New Year’s Hobby Box & Red Chalk

January 1, 2014

Unable to say much about the look of things beyond the tees but the first day of 2014 along Old Dixie Lane is cloaked in a twilight of semi-darkness with all the damp of a falling mist. Does it reflect my mood of still being denied Internet access? Not hardly. Even on a less than sunshiny New Year’s day there are simple pleasures apart from gloomy weather and no Internet. Some might even get a kick out of watching their dog search out and eat fallen acorns as skillfully as any squirrel hiding in the tall trees. I happily occupy myself for a good hour digging up more empty shell casings discarded by the long ago owner-gunsmith. A puzzle just why he didn’t either reload the shells—a gunsmith, after all—or throw them in the trash. Instead he chose to throw them day after day onto a plot of ground to the right of his firing stand. And now I dig them up, no less than a hundred a day, in all sizes and caliber. 

Farina on the Picnic Table

I passed a frustrating hour on the telephone yesterday trying to get some help with a newly installed modem that lit up only halfway and left me still unconnected to the world wide web. As I suspected all along, the problem is not going to be solved by me or a tech support person on the telephone—even one with understandable English skills. Next step of the plan is a visit from a technical expert on January 3. The woman on the phone explained, “He come, you pay twenty-nine dollar.” She must have understood when I said that I wasn’t paying twenty-nine cents for a failure of their equipment because she put me on hold and came back later to say the fee would be exempted this time. Obviously, the supervisors instruct telephone representatives to try passing a charge off on customers. Similar to the methods at AT&T, one more amoral attempt at exercising greed. 

A couple of tidbits for the fountain pen aficionados wandering into these pages… Along with a new modem, yesterday brought a new issue from Japan of the magazine Stationery Hobby Box (Shumi no bungu bako) This issue (No. 28) is devoted in good part to ink from around the world, with attention to everyone’s favorites, Iroshizuku, Herbin, Montblanc, Pelikan, Sailor, Diamine and a few dozen others. I expect that many American enthusiasts will wonder if Noodler’s ink is included in the magazine’s coverage, and it may come as a surprise to learn that Noodler’s, while available in a few Tokyo stores, is not a popular brand of ink in Japan. I have friends there who won’t touch it. 

Apart from various articles on ink, one I found especially interesting is a piece on the magazine’s choice of the Top Ten fountain pens of 2013. As a great fan of Pelikan fountain pens, my reaction to the No. 1 Pelikan Souverän M800 was something like, “Naturally. What else?” Numbers two and three on the list are respectively, the Montblanc Meisterstück 149 and the Pilot Custom 743. Rounding off the list at No. 10 is the Platinum #3776 Series and except for the Lami Safari at No. 8, the most inexpensive pen on the list at about $165.00. I believe because they are popular with Japanese, all fountain pens on the list are either German or Japanese made.

Montblanc is releasing this month a new design in the Great Characters (Famous Names) Limited Edition series, this one the Leonardo 74. The 74 reflects the number of pens made, but at the price listed, there aren’t many able to afford a fountain pen costing over 3,633,000 yen. I'll leave the yen to dollar ratio to those with a big calculator. Montblanc is also releasing at the same time another Da Vinci model, the silver Leonardo 3000. At $39,000 this one is slightly more affordable…for some.

I think I can afford the new Montblanc ink being released along with the two pens. The color is taken from Da Vinci’s sketchbooks and is called Red Chalk.

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.