One of the few types of nib that I don’t – or didn’t – own and might actually want to use is a music nib. I can’t even read music, let alone write it, but to summarise, a music nib is a type of stub designed to have a particularly regular flow and be usable at odd angles to the paper. Given that these are three qualities I that I am very fond of in nibs, I thought that it was worth buying myself one for my birthday, or at least excusable.

There are a few different companies that make music nibs – looking around at reviews I judged that the Platinum #3776 received the best marks for nib quality, which was after all why I was buying it, so I ordered one from Andy’s Pens.

It is a medium-sized cartridge/convertor pen, traditionally decorated – black with gold trim, pleasant-looking but not particularly unusual when capped. The nib, though, is different enough to surprise even a casual onlooker, mostly because it has three tines. Or two slits. Or in fact both. I have no idea whether this actually makes any real difference over one, well-tuned slit (two tines etc) but it’s certainly good when used at all sorts of angles to the page. I tend to hold pens at a very high angle, and often, italic-ish ones will complain about this and refuse to respond properly unless aligned very carefully with the paper – I’ve had none of this sort of insubordination from the Platinum. It’s also extremely smooth, the ink flow is regular and it’s not too wet. I should try it with some of my “dryer” inks, like the iron galls.

It’s certainly a noticeable stub – there is a writing sample at the end of the above photoset. I’d say that it was around 1.25mm on the downstroke, and, oh, 0.4mm on the side? Something like that anyway; I don’t have the tools to measure this exactly. My main problem in using it is that, while I’ve improved my handwriting recently, I haven’t trained myself with italics, and the broader nibs can be hard to write with in the first place if you’re used to finer pens (which I am). This means that everything I write looks clumsy and irregular. Oh well.

Lamy 2000, broad nib

Seeing as I’m writing about one pen with a broad nib, why not another one? I went through a phase of wanting every type of Lamy 2000 around – now I come to think about it, pretty much exactly a year previous to my buying the Platinum, perhaps it’s some sort of reaction to winter that I have – and one of the models I ended up with was the 2000 with a broad nib.

When I first tried this pen I was stunned, and really quite upset, by how vast the line was. It doesn’t look like a particularly huge nib to the eye but it really is – the line is about as broad as the Platinum on the downstroke but almost the same size horizontally, too. I wondered whether it had been given some sort of freak triple-broad nib by mistake, and considered sending it back as I would obviously be unable to use it for anything at all.

I kept using it though, and found that:

• It is extremely smooth and responsive, and the nib has pleasant flex (this is generally true of Lamy 2000s);
• The 2000 design is very nice in the hand for long periods of writing, though this is a matter of preference and there are people who disagree with me;
• The amount of ink that comes out of the broad nib lubricates it against the paper making it even smoother;
• Lamy 2000s hold a lot of ink, which is useful when they also put down a lot of ink;
• Colourful, shading ink always looks nicer coming out of a broad nib – you can see the variations and even lighter colours are readable. This is as opposed to fine nibs, where you really have to use dark colours or black, or you’ll just find it hard to read what you wrote later on.

These things combined make it a terrific pen for writing, as long as you’re not limited by space or amount of paper. When I wrote my NaNoWriMo last year I used this pen at least 75% of the time; you don’t get as many words per page but it encourages you to keep going longer.

It is also good for the sort of scribbles and notes where you’re not limited by space and you’re mostly writing to sort out ideas in your own head. Particularly on A4 – I like using this pen with black ink on an A4 Rhodia pad. Not such a great pen for jotting things in a pocket notebook.

I can’t remember where I got it, now, but I think it was from The Writing Desk.

…anyway, I got some ink recently. (“What ink did you get?”) I got four inks from Diamine, out of their new range. Diamine is a terrific company, by the way. They don’t make inks with extreme chemical qualities that allow them to stop bullets and raise the dead; they do, however, make nice inks in a huge range of delightful colours that behave well in any pen at reasonable prices, and they release new ones as well rather than sitting around with a traditional range. (They also make Diamine Registrars’ Ink, which is one of the best iron gall inks one can buy.)

