Feels Like Spring

Dog life has me on the go these days leaving little time to sit around dreaming up topics that might make an interesting blog post. All the corralling, trips to the vet or Pet Supermarket and filling in holes dug in the driveway tend to take the mind far from blogspot.com. I mean, concentration is a touch-and-go kind of thing when a thirty-six pound puppy is dragging twenty-five feet of hose-pipe around the yard or chewing on old asbestos shingles she found in the shed. If I’m completely honest though, all of it—excepting the asbestos shingles—is a daily joy.

Moving on from dogs, I was looking back at an old Japan blog post this morning, one showing a sketch and a journal excerpt, and I got the idea to re-post the sketch from a different angle. That part of the earlier post which caught my attention was not so much the sketch of tomatoes and a can of sardines as the thoughts about that particular March day written in the margins around the sketch. 

The sketch and the words surrounding it are in my journal of the time, a Life Noble Note Plain notebook with cream paper. The sketch was done first in a 2B Mitsubishi pencil and then colored with Mitsubishi Uni Watercolor Pencils. The journal notes, as far as pen and ink go, are a little harder to discern because earlier and later pages in the journal leave no hint. Looking at it closely I am fairly certain that the ink is an old De Atramentis color called Jules Verne Deep Sea Blue and the pen used, a Sailor Profit with a 21k Naginata medium nib. As the handwriting might cause a problem for some, a cleaner version is below:

Friday, 5 March 2010 — Thinking of tomatoes and sardines for some reason. I have neither in my kitchen but wish I did. That and some saltine crackers. Feels like spring today, a change from the cold rain of yesterday, a day that typified everything about winter, the wet and the cold. Plum blossoms are in bloom in the garden below me, and the Japanese magnolia is full of buds.

Searching through my photographs of Kugayama I can find none of the ‘garden below me’ showing both the plum blossoms and the budding Japanese magnolia, but the one below is fairly close. At least the magnolia (tree with leaves of the lightest green) is budding though the plum tree is out of the picture. The red blooms at the far left are on a giant azalea at least ten feet in height. I was standing on my third-floor veranda when I took the picture; the house and garden belong to my landlord.

Four Favorite Inks

It’s been some time since Scriblets has featured a post from the world of fountain pens and ink, and as a result the feeling of neglect is knocking about in my head. Easy to explain in some ways and daily habits do still include the use of one or more fountain pen and a whole assortment of inks. Most of my pens get a regular workout, and I’m often dithering over this or that ink to a degree many would call unreasonable. Still a passionate hobby, but one that has been affected in a large way by a change of scene.

It could be true that only a fountain pen hobbyist who has made the move from a major city to a very small and isolated town can understand the impact of change as far as fountain pens and inks are concerned. For many years my world was a heavenly realm of pens, ink, paper and fellow enthusiasts, Tokyo a paradise of stationery goods, an anytime avalanche of choices from basic to connoisseur. My little post-Tokyo beachtown in Florida is home to those for whom a Bic ballpoint and a giveaway memo pad are instrument enough for whatever needs jotting. And my guess is, you’d be confounded if you were shopping for a color other than black, blue or red. The inability to browse and experiment has had a negative influence on my love of pen and ink. Sure, there is a wide world of choices to look at and buy on hundreds of different websites, but my initiation was hands-on and looking at a digital image onscreen is nothing compared to holding it in my hand and giving it a try.

But still I scribble with my assortment of fountain pens, change ink for small reason, dabble with bottles of ink and Q-tips, read what I can to keep up with the game but purchase little outside of ink or paper from online stores. I can count on one hand the fountain pens I have purchased untested from online sources. Happily though, ink continues to be an easier and more trustworthy buy from distant vendors. Unless someone is badly screwing up the scans or photos of swab samples, ink is a safe bet without actually getting it on your fingers before purchase.

