Fountain Pens: Starting Young

The mailman brought a breeze of fresh air on Saturday. No matter the enticement of lush green outside my windows, August is ablaze in eastern Florida and days are defined by heat, humidity and mosquitos ready to pounce. Happily, a good part of all that was relieved by the arrival from a longtime Tokyo friend, of the latest issue of Stationery Hobby Box (Shumi no bungu bako). Since leaving Japan a few years back, Kumiko has never missed sending the magazine as quickly as a new issue appears on bookstore shelves. Volume 26 came out in June and like every issue contains over 150 glossy pages of articles and photographs highlighting fountain pens, ink and paper, pencils and a few dozen other stationery-related products.

The bold black copy on the cover this time suggests that people want to write with fountain pens (mannenhitsu de kakitai) and in Japan that is a not an exaggeration. Related to that idea is the magazine’s feature article about eight people who treasure their fountain pens and use them as a daily tool. Among them is a film producer, a stylist, a couple of businessmen, a teacher, and a high school student.

Yûdai Kamei is a seventeen year-old high school student in the Tokyo suburb of Saitama who got his first fountain pen in the third grade. Since that early age his enthusiasm has been nourished by parents who share to some extent their son’s interest in fountain pen history and quality writing instruments. How many fathers take their son on a summer holiday with the specific aim of browsing pen shops?

Yûdai’s collection of fountain pens now numbers ten. The article offers no listing of exactly what those pens are, but looking closely at the photos it is easy to spot a Montblanc Meisterstück 146 Doué, Pelikan 800, Pelikan M200 Demonstrator, Pelikano Junior, Pilot Custom 742, Lami Safari, Lami AL-Star, Platinum 3376 Century and two others difficult to distinguish, though one is a Montblanc. The photograph below shows his stated favorite, the Meisterstück 146 Doué, a gift from his parents at the time he entered high school.

Below the fountain pen in the photo is a bottle of Sailor Jentle Ink and a page from Yûdai’s school notes. The bottle of ink is Miyougi Amber bought on the above mentioned summer pen-trip with his father. The color is reflected in the brown ribbon running down the bottle from cap to base and again at the bottom of the page to the right. The ink is one he first saw in the August 2011, vol. 20 issue of Shumi no bungu bako. To the right is a page of school notes from the morning newspaper, different articles distinguished by a different ink. 

As a way of trial and error, Yûdai uses his journal to get a feeling for his pens used with different inks, a natural extension for any fountain pen aficionado striving to better understand a specific pen or ink. The photo shows a sample of writing with the Pelikan 800 and the Sailor Miyougi Amber ink.

Born in Saitama Prefecture in 1996, Yûdai is currently in the 11th grade and his favorite subject is government economy. Apart from fountain pens, his interests include cars and leather goods. He is also an avid reader, getting through about two books a week.

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For those who deny themselves nothing in the way of fine writing instruments, a full page advertisement in this latest issue of Stationery Hobby Box offers the new Montblanc Paul Klee Limited Edition fountain pen for a mere $28,643. ‘Limited Edition’ in this case means Montblanc made only seventy-nine of them.

Dusty Pages of Another Season

Journal entries: June 2006 - September 2007

MONDAY 12 JUNE 2006

Telephone call from Moriyama-san at Fullhalter, the new Pilot Custom 823 fountain pen is ready for pick up. The work wasn’t scheduled to be finished before 8 July.

SATURDAY 17 JUNE

Restaurant in Oimachi called the Sun Room, with Kumiko after picking up the Pilot fountain pen. Pen in hand and full of Montblanc black ink (a very old bottle from 1985). Always thrilled with a new pen from Moriyama-san, this one is no different. As smooth as cream, the nib a perfect width and the whole thing a comfortable size and weight in my hand. The old Montblanc black ink is a surprise—a happy surprise. It has a sumi-like shade that I like. Everything feels just right with both pen and ink.

MONDAY 19 JUNE

Flashback to a memory from early days in Japan when I saw almost every day young businessmen on the way to work wearing the familiar dark suit, and snowy white socks inside black or brown dress shoes. Fast forward 25 years and it’s no longer old-fashioned white socks, but the hugely popular low-cut sport socks which almost everyone wears now. Look at the feet of young businessmen on the train these days and you will see those ankle high socks in dress shoes. Statement on the Japanese male’s sense of fashion?

