Another Wolfgang Fabian Design

At first look, it appears to be a desk pen, one of those that fits into a holder on a round or rectangular base, and something we once saw on every banker’s desk. Were it not for the cap with its large and familiar pocket clip, you might not guess you were looking at a Lamy fountain pen—one that despite its shape and length is not a desk pen at all. This is the Lamy Joy Calligraphy Fountain Pen L15, designed by Wolfgang Fabian of Safari and AL-Star fame.

Lamy describes the Joy as, ‘a fountain pen that inspires beautiful, creative writing.’ Mmm…Wouldn’t that be nice? The implication is that it is designed for calligraphy, ‘…for those times when you want to convey an especially personal touch.’ I tend to think a letter or note derives its ‘personal’ feel from the fact of its individual and inky, non-digital, unprinted handwriting, whether it’s beautiful or not, but then, Lamy didn’t ask me to write their copy.

The Lamy Joy is a long quill-like pen measuring 7 inches capped, and 6.7 inches without the cap. It is surprisingly lightweight, made of shiny black plastic. The pocket clip is the same spring brass wire as that on the Safari and the AL-Star, but this time bright red. For visual balance, there is a small red accent on the top of the pen. The ink window is also a repeat of the Safari and AL-Star design. The nib is polished stainless steel with a chisel point, available in three sizes: 1.1, 1.5 and 1.9mm. The pen comes with a converter and one blue cartridge.

I have the 1.1 millimeter nib, and am quite pleased with the way it writes. It definitely writes a line that looks and feels like calligraphy. My guess is that a little experience with this pen will improve the look of the ‘handwriting’ or even calligraphy, if you want to call it that. My own experience has been with another kind of calligraphy using brushes, and fountain pen calligraphy is pretty ragged in these hands. Still, the Lamy Joy does give a sense of encouragement, and makes you think that with some practice a beautiful flow of inked words is just around the corner.

The AL-Star Lineup

No question, I love my Lamy fountain pens. I’ve been using a Safari since December of last year, and a 2000 since March of this year. Both pens have brought nothing but complete satisfaction and continued admiration for Lamy design and engineering. True, I am not the biggest fan of steel nibs, but I’ve adjusted to my Lamy nibs over the course of using them. I have great respect for designers Wolfgang Fabian (Safari) and Gert Müller (2000), and am also a big fan of the Bauhaus principles of functionalism and simplicity.

The spotlight here is on what some call the upscale Safari, the pen introduced by Lamy in 1997, the AL-Star. Anyone looking at the AL-Star will see immediately that it bears close resemblance to the hugely successful Lamy Safari. The AL-Star was in fact designed by the same Wolfgang Fabian of Lamy fame. But he has made two noticeable shifts in the AL-Star design, perhaps both in the hope of giving the pen a high-tech look and feel. Side by side, the AL-Star is bigger than the Safari, but not in length, and not in weight. It’s the diameter that is bigger, and a close look at the caps end-on makes clear the difference in size. The other shift comes in the material. Unlike the Safari, which is crafted in plastic, the AL-Star is lightweight durable aluminum. I have the polished matte aluminum model, but it also comes in five other colors: coffee, blue, graphite, green and ocean blue. As for the shift to durable lightweight aluminum, Lamy indicated that they hoped to link the AL-Star with the prestige of high-tech industry. I would say they succeeded in that. Certainly, the designer has achieved the look and feel of high-tech. Despite the almost 100 year history of Bauhaus design as envisioned by Walter Gropius, the Lamy design looks as fresh as tomorrow’s bread.

Consider the ergonomic design of the AL-Star’s grip. Unlike the upper body, the grip is made of smoky-transparent plastic and ends in sculpted finger pads. The pen is amazingly comfortable in the hand, and at the same time provides grip-guidance for young, inexperienced users. Here again they succeeded, if we are to believe the Lamy label, which calls it “The most successful young person’s pen on the market.”

Like the Safari, the AL-Star measures 5.5 inches capped, and at 6.7 inches posted, is slightly longer than the Safari. The nib on the AL-Star is black chromium-plated stainless steel. It comes in extra fine, fine, medium and broad. The cap does not screw on, but clicks into place, and posted maintains a strong airtight seal. The top of the cap has cross-shaped slots cut into a black plastic disc, almost like a Phillips-head screw. I inserted a dime and turned it, but nothing happened. The clip is a repeat of the Safari design, black painted spring brass wire in the distinctive broad upturned design. The pen takes either cartridge or converter and the barrel has an ink window, which I find somewhat hard to read in terms of ink level.

Overall, the AL-Star is a tough and rugged design, with young users in mind, and only slightly expensive for a start up pen. It lists for about $40, but a better price is available from several dealers. I call the pen slightly expensive because the best priced start up pen in my opinion, is the Pelikano Junior for about $10-12.

Performance wise, the AL-Star is okay, but I am more comfortable with a medium nib, and feel the scratchiness of a fine steel nib a little bothersome. My other Lamy pens are medium and the feeling is smoother, more comfortable, providing a better flow of ink. Writing with a full cartridge I still get the feeling that the ink is low. Little wetness to the fine nib on an AL-Star. Unless you have a real bond with fine nibs, I recommend a medium. Hard for me to imagine what the AL-Star extra fine nib must be like.

Considered all around, I have to echo other opinions and say that the Lamy AL-Star represents good design, good engineering and strong manufacture. Great pen for a high school student.

Look here for earlier reviews of the Lamy Safari 1, Safari 2 and Lamy 2000.