Here are two of the inks. The other two were Graphite – a greyish green – and Wild Strawberry – yet another red. I have no idea why I keep buying red inks, but I think that I have more of them than I have blues, which is another colour that I pretty much never use.

I have made these scans at 300 DPI, but note that, on the page, in anything less than intense direct sunlight, the inks seem much darker than they do here. One of the frustrations of writing about ink, rather than with ink, is that photographs and scans just never properly demonstrate what the ink looks like. Photographs are mostly too dark, except in the best of light, and it is quite late here at the moment. Scans are always too bright. It’s a tragic injustice if you ask me.

Eclipse

This is an extremely dark and muted violet. Regular readers may be aware that I am fond of purple inks, and am keen on the J Herbin “Poussiere De Lune”. If you liked that but thought “you know, it isn’t all that dark really, and perhaps it could be a little wetter because it feels very dry to the page” then you should immediately buy some Eclipse. It is a very nice writer, with excellent flow yet not being too wet, and works well on even fairly rubbish paper. This would, I think, be a good ink if one were in a professional situation but wished to show a little bit of individuality, though really, just using a fountain pen at all marks you out as “fascinatingly artistic and eccentric” and/or “bit bloody odd, quite frankly, do they ever talk to customers? have you run a CRB check?”

Denim

This is another dark ink, though not quite as dark as the Eclipse, and also blue instead of purple. It is not amazingly muted but is not a bright blue, and perhaps leans towards the indigo end. Again, like the Eclipse it is very well-behaved and a lovely practical writing ink. I used both of these inks in this years aborted NaNoWriMo and produced thousands of words with both without having any smearing or flow issues.

With blue inks I either like them to be quite dark and low colour saturation (J Herbin Bleu Nuit, R&K Salix) or absurdly bright (Bay State Blue, Waterman South Seas Blue). Denim falls into the former category. I think that it behaves better than the Bleu Nuit and is also a better colour, slightly darker – I would do you a colour comparison but unfortunately my bottle of Bleu Nuit fell to the dread plague of SITB¹, and I am unwilling to load up a pen with Quorn.

A return to form

As a note, I have been a bit annoyed with some of Diamine’s “New Century” highly-saturated² inks which take forever to dry and don’t even have the justification of some of the Noodler’s inks that they can survive in volcanoes. If you, too, have been annoyed by this, you will be happy with both the Eclipse and the Denim, which are both proper shading inks with distinctive colour that actually dry in less than a minute.

They are not waterproof, but then, you could always not spill water on your writing. I have increased respect for water-soluble inks after knocking over a bottle of Herbin Eclat De Saphir on Sunday which splashed all over the carpet of my rented flat. Not that it has disappeared, but it is gradually disappearing, with the application of water, paper towels and swear-words.

Where can I buy these wonderful inks?

Well, I am glad you asked me that. You can order them directly from Diamine in either little 30ml plastic bottles (which I prefer to test things) or big Art Deco 80ml glass ones by going to the Diamine inks site. It is not the nicest-looking site in the world, but it works. For foreign types, I believe that some other sites do distribute Diamine inks and may charge you less in postage.

The Allan’s Journal looks rather like a Bible in construction, as you can see from the pictures, with a tough, flexible, leather cover, a ribbon, red under gold edges to the very thin pages, and even what it is embossed on the cover. (Fewer pages, but still a lot for a notebook.) They are in fact made by an old Scottish company that usually specialises in making Bibles. When considering an order, I theorised that there are certain characteristics of a portable Bible or other religious text that are desirable for a notebook – they need to be tough, long-lasting, compact, easy to carry and be able to store a lot of information – so I was interested to see how well this theory held up.

Price

First of all, this journal costs £22. You should be aware of this at the start. However, given that it lasted me for slightly over three months, and I write a lot in my journals, this works out to be pretty good value as far as I’m concerned. Worldwide delivery is free, too.

The larger, A5-ish version costs £25, and that would last for even longer.

According to the website, several colour and size combinations are out of stock as of time of writing, and are due to be reprinted in late 2011.

Size and construction

The pocket Allan’s is around the same height and thickness as most A6-ish pocket notebooks, but noticeably wider. You can get it into a large pocket, but not a small one. In practice I only occasionally pocketed it, mostly keeping it in my bag, but it’s fine for jackets and combat trousers. It has 256 pages, because the paper is so thin – see below regarding the paper.