I have my favorites, though they change often enough to confound those on the outside, whose first question is always, “How will you ever use so much ink?” But for those on the inside, the question is hardly relevant. I have a bottle of Montblanc black ink purchased in Tokyo in 1985 which only improves with age; rather than using it up my concern is making it last. Ever changing, the three or four at the top of my list this month are shown below, all colors I use if not every day, then every other day. The case will probably be different in two or three weeks, but for now…

None of them new, and one unfortunately discontinued, these are the inks that color, stain, smear and highlight my journal pages these days. The oldest is the marvelous classic shade of gray-green from De Atramentis, Charles Dickens. Next is in my opinion an incomparable Turquoise from Montblanc, an ink no longer available and another I use carefully. Wine inks can be risky and shouldn’t be left too long in a fountain pen, but the Dornfelder from De Atramentis is one hard to deny. Nothing too special except it is a shade of red that appeals to me. The Diamine Denim is the newest and a very special shade of blue that instantly erases thoughts of ‘boring blue’ and hits the target dead on in terms of name and color. Seems like they stole the color straight out of the Levi Strauss dye pot.

The samples above (from top to bottom) were written with: (1) Pelikan Souverän 600 and De Atramentis Charles Dickens ink; (2) Sailor Profit with a Naginata nib and De Atramentis Dornfelder ink; (3) Montblanc Marcel Proust pen from the famous writers series and Montblanc’s Turquoise ink; (4) the wonderful Pelikano Junior with Diamine Denim ink.

All of the inks are available at Goulet Pens, where quality and service are unbeatable.

Seven Oranges

Prompted by Brian and Rachel Goulet’s October inkdrop from Goulet Pens, I went digging in my ink stacks pulling out some resonant oranges to line up beside their “Autumn Leaves II” October inkdrop palette. Pretty much a sucker for inks in the orange range, and with shades enough to satisfy any Halloween or Autumn theme I have probably wasted money on some I too rarely use. But addiction to ink being what it is, the phrase ‘waste of money’ doesn’t easily get through to me.

In one important characteristic, orange inks are like their distant cousins, the grays. For both colors to work well they must have good saturation, otherwise the words wash off the page and a reader will have to squint to read. No matter how beautiful an ink is in the bottle, or in a swab test, if it produces hard-to-read lines of writing, then you don’t have an ink that is very useful. I could name a half dozen orange inks that fail the test—I have a few bottles gathering dust—but for this comparison I left those inks out and lined up seven oranges that have rich saturation and are not difficult to read on the written page.

Another thing about the seven inks displayed here is that each one comes from a reputable company consistently producing quality inks. The range is broadly international, covering inks from the US, Switzerland, Germany, England and Japan.

A word about each…

The inks on the chart here are by no means listed 1-7 in any particular order of preference or quality. It is a totally random arrangement.

1. Private Reserve Orange Crush: I lied. Private Reserve’s Orange Crush is one of my longtime favorites that has as much to do with a childhood full of Orange Crush pop as it does with the richness of the color. This one is perhaps the most saturated of the seven and produces lines that can almost be called delicious.

2. Caran d’Ache Saffron: Similar to Diamine’s beautiful Pumpkin ink, this one too has the needed saturation, and a softness not seen in the Orange Crush. Part of the Earth Colors series from Caran d’Ache, it is a perfect fit, looking much like something squeezed from the earth.

3. De Atramentis Buonarroti Michelangelo: De Atramentis has long been a favorite ink maker and this one comes from Dr Jansen’s Historic Persons series. Very close to butterscotch and not terribly far from its Saffron neighbor, this ink definitely has a renaissance flavor, a color familiar in the works of Michelangelo.

4. Diamine Sunshine Yellow: Perfect name for a near golden yellow-orange. Sprinkle some orange zest beside this ink and it would be a match. This is one in the October inkdrop which arrived yesterday and there hasn’t been time yet to try it a pen, so I am trusting the saturation will be similar in a written sample.

5. Sailor Custom Mix Persimmon: Another ink that is always in one of my fountain pens, it was mixed by Osamu Ishimaru at a Tokyo pen clinic. I placed a persimmon on the table and asked him to match the color. No question he hit the bullseye. It is the color of late autumn persimmons hanging on trees in Japan.

6. Iroshizuku Fuyu-gaki (Winter Persimmon): No argument with Pilot and blenders of the Iroshizuku inks; they too have captured the essence of persimmons. My tiny complaint about the color is that it is closer to the color of the fruit in autumn and not winter. As the fruit ripens you will see more red.

