or similar, but rather that both these inks have a like quality of understatement. There is nothing bold or eye-opening about Vert Empire or the Charles Dickens, but each has its own subdued strength.

Clicking to enlarge the sample above will probably make the words legible, but to make things easier I will reproduce my comments here.

VERT EMPIRE — Sample of the J. Herbin ink, Vert Empire using a Sailor 1911 fountain pen, medium nib. The paper here is not something I can be too specific about, as it’s a page from an old blank journal, something I bought at the Museum of Modern Art on a visit to New York several years ago. From the look of this page, the pen, ink and paper behave well together. Ink flow is good; no feathering; shading is good also, and there’s no bleed through. (smeared words) Let’s look at drying time and smearing with this sentence. Yeah, it’s a wet, slow to dry ink, more so than its Herbin brother ink, Cacao du Brésil.

I give this ink a high rating and suspect I might even grow to like it more in time.