The (real) leather cover is flexible, though not floppy, and thick enough to be tough. You’d have to be very unlucky to damage it beyond a scratch or two. It is “semi yapp”, which means that the edges of the cover extend a little way beyond the edges of the pages, to protect them on the sides as well as the faces. I never experienced the slightest hint of it coming apart.

I found the binding very secure as well, but the book also opens and lies very flat, without needing any force at all. Opening flat (or not doing so) is one thing that always annoys me about notebooks; I found that the Allan’s was the best I’ve seen so far.

Paper

There are two things you would immediately notice on opening an Allan’s journal – how thin the paper is, and how narrow the lines are. It’s almost airmail/onionskin paper thickness, and the paper has a light 4mm rule, the thinnest I’ve yet seen.

What you would not immediately notice was how amazingly good this paper is. It isn’t shiny and impermeable as you might suppose – it has a normal level of absorbency, and inks dry quickly on it and look pleasant. On the other hand there was no bleeding or feathering from any fountain pen or normal ink that I tried, from fine to broad. (Sharpies do bleed through the paper, but that’s not unexpected.) Despite this the paper is tough and won’t easily tear. It is absolutely the best thin paper I have yet come across, even including the Midori Traveller’s Notebook ultra-thin paper that I’ve mentioned before, which is not by any means bad, just a bit shinier and easier to smear on.

Due simply to how physically thin the pages are, you can sometimes see writing through from the other side, but because the ink isn’t bleeding through this isn’t a problem – I rarely even noticed it. On the other hand, the 4mm ruling did get on my nerves on occasion. When I was in the mood to write with a fine nib it was, well, fine. It’s very difficult to write tidily with a medium or larger nib with that ruling, though, and I like to do that at times.

This sounds great – why aren’t you getting another one?

This was a useful purchase because it has convinced me that I really don’t like pocket journals any more. It’s basically the perfect pocket journal, apart from the height of the lines and maybe that it’s not hardbacked, but I could get used to both of that. Given that, after using the Allan’s for three months, I was still thinking “yes this is great but I wish the pages were larger, I can’t fit all my thoughts in”, I can safely be sure now that I should not be using pocket notebooks as my main journals, and that I should stick to A5-ish for my journal and Rhodia pads and little pocket cahiers in my pockets, for small notes and ideas and shopping and to-do lists or whatever, not to record the happenings of the world for posterity.

A lot of people do prefer pocket journals, though, and if you are one of them, unless you

(a) absolutely demand a hard cover – and as mentioned, this is not all that floppy, overly floppy covers annoy me as well; (b) refuse to write with anything smaller than a medium nib, or don’t like lined paper in the first place; (c) have very small pockets; (d) really love thick paper; and/or (e) are a huge cheapskate

you should definitely have a think about getting an Allan’s journal.

For the moment I have moved onto an A5 Leuchtturm notebook, but I look forward to trying out the larger Allan’s that I bought at some later date.

Links

• Allan’s Journal ordering

with F nib and Noodler's Black, on a squared Moleskine cahier

Some people dislike Safaris, but apart from not liking the angled grip (which is fair enough) I can’t quite see the reasons.

• Safaris are cheap. Well, not cheap-cheap but they’re not very expensive.
• They’re also quite easily available, though if you want different nibs (see below) you’ll likely have to order over the net.
• They’re light, yet surprisingly durable. This one is several years old and doesn’t have a single crack, and not even many scratches. Plastic construction doesn’t mean fragility – after all, look at Parker 51s, they have plastic bodies and are regularly in working order after 50+ years. This plus the price mean that they’re good for carrying in almost any circumstance – hiking, warzones etc.
• They’re large enough to feel good in the hand and not get lost, but not so large that they’re silly.
• They have slip caps, but the caps actually come off less in my bag than most screw cap pens I own. And if you’re working, and you pick up and put down your pen quite a lot, a slip cap is much more convenient and less annoying than a screw cap.
• You can swap out the nibs with great ease, and new nibs are cheap, and there are many types – not only EF to B, but also italics from 1.1 to 1.9mm, and you can even get such things as broad and medium obliques. They’re also generally good quality – Lamy use the same nibs for Safaris and also some higher-end pens – although I’ve never been hugely impressed by the EFs.
• They come in a variety of bright and pleasant colours, but aren’t over-ornamented. This makes it easy to have a selection with different nibs and inks and quickly tell which is which.