7. Iroshizuku Yu-yake (Sunset): Another ink I like despite not using very often. That isn’t because of anything that bothers me specifically, except that it always looks better in a swab than it does in a letter, journal or notebook scribble. Saturation is fine and it has all the good qualities of Pilot ink.

For those with a penchant for orange, red-orange or yellow-orange inks, any of the above seven will do the trick and have your pens drunk on smoothness. Except for the De Atramentis Buonarroti Michelangelo they are all available at Goulet Pens, where the service is No. 1. If you are interested in the De Atramentis ink, it is available at Art Brown.

Trying to Find the Color

[The embedded sound clip of Chopin’s Prelude Op. 28 No. 4 in E Minor at the bottom may lend a faint breeze of color as you read the words below.]

Chopin is at the piano, quite oblivious of the fact that anyone is listening. He embarks on a sort of casual improvisation, then stops. Nothing will come… nothing but reflections, shadows, shapes that won’t stay fixed. ‘I’m trying to find the right colour, but I can’t even get the form…’ ‘You won't find the one without the other,’ says Delacroix, ‘and both will come together.’ ‘What if I find nothing but moonlight?’ ‘Then you will have found the reflection of a reflection.’ The idea seems to please the divine artist. He begins again, without seeming to, so uncertain is the shape. Gradually quiet colours begin to show, corresponding to the suave modulations sounding in our ears. Suddenly the note of blue sings out, and the night is all around us, azure and transparent. Light clouds take on fantastic shapes and fill the sky. They gather about the moon which casts upon them great opalescent discs, and wakes the sleeping colours. We dream of a summer night, and sit there waiting for the song of the nightingale…

Despite the appearance of the words ‘blue’ and ‘azure’ in this George Sand description of Chopin composing, I like to think that the ink blender at De Atramentis pondered this excerpt when he mixed the green called, Frédéric Chopin. The words seem to imply that the composer may have seen colors in notes.

Not the first time I have written about the Frédéric Chopin green ink from De Atramentis, but in the earlier post about green inks, a swatch was all that was offered of this distinctive shade of green.

At one point along the process someone tagged this ink with a ‘pine green’ label, but that isn’t what I see. Pine green suggests a color with a tinge more yellow and less gray or black. One quality of the De Atramentis famous name inks is the conjuring of exactly what you imagine that famous person would have in his or her fountain pen. The first moment I saw the Chopin ink I felt it reflected the composer.

J. Herbin’s Vert Empire is close to the De Atramentis green, but with more gray. I suspect the two could be confused without a careful comparison. In writing out the sample lines in the attached scan, I had to stop and start over two times because of smeared ink, so I would call it a slow drying ink. There is no feathering or bleed through, and minimal show through on Clairefontaine paper, and both saturation and shading are good. For my example, I filled a Platinum 3776 with Chopin green and the ink behaves beautifully in this pen. Excellent flow and lubrication and zero nib creep.

There are seventeen famous name inks from De Atramentis on my shelves, and the Frédéric Chopin green is neck and neck with my number one favorite, Charles Dickens. Strong recommendation for this composer’s special green.

Heart of Blue

One definition tells us that blue is, ‘a color whose hue is that of the clear sky, or that of the color spectrum lying between green and violet.’ For most people blue evokes thoughts of water, sky and perhaps universe. Who hasn’t seen the well-known photograph of a blue earth viewed from space. Apart from sky and water, blue carries a wide range of associations. It is at times a calm, peaceful color, one aligned with infinity, eternity, faith, purity, chastity and peace. Illustrations often show the Virgin Mary and Christ wearing blue. The color has also been linked with melancholia, probably a connection that grew out of the blues sung by African slaves. Another more modern link is with pornography, or the ‘blue movies’—dim screenings of once secret films.

Surveys might suggest that a majority of people polled choose blue as their favorite color. That certainly has been the trend as far as fountain pen ink goes. Blue is the first color of ink offered by ink makers, and since the 20th century has long been a standard color in documents where black once dominated. Without checking sales charts, I would venture to say that the average person buying ink today will choose something close to the standard blue.