Another Lamy Look

Thought it might be a good time to update my impressions of the Lamy Safari I bought and began using in early December of last year. I wrote a post about it at the time, sandwiching descriptions of the Safari in between some paragraphs about the pen store Kingdom Note, two J. Herbin inks, and some notebooks. To do the pen justice I should add some pluses to my earlier comments. The Lamy Safari is wildly popular and been written about in more than a few places. Now I better understand its popularity.

I learned from Ed Svoboda on The Fountain Pen Forum that it was in 1966 that Lamy shifted its design to a more modern, or modernistic look. The first of their pens to have the new look was the Lamy 2000 released that year. Lamy came out with the Safari in 1980 aimed at ten to fifteen year-olds, with the catch phrase, ‘individuality goes to school.’ Industrial designer Wolfgang Fabian got most things right with his design of the Safari, embodying bright color, strength, robustness, reliability and adventure. Comfort and function are key qualities as well. Like the Pelikano Junior (another design for students) the Safari has a durable feel, without a tidbit of fragility. The steel nib is obviously the same, and the ABS plastic body is good protection for those times when it accidentally falls to the floor.

With my stubborn attraction to more traditional fountain pen designs, I was late coming to the Lamy Safari. I wrongly imagined that its avant garde look was a flashy cover up for a poor or mediocre nib and writing quality. In that I was badly mistaken. When I first brought the pen home and sat down to run it through some lines and squiggles, I was bothered a little by the hard steel nib (M), and griped a little over the absence of flex, but looking back on my experience with other pens, I hoped that this pen, too would soften and develop at least a smidgen of flex over time. I have used the Safari for two months now—not exclusively or daily, but with regularity, and my hope has been realized; the nib has softened, and I can now sense a degree of flex.

I use a Waterman converter in my Safari, and that with the M nib gives me an excellent flow of ink. The line is very smooth. My feeling is, the wetness of the steel nib is just what I like and I’ve yet to see anything like smears or blobs on a variety of paper types. Initially, I had less success with the better grades of paper, and felt most comfortable writing on cheap white copy paper. That too has improved over time, and the pen is now writing beautifully in my favorite Life Noble Note. I tried it on another high quality Japanese paper made from sugarcane pulp, and the result is outstanding. My only regret is that the paper is lined, unlike my Life notebooks.

There is one part of the Safari I am not crazy about, and that’s the oversized pocket clip. It looks a little like a giant paper clip, and is extremely stiff (durable is probably the word Fabian would use). I do like a pocket clip, but most often rely on a pen case instead of my pocket. Despite this complaint about the paper clip-pocket clip, it’s hardly enough to stop me from giving the Lamy Safari a high rating.

Lemme Have That Lamy

Kingdom Note is a small but very good fountain pen & ink shop on the 6th floor of the Branché Building in Shinjuku. You get used to it in time, but reaching the store requires a halting, sidestepping, baby-stepping walk through crowds that rival Times Square and Piccadilly Circus. Not more than five minutes from Shinjuku Station, the shop is located very near several giant multi-storied electronics stores, and most of the people are headed to those stores. Once inside Kingdom Note, the atmosphere changes immediately, suddenly quiet and full of polished surfaces and hundreds of fountain pens in glass cases. Bottles of ink are arrayed behind a long counter where customers sit and sample this ink, or that fountain pen.

My purpose today was to buy a Lamy Safari. I’ve gotten the feeling lately that I might be missing the charms of a pen that enjoys huge popularity, and knowing it isn’t an expensive item, the time had come to give it a try. I knew from the website that Kingdom Note carries a wide range of Lamy pens, so knew I’d find what I wanted. Didn’t take long to find, and I chose the bright orange Safari L13 with a medium steel nib. It came with a blue ink cartridge, but I had that replaced with a Waterman converter, which was added to the price. The pen and converter came to almost $52.00, but I learned later that it sells for less online through Rakuten. I’ve had some less than satisfactory experience with this particular online store, so I would not have bought the Lamy online even had I known beforehand of the lower price.

Was happy to find that Kingdom Note has the new Life notebook edition, the Premium, so bought two of them. Usually I stick to the notebooks with blank pages, but I also bought one with graphed pages this time. Bought, too a small notebook of traditional Japanese design, something that caught my eye as handy for quick memos. It’s the one under the Lamy Safari in the photo, and is called genkô yôshi in Japanese.

I would have been daft to leave the store without looking through the wealth of inks stacked right in front of me, and so I passed a happy thirty minutes looking at the sample books and a few of the bottles. In the end, it was no surprise that I settled on two J. Herbin inks that have been on my mind: Cacao du Brésil and Vert Empire. The first is a gray-brown, the second a green close to, but lighter than Montblanc’s discontinued Racing Green. More on these two inks later, as they deserve a post of their own with photo examples.

By now I’ve had time to fill the Lamy Safari (with J. Herbin) and write some lines with it. Tried it on four different kinds of paper, and believe it or not, the smoothest lines came on cheap white copy paper. It also writes well on an inexpensive variety of Muji recycled paper, but I wasn’t satisfied with the feel of the Lamy in my Life notebook, or the traditional Japanese paper. I have a feeling it will improve with time and use, hopefully soften a little, or as much as the steel nib will allow.

And last, a funny confession about something that happened to me when I joined the Fountain Pen Network. Part of the application process was to type in the answer to a question. The question was: Who makes Safari?

I stared at it for a minute wondering why they would ask such an off the wall question that many may not know the answer to. But I went ahead and typed in my answer: Apple

Gong! Huh? Well…duh. Took another minute before it occurred to me that the answer they were looking for was Lamy. I’m a member now despite the quiz I almost failed.