If it weren’t for the Safari, I probably wouldn’t have revived my interest in fountain pens at all, which does make me well-disposed to them in general, but if it weren’t for the simple “pick-up-and-write” usability of them I’d just be nostalgic and not a continuing user.

Construction and design

Like the Moleskines, they are stitched rather than stapled, which makes them easier to open flat(-tish) at any page, rather than just at the middle. (They won’t lie flat, but when you are using them, they don’t try to spring back into shape.) The covers are rather nice – shiny, textured, plasticky, like some sort of leatherette, tough but thin – they come in a good selection of bright colours as well. The feel of the covers as well as the colour selection makes the design feel quite 60s, in a good way, and definitely more durable than the card covers of Moleskines and Field Notes.

Inside, like other Leuchtturm notebooks, they start with a page for your name and address, then have a place for an index. The Jottbooks only have one index page with only 19 rows, so you won’t be writing the contents of every page in it – the larger notebooks have more index pages. (You could always write on the back of the page if you run out of space, as it is blank.)

There are 60 pages in each book, leaving it quite thin but larger than a Field Notes. The last 32 of those are perforated at the sides for you to rip them out. I’ve never really felt the need to tear out more than a few pages in a notebook, and 32 perforated pages is way too many, in my opinion.

It doesn’t have a back pocket. Back pockets are a silly Moleskine feature, particularly in thin notebooks like this. You don’t need a back pocket.

With each Jottbook comes a pair of stickers, one with two lines on it and one blank. Presumably these are to apply to the outside or the inside of the cover and write a title or subject on.

Paper

The paper in Leuchtturm notebooks generally is good, and pretty much the same across the whole range. I don’t think the quality is quite as good as the Clairefontaines, but it is proper paper that you can use big fat wet pens with. (See the last image in the gallery above.) On occasion there is some very slight feathering, but no paper is perfect. It’s 100gsm apparently but isn’t thick.

It’s slightly yellowy/cream off-white – lighter than Moleskine, not as white as Field Notes or Clairefontaine.

Each page of the book after the name and index pages has a space for the date at the top and a page number at the bottom. This is slightly redundant for me as, reflexively now, I date every page I write anywhere and timestamp each entry, as well as numbering the pages in any sort of journal or book – I check my watch, write the time down, underline it and then continue with the note. I’ve trained myself to do this and it is incredibly useful and you should do it too – when looking back through notes it’s pretty vital to be able to see what order they came in and when you wrote them.

Anyway, it is good that Leuchtturm are encouraging people in these habits, but their printing doesn’t quite agree with my manual scheme. In my journal:

• I write the date on the inner side of the top of the page, closest to the centre – the date that I started the page on the left hand one, and the date that I finished the page on the right hand one, so that I can immediately see which dates the two pages span.
• I write the page number on the outer side of the top of the page, and I continue page numbers between journals. (I am currently 3/4 of the way through page 1349, for your information; I only started continuing page numbers relatively recently too.)

The former dating structure can be continued with the pre-printed date area, but I can’t journal using the printed page numbers, unless I record an “offset” for them at the start. On the other hand, I’m not going to be using these as main journals anyway, more special purpose notebooks or casual jotting things, and for those purposes pre-printed numbers are a bonus. In general, +1 for encouraging people to think about the archiving of notebooks and not just assume they are going to throw them away.

The Jottbooks I have are lined and squared. Leuchtturm do make notebooks with plain and dotted paper as well, but I’m not sure that they put it into the Jottbooks, or if they do you can’t buy them in the UK yet.

Why would one want a Jottbook?

You may or may not feel the need for pocket notebooks like these – I’m not sure that I do, my normal pocket “random thoughts” notebook is a Rhodia pad at the moment and I tend only to use little notebooks for special purposes like dream diaries or work on a specific project) – but I know that a lot of people do, and the Jottbook stands out in a number of areas.