But for some of us looking for blue ink, there is an urge to look past the familiar stand by and go for something further along the spectrum. Distinctive fountain pen ink is enjoying a wave of popularity among many these days, especially for those of us with a passion for interesting inks.

From ten bottles of blue ink I have selected six for their special, unusual or particular qualities. Again, I make no mention of writing quality, but focus only on color. Similar to the earlier post on green ink (here), this swatch sample, too shows color, maker and tool used to produce the sample swatch. Starting at the top left and reading across and down…

1. Turquoise • Montblanc • Brush

2. Blue • Pelikan • Q-tip

3. Blue • Conway Stewart • Brush

4. Kon-peki • Pilot Iroshizuku • Q-tip

5. Blue Suede • Private Reserve • Folded paper

6. Hans Christian Andersen • De Atramentis • Pen

Sadly, the Montblanc turquoise is another ink the company has decided to discontinue. I will sorely miss it when my last bottle comes up empty. The Pelikan blue is a standard shade, and in my opinion inferior to none. The Conway Stewart blue is another standard, one with a good depth. As so many of the Iroshizuku inks are, the Kon-peki is a standout, and a particularly distinctive and beautiful blue. Blue Suede by Private Reserve is another color that shows some distinction. To me, it is nothing less than exquisite. Another in the famous names series, Hans Christian Andersen from De Atramentis is close to the Blue Suede, but darker and thereby a touch more traditional. I have one friend who uses this ink exclusively for business papers.

And last, from the imagination of one young student contemplating it all:

“Blue”

BY DAN AT THE ORCHARD SCHOOL

Blue are blueberries freshly picked

a sapphire stone

and an aquamarine shine

Blue is the color of ink in a pen

A long line that never ends

Green Squiggles

The location of ink around here is for the time being haphazard. The Kugayama ink cabinet was something not shipped from Japan, and as a result there are now homeless ink bottles about, stacked in untidy rows on top of a chest. Staring at those bottles, I moved a few of them around, trying to put some order to the jumble. I’ve always been a sucker for green ink (among a half dozen other colors), so ended up with six bottles of green ink off to one side, the finalists chosen from a baker’s dozen of different greens.

I balked at the idea of filling six different pens to accommodate each of the greens, so divvied them up among pen, Q-tip, brush and folded paper. My purpose was to get a good, clean color sample, no more than a swatch of each color, and to leave out any observations about drying time, shading and such. I am happy enough offering just a simple color chart of green inks.

The attached scan may be difficult to read as far as the descriptions go. Here’s the order of colors and tools used; start at the top left and read across and down…

1. O-cha Green (Green Tea) • Sailor, order blend • scribbled with a pen

2. Racing Green • Montblanc • Q-tip

3. Conway Stewart Green • Conway Stewart • Brush

4. Frederick Chopin • De Atramentis • Folder paper

5. Shin-ryoku • Pilot Iroshizuku • Brush

6. Gin & Lime • Itô-ya Cocktail Ink • Q-tip

My favorite remains year after year the now discontinued Montblanc Racing Green. Some may find the bottom right, Gin & Lime a beautiful ink, and I would agree, but warn that it is a difficult color to read. Despite my fondness for the Iroshizuku inks, the Shin-ryoku comes off weakest in this line up. Always liked the Conway Stewart, but how can you not like that luscious blue-green. The Frederick Chopin is from the famous names series by De Atramentis, with a ‘pine green’ label attached to the ink. I like the heaviness of the green. I’ve saved Sailor’s O-cha Green for last, because it holds a special place in my nuttiness for ink. There is rarely a time when a pen loaded with this ink is not within my reach.

Igniting Sparks

Back in August of last year, Vanrensalier at Saint Austin’s Pub put up an interesting tongue in cheek post called, The Pen Pusher Test, in which he posed questions meant to ferret out those of us with ‘serious’ pen pushing tendencies. I got a kick out of that because I couldn’t help seeing myself in his questions, and wondering, “Am I that far gone?” The answer is probably yes.

I suppose my story today could apply to any one of several questions in Vanrensalier’s post. Nonetheless, I can’t help thinking that the outcome of my addiction in this case was definitely along positive lines. Not sure that I sent anyone running to the nearest fountain pen dealer, but perhaps I opened a window.