SATURDAY 24 JUNE

At de feet o’ Jesus,

Sorrow like a sea.

Lordy, let yo’ mercy

Come driftin’ down on me.

At de feet o’ Jesus,

At yo’ feet I stand.

O, ma precious Jesus,

Please reach out yo’ hand. —Langston Hughes, 1932

TUESDAY 19 DECEMBER

Doutor for lunch, but luck is against me this time on my cherished 3rd floor. No sooner do I sit down at my favorite table, then here comes a herd of giggling, chattering housewives who quickly slam 3 tables together, pull down all the shades to erase the flood of sunlight and launch into loud banter.

In the middle of 3 books now, and depending upon where I am the book changes. Sitting at the kitchen table it’s book 13 in the Aubrey/Maturin series, slumped in the big blue chair it’s the book about Japanese student soldiers in WWII, Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers. The 3rd book, and the one in my bag now is Dickens’ Great Expectations, also the one I read on the train or bus.

MONDAY 8 JANUARY 2008

“Coming of Age Day” in Japan. 20 year-olds are celebrating their new ADULT status. Tokyo cold, as it always is on this day of the year. Passed an enjoyable afternoon with Sawane-san in Shinjuku yesterday. Been a long time since I had walked about the area just east of the station, and the changes surprised me—though they shouldn’t have, since no city anywhere tears down and rebuilds as much as Japan. The old oden restaurant Isuzu that a friend and I went to almost every Friday night for 2 or 3 years is now a Starbucks. Too bad, since the building was pre-war and the inside of the bar-restaurant all of that period. Everything has changed, everything.

Sawane-san and I went to the fountain pen clinic at Isetan, but it turned out to be a slight disappointment. Sawane-san was unable to get his Sailor King Cobra repaired.

MONDAY 26 FEBRUARY

Looking for something to read and rummaging through the book closet, I uncovered something I don’t even remember buying, a rather handsome 1st edition hardback of Donald Richie’s Japanese Literature Reviewed (2003). It is a collection of his reviews written over the years for his weekly column in The Japan Times. Happy to find that.

SUNDAY 4 MARCH

Done with a workout at the health club and in Doutor now for a spot of iced coffee, some scribbling and hopefully some moments of quiet here on the 3rd floor. Such a warm, warm March day for Tokyo, especially for a day barely out of February. Read a good bit of Shiga Naoya while riding the stationery bike at Tipness. Almost 20 miles in 60 minutes and 4 Shiga short stories. Thinking I might do a Shiga story in the lit classes at the university during the 2007-08 school year. Maybe some Shiga, maybe some Miyazawa Kenji, and maybe a selection from Ecclesiastes in the Bible. Need to think too about finding a replacement for the dear-to-me E.B. White essay “Once More to the Lake.”

SUNDAY 4 MARCH

Reading Raymond Chandler these days. Talk about ‘economy of expression,’ Chandler can say more in 4 words than most can say in 24. Interesting essay by Chandler called “The Simple Act of Murder” that prefaces his collection of stories with the same name. Love what he said about famous English mystery writer Dorothy Sayers. She: ‘The detective story does not, and never can, attain the loftiest level of literary achievement.’ Chandler: ‘I do not know what the loftiest level of literary achievement is: neither did Aeschylus or Shakespeare; neither does Miss Sayers.’ —‘A male cutie with henna’d hair drooped at a bungalow grand piano and tickled the keys lasciviously and sang “Stairway to the Stars” in a voice with half the steps missing.’ —Chandler, Farewell My Lovely

MONDAY 12 JUNE

Saw something on the Classic Fountain Pens website last night I’m going to buy. It’s a cleansing cream to remove ink from hands and fingers, and do I ever need something to get the ink off my hands. Most of the time my fingers look like a Technicolor screen test.

Enjoyed the movie I saw yesterday in Kichijôji. Bloody spectacle of 480 BC, the Spartan stand at Thermapolae. The fight and battle choreography was excellent, and almost like a bloody ballet with spears, swords and shields. Have to laugh at the critics who get so uppity about 300 being nothing but a shallow and bloody mishmash with no historical veracity. Are they trying to fool themselves with such pretentious claptrap? It’s a Hollywood spectacle, for God’s sake, a film treatment of a graphic novel. What the critics missed was the director’s faithfulness to the format of narrative told through a series of frames on a page. Again and again in the film you see characters in a ‘comic book’ pose. This is especially true in the lush and bloody fight scenes. Freeze the frame and move it straight onto the page of a graphic novel or comic book. Well done and completely over the head of the critics. Same kind of technique in the Japanese movie Ping Pong, which also originated as a comic book.