• The cover is great – tough, waterproof, thin, colourful, feels nice.
• The book is stitched so durable and opens well at any point – small stapled books irritate me on this point (hello, Field Notes).
• The paper is good quality and won’t feather and bleed, but it’s not so thick that you only get a dozen pages in the book. There are 60 pages too which is a fair number.
• The pre-printed numbers save you having to do that yourself, and the structure keeps reminding you to date and index the book.
• They’re not particularly expensive. I paid £2.99 for each one, and used a 3 for 2 offer. Unless you write vast quantities or use a triple-broad nib that isn’t going to add up to a huge amount of money per unit time.

The Official Chasing Daisies Thin Pocket Notebook Recommendation at the moment is thus either one of the Jottbooks, or a Clairefontaine “Life Unplugged” Duo. The latter have slightly nicer paper but are smaller, are staple-bound and don’t have quite such great covers. Swings and roundabouts really.

Purchased from…

• The Paperie

I ordered it from Andy’s Pens, which, while it might not look that modern and requires you to email the owner to order rather than having shopping carts and other e-commerce widgets, is a terrific site, with a huge variety of popular and obscure makes at good prices. I got a response to my email (sent in the middle of the night) in the early morning and had completed the transaction within minutes of reading it – the pen arrived the next day. It’s a pity that the design might put off some customers.

I ordered the black model with the “Bakul” finish and the standard Wality nib. I’ve had Wality nibs before, and they’ve been fine, so that didn’t bother me, and I liked the idea of the enormous capacity of the eyedropper chamber to go with the enormous size. The body of the pen is hand-made ebonite, and the Bakul finish is a slightly rough texture that’s given to it which is then polished to be quite smooth to the touch – if you have used a Lamy 2000, it looks and feels a lot like that.

Construction and feel

It really is an enormous pen, mostly due to the huge size of the (screw) cap, which makes up about half the length – it is far larger than it needs to be to protect the nib. This makes it very easy to unscrew the two no matter how cack-handed you are, and very hard to lose the cap, two good aspects as far as I am concerned. It’s very easy to open and close as long as you have two hands free. There is no clip and the only visible feature is a breather hole in the cap – both a minimal and maximal pen.

When open, it isn’t all that much longer than any other largish pen. It is still, of course, a lot fatter. The body is 19mm in diameter, and the finger grip tapers from 14 to 12mm. The size of the body doesn’t matter that much in practice if you have a sensible grip, because all it does is rest against the side of your finger, and I found that the width of the grip was comfortable and probably ergonomic in some sense. (Small hands might have problems with it, I couldn’t say.)

The pen is is surprisingly light in the hand – the site says it is 50g when full, which isn’t much, and that includes the cap, which you won’t have in your hand when writing. It is not easily pocketable unless you have ridiculous clown pockets, but it fits into bags easily enough.

Nib and performance

This model of the Gajendra is an eyedropper filler, which means that the whole back section is an ink reservoir, which you fill using (traditionally) an eyedropper¹, one of which came with the purchase. The reservoir holds 7ml or more of ink. That is a lot of ink and you will not, in practice, run out. For tests I loaded it with good old Noodler’s Bulletproof Black, and have had no trouble with this: the flow is fairly generous but not too wet, I’d say slightly on the wet side of average. It does have a tendency to be a little dryer than normal when starting up after being left for several hours; this is easily dealt with by re-priming the nib (i.e. unscrew it slightly, turn it upside-down and screw it up again – air in the reservoir forces a little bit of ink through the feed) or just by writing with it a bit.

The F Wality nib was smooth out of the “box”, though, being the picky² sort of person I am, I smoothed it a little with a nail shaper to suit my preferences. It’s the same nib that was in the Airmail 69L that I’ve written about here previously, and that was also good (the one on my Airmail was better actually but stock nibs do vary ever so slightly). Normal people would not have to do this; I didn’t have to with the Airmail at all.

Why would I own this pen?