I have a young acquaintance here in Tokyo who is something of an artist, and who no doubt will one day after finishing high school and art college, find his way as a successful artist. A few months back he was working on an assignment at school combining drawing and/or painting with English text, something that expressed his feelings in connection with the drawing. The first time I saw a draft of his work, the text was written in pencil. I asked if he had considered doing it in ink, and if the idea appealed I’d be happy to loan him a fountain pen along with the ink of his choice.

He was reluctant at first for fear of imposing, or maybe even damaging the pen, but I waved off his concerns and handed over three pens for him to take home and play around with. A couple of days later he returned the pens, saying he would like to use the Sailor Professional Gear pen for his assignment. For the ink he chose De Atramentis Guiseppe Verdi Blue from my sample book, and I cleaned and filled the Sailor with that ink.

A few weeks later I was quite honored to receive his painting—post exhibition—as a gift. His way of saying thanks.

Did this experience light a spark of interest in fountain pens? I like to think so.

The text in the picture…

Thursday, September 10, 2009 — Morning

I rode fast on my bicycle, because I was late. I felt many different things on the way to school. First, I heard the breeze blowing and then noticed a utility pole on the road paved with concrete. Then I noticed other natural things in a routine way, and I thought, “Why have I [not] noticed the things around me lately? Why did I lose that?” I missed these things in the course of busy days. But today I re-connected with the daily important sights around me. I don’t want to lose that ever, even after I am grown. I don’t want to lose track of the small but important things around me.

A Fairy Tale Ink

Poking aimlessly around my ink shelves, no real purpose in mind, I came upon an old bottle of De Atramentis Hans Christian Andersen ink. “Oh, great color… excellent ink!” I thought. At the time I wasn’t thinking about what I might put in this blog, but the Hans Christian Andersen gave me an idea. This is an ink I have long enjoyed using, one I have given as a birthday gift on a couple of occasions, and something I have recommended many times. So, it occurred to me that a review of this old ‘fairy tale ink’ might make an interesting topic for some.

Now, several hours later I find myself in the unexpected position of having to write with reservation about an ink I never doubted before today. Saying that, let me be quick to add that I blame the paper and the fountain pen chosen for this testing and review. I still have a good opinion of this De Atramentis ink, but unfortunately there is neither the time nor space to justify that opinion with different samples.

I started out using a Sailor Profit (Naginata) fountain pen with a medium 21k gold nib on a creamy high quality paper taken from an old unfilled journal. What paper? Thick, expensive, smooth and Japanese is about all I can tell you. But the point is, the Hans Christian Andersen ink worked very well on this paper, with this pen. Hopefully, the upper photo will give you a good look at both the ink’s unusual color and strong performance. At that point in my test I was optimistic that my remarks would all be positive.

Next, I printed out an ink review form on plain, inexpensive white copy paper. In less than a minute I found myself in trouble with both paper and fountain pen, not to mention ink. The first page I wrote out was an ugly mess. The De Atramentis ink clearly didn’t like that paper, and was doing everything possible to tell me so. In a nutshell, every aspect we like to examine was off. There was a lot of feathering and bleed through, and very poor shading and saturation. Honestly, nothing about it was beyond what anyone would call a poor performance.

I tossed that cheap copy paper and put the Sailor pen to bed. Next, I tried it with a Montblanc Meisterstuck 146 that has a fine 14k gold nib. The new paper was also white copy paper, but a much more expensive grade and weight. The results of that test are shown in the second photograph, however please discount the color in this scan. It is nothing at all like the true shade of blue-green you can see in the top photo. I think the scanning killed the beautiful and special quality of the Hans Christian Andersen color. (The top photo is not scanned.)

Despite the less than praiseworthy comments I have made about the ink on the review form, and despite the problems I had with the ink today, I continue to like this ink and still consider it a worthy member of the De Atramentis family of writer-named inks. If you choose a fountain pen and paper that are agreeable to the ink, I can promise you will enjoy using it, and will especially enjoy the distinctive shade of blue green.

Mouse Fur?