SUNDAY 30 SEPTEMBER

Rainy and slightly chilly day in Tokyo. Some might call it autumn weather, but to me it doesn’t have that feeling. The air is different. What we call autumn in Tokyo has an entire vocabulary all its own, and there’s none of that in this last day of September. Nonetheless, I wear an autumn-intended pullover despite the contradiction of my sockless feet in a pair of Rockport deck shoes.

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.

When Is Enough Too Much?

The other day I came home with a new bottle of ink, and going to put it with the others on my shelves, I couldn’t find any room. So, I decided to rearrange things and see if I couldn’t squeeze more room out of a new arrangement. Ten minutes later I had a sprawl of ink bottles and boxes across two tables, and I stood back gaping at it all, amazed at what looked liked gallons of ink. Could I ever use all that ink? When was the last time I filled a fountain pen with Tangerine Dream, or Nicolaus Copernicus? What was I going to do with eleven different shades of red ink, eleven of blue and twelve of green? All that, and it didn’t even cover half of what I saw spread on the two tables.

When does enough become too much? Talking about a hobby, a passion for something, maybe even a mild obsession, limits can sometimes be hard to set. Or is that only for some of us? In my own case I have little doubt that it often goes beyond sound reasoning, and I convince myself that I must have this or that to enhance my ‘collection.’ Naturally, every little bit we add on brings a deeper understanding, or at least that’s what I tell myself when I buy the next bottle of ink or the next fountain pen.

I’ve said in these blog pages before that most often my mood determines what color ink I choose to write with. It really is strongly connected to the nature of present feelings or sensitivities. The green I choose on Thursday may be an attempt to turn the current of my disposition, the violet a go at rousing myself from the doldrums. If I’m in sober spirits then I reach for the black or dark brown. I will admit to writing multi-colored letters, each paragraph a different and exotic color of ink. No doubt a frivolous exercise, but in fact it usually impresses the person receiving it. In this sense, it is possible to think that ink becomes a toy, or a plaything. All of these examples fit into what I believe are guidelines that define a hobby. If it doesn’t push you to find new layers, then I would worry that boredom is just around the corner. Seen from that angle perhaps enough is never too much.

Unfortunately, for some of us there is a worry that we’re spending too much money when a little economic budgeting is required. More often than not I listen to the little budget-bird in my head for a week or two, then close my ears to its peeps and run off to the pen shop for some more, more, and more INK! Somewhere out there is a new shade of green I absolutely must have.

A Favorite Notebook

Easy to find examples of a dozen or more different notebooks, journals, sketchbooks and notepads in blogs related to paper, pen and ink, but in all those pages I’ve yet to see something showing and describing a personal favorite in the notebook-journal-sketchbook family. Maybe not easy to find outside of Japan, and even here, many stores do not carry the Life Noble Note series, a made in Japan high quality line of notebooks. The notebooks come in three sizes: A4 (8.26 x 11.69 in), B5 (6.93 x 9.85) and A5 (5.83 x 8.26), sizes common to Japan. Notebooks have 100 pages, with either blank, ruled or graphed pages. The paper is excellent and almost always allows pen or pencil to glide smoothly across the surface. I have found that different inks tend to react differently, and while many inks neither feather nor bleed through, it does happen with particular inks. I haven’t kept a detailed record of which among my 60 different inks react poorly with the Noble Note paper, so am unable to offer a list of inks to watch out for. And of course, there will be differences depending upon the fountain pen and the type of nib. Most of my pens have a medium nib, and write beautifully in these notebooks. The Life series is available online, though I cannot say positively that delivery outside of Japan is possible. The website is ninety percent Japanese, but someone might want to take a look at Rakuten.

Bad to say, but there is a downside to ordering from this website. Experience has taught me that even an inquiry will almost assure that regular and bothersome email will follow, the kind few of us like to get.

Perhaps the three images will give a fuller description of these great Life Note Note journals and notebooks.

Hopefully, you will find them available outside of Japan.