The J. Herbin ink library of colors includes a rich assortment of beautiful, striking and unique, or at least idiosyncratic colors. The Vert Olive is a distinctive ink, and the perfectly named Rouge Opéra is for one who has a taste for reds, particularly individual. And though it it close to Private Reserve’s Arabian Rose, the J. Herbin Larmes de Cassis has its own quality apart from the former. But the feeling is they have done something truly individual with the ink they call Cacao du Brésil. A quick look might prompt one to say, “Yeah, a gray-brown ink. Not very pretty.”

In my opinion that snap description would be about 50% accurate. It honestly is not an ink that anyone would choose to brighten up or prettify the page. But then, we must realize it was never meant to serve that purpose, and that the mixologists at J. Herbin had a different idea in mind when they devised this odd shade of gray-brown. I have always felt that fountain pen inks should be chosen to illuminate the writer’s mood, or the tone of what is being put on the page. Certainly graphic designers routinely select their fonts and colors to enhance the ad or layout on their drawing board. Are we who love fountain pens, ink and paper any different in that respect?

I saw right off that Cacao du Brésil would fill a useful spot in my palette of inks. In writing out the detailed review page shown above, I mentioned that the ink reminds me of the De Atramentis ink, Charles Dickens—slightly somber, but in that description we also sense a hard-to-name quality of quiet simplicity. The Japanese call it shibui, or sober refinement and elegance. To my eye, the Herbin gray-brown has that quiet elegance.

Gray-brown. Mmm…is that accurate? How did they achieve this shade? At the risk of sounding as though I’m making a joke (and I’m not), if I had to imagine how Herbin arrived at this color, I would say they tried to come up with something that might look like a mix of unwashed potato peels, mouse fur and two, three at the most blueberries. Of course, that’s a preposterous recipe, but it does look a little like that to these eyes. My hope is that no one will read it as an inky indictment. When all has been said, when finally the inked words march or dance they way across the page, I’m happy with what I see.

The above review gives a few of the details, but I must warn that as of now, I have only tried the Cacao du Brésil in one pen, a Lamy Safari, and on three or four varieties of paper. The overall impression with the Lamy was good, but I'm not sure that another (perhaps better) fountain pen won’t bring out some other qualities in the ink. I have a feeling that the shading might be improved in a Pelikan, with a gold nib. In time, I might have some other ideas about this wonderfully peculiar J. Herbin Cacao du Brésil.

Wine Red or Something

Going into the store, red ink was about the farthest thing from my mind, having already considered that I have bottles enough of red lining my ink shelves. True I like a red ink, as long as it isn’t what I call the standard pedestrian wagon red. But I have a fair supply of non-standard, non-pedestrian red inks, and I wasn’t in the market for another. Rather, I had in mind something like J Herbin’s Vert Empire or Cacao du Brésil, one a dark blackish green, the other a black-tinted brown. I also was thinking I might buy a new Moleskine notebook, a classy background for the new inks.

Well, now and again we’re thrown a curve ball and have to adjust to a new direction. The first thing I noticed upon walking in the ink store yesterday was the absence of the familiar shelves on the far wall holding varieties of Moleskine notebooks. The Moleskines had been replaced with small leather notebook covers, and apart from a small $90 notebook of an unfamiliar brand name, I couldn’t find much in the way of notebooks or paper. Next I was surprised to find that they had not one bottle of J. Herbin ink. There were maybe seven or eight other kinds, but none of what I had come looking for.

I wasn’t too drastically disappointed, considering I still had at least a hundred different inks before me, plenty enough to feed an obsession with ink.

After about thirty minutes I found myself narrowing the choices down to… You probably guessed it—red.

Visconti Bordeaux

I had never used or owned any Visconti ink, and I was right away taken by the special quality of this bordeaux wine red. I have another bordeaux ink made by Sailor, and it was clear right away that the Italian wine red was distinct from the Japanese ink. They are very different bordeaux reds. Perhaps it sounds trite or predictable, but I want to say that the Visconti Bordeaux seen in the photo here has an Italian flavor to it. I first tried the ink on a light gray paper from Muji, and it worked well on that. No feathering or bleed through at all, and while the saturation is inconsistent from word to word, it might have been the fountain pen I used, a Bexley with a broad nib. Personally, I like this kind of inconsistency in an ink when I am not writing a business or formal document. In a journal or notebook, the saturation is acceptable, even good.

The down side is the really bad plastic bottle in what can only be called an odd shape. I almost tipped the bottle over three times filling the Bexley. Have to say, I strongly dislike plastic bottles of ink. It looks and feels exactly like what it offers the maker—cheaper production costs. Great ink in a horrible bottle.

De Atramentis Barbaresco (Wine Series)

I have two in the wine series, Merlot and Dornfelder, and like them both, apart from the scent. I will say right off that I also like the Barbaresco but not the scent. This one has a lot of brown in it, and looks almost un-wine-like. Have to admit that I can’t recall seeing (or drinking) a Barbaresco wine in glass or bottle. It may be a red wine with a heavy brown tint. For that reason, I can’t say if the De Atramentis ink is a true color match with the wine. The Barbaresco doesn’t flow as well as the Visconti ink, but that may have something to do with the Sailor Naginata medium nibbed pen I used. The saturation is very consistent, and like the Visconti ink there is no feathering or bleed through. After writing a page with the Barbaresco I started to wonder if it is an ink I will continue to use, or one I will quickly tire of. It isn't exactly what I call a ‘pretty’ brownish red. Sailor’s Red Brown is much richer and more along the lines of being a pretty or handsome color.

A Bevy of Browns

The season is turning in Tokyo, with evidence here and there in the natural colors around us. Leaves have almost completed their metamorphosis from brilliant summer green to the sere brown of winter, with many fallen and scattered on walks and pathways, or blowing along streets in cold susurrous whispers. The trunks of trees seem dryer now, hoarding their last stores of sap for the coming cold, and along the banks of the nearby Kanda River cattails tilt in bent postures, dried and brown.

There are still hints and remnants among the branches of autumn orange, of darkening gold and deepening hues, but to these eyes brown is daily becoming the dominant color. Could it be the reason for an infatuation with brown inks? For one not too fond of cold weather, the approach of winter is, in that sense a somber business, and may turn the head toward filling pages with warm, woody brown inks.

In an earlier post I talked a little about Iroshizuku Yama-guri, with mention of it’s brother ink, Tsukushi. This time — and partly for my own desire to see them aligned — I’ve put a splash of six different brown inks on a page. No critical, or review-like comments this time, but merely a side by side comparison of different shades. I’m going to fudge it a little by confining the browns to swatches, with the names and makers in a blackish favorite from De Atramentis, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. So, take a close look at all that brown and wrap yourself in the imagined warmth of wood, bark and thistle.

From top to bottom, left to right…

Sailor - Capricorn (special blend)

Hakase - Sepia

Iroshizuku - Tsukushi (Horsetail)

De Atramentis - William Shakespeare

De Atramentis - Ludwig van Beethoven

De Atramentis - Julius Caesar

On another note…

With regard to yesterday’s post featuring the Yama-guri ink, a question arose about my choice of the Pelikan Souverän 600 for showing off the ink. Was there a particular reason for choosing that pen? Apart from it being one of my earliest pens, with a B sized nib specially ground to my liking, I chose it because it handles all ink well, because it allows me to write without concentrating on the pen and what it’s doing. Kind of like being wrapped up in a story unaware of the mechanics. And I suppose that’s why I picked up the Pelikan 600 to show off the Iroshizuku Yama-guri.

In the southeast of Tokyo there is a tiny pen shop called, Fullhalter. The shop is owned by Nobuhiko Moriyama, who crafts fountain pens to fit the needs or idiosyncrasies of individual customers. Mr Moriyama worked for Montblanc for many years before opening his shop and turning his focus to Pelikan. Two of my three Pelikans, and the one Pilot pen in my collection were shaped especially to my way of writing by Mr Moriyama. None of the Fullhalter pens have ever failed to delight me, filled with whatever shade or maker of ink I choose. I often regret that my Souverän 1000 is one straight from stock and unshaped by the skills of Mr Moriyama. Certainly a fine pen, but one degree less without the Moriyama touch.

The photo above is a look at Nobuhiko Moriyama (left) in his tiny pen shop, Fullhalter.