The most obvious target audience for a pen like this is people who prefer fat pens, either because they just like writing with and holding fat pens, or for some sort of medical reason – and there are a significant number of fountain pen users who fall into the latter category, from arthritis, RSI or whatever. Not only is it a tough and good-sized pen to hold but it is also easy to manipulate in almost every circumstance except filling, and you’d only have to do that every few years.

Even without these reasons, I’ve been using it as a standard writing pen for a few days now and it’s a generally very pleasant thing to write with. It’s much lighter than it looks, it is easy to grab and unscrew even when half asleep, the nib is well balanced in size, it is not going to suddenly run out of ink, and it isn’t going to break if you step on it. You may hurt your foot but the pen will be okay. The whole thing is extremely simple in structure, as is standard for eyedroppers, and there are no fiddly bits which will ever need work; the nib is pretty much all that would ever be likely to need changing.

It isn’t a good pen for people who want to show off, because it’s very subdued in design. At least, the black one I have is; they do come in colours as well, but nothing terribly flashy, and by design there is a complete lack of ornamentation. Despite the size I think it is very elegant. It could be a talking point when used in public, I suppose.

It is also not a terrific pen for people who will want to cap and uncap it to make rapid notes. Not only is it large, the cap screw is quite long. One could certainly use it in a meeting but would not want to fully screw up the cap between periods of writing. This would work. I will try it next time.

Final word because I am awful at finishing blog posts

“Circumnavigation”.

Addendum (Monday 11 July 2011)

I was wondering whether the large size of this pen would insulate it from Eyedropper Heat-Related Blobbing, which is when heat from your hand or from the sun occasionally causes the air inside the reservoir of any large-capacity pen to expand and force ink out unexpectedly. (This is similar to pens leaking in aeroplanes, though that is caused by the air pressure outside the pen going down rather than the air inside the pen going up.)

The answer to this question is “no”. If you sit in the hot sun writing with it, expect to see the line get wetter and wetter and eventually, some ink blob out onto the page. So don’t do that. I’ve not found it to blob just from the heat of my hand though – the ink level would have to be pretty low for it to do that.

It comes in an absolutely lovely display box. This is the nicest packaging that I have seen for a fountain pen – even the fancier ones I have tend to come in little “jewelry boxes” which could contain anything, well, anything long and thin. In contrast, the M205 Duo’s packaging is very specific to the particular pen and suits it perfectly.

The pen itself is a standard M205, except that it is a yellow demonstrator. (If you have an M200, which I do, it’s basically the same pen but with silver trim instead of gold.) It’s smaller than it looks in the pictures, but not too small even for those of us with fat fingers, and extremely lightweight. It seems quite orange in the picture below, but it isn’t, really, that orange – that is the light.

The Duo comes with a 30ml bottle of Pelikan radioactive¹ fluorescent highlighter ink, and again, we come up against the limits of photography: it is not as green as it looks in the photograph below. Though it does still have a bit of a green tinge.

Here is a scan of some writing with it, which is heavily adjusted to try to make it a bit more obvious the difference in line widths. It’s basically impossible to scan fluorescent ink and have it look like real life. Let me emphasise that it this is just for nib size comparisons. What does the ink look like in practice? Imagine a particularly bright yellow highlighter that has not had a chance to dry out at all, and has been freshly uncapped. When considering the benefits of this sort of pen for use in practice, imagine that it will continue to be like that indefinitely, rather than drying out a bit and being disappointing (which has always happened with ink highlighters that I’ve used) and if it ever starts to run low you can just top it up. This is the benefit of a fountain pen highlighter, the regular flow.

The pen writes very smoothly, and if you are after a BB nib for other purposes apart from highlighting, an M205 BB nib unit will likely please you. The line is certainly thinner than you would normally get from a normal highlighter, which means that it is best for underlining and circling, but you can colour in larger sections if you really want to, and the size gives the advantage that you can also write short notes with it.

I was asked when showing this off whether you could use another ink and the answer is of course yes – it’s a piston filler and you can load it with any ink you fancy. You can also change the nib for a narrower one; I bought mine from Pelikan Pens, and they offer nib replacements pre-order, or you could buy another nib later on (Pelikans are very easy to change nibs with, the units just screw out and in again).

Why would you buy this?

The question is a fair one. I bought mine because… all right, I can’t really explain it, I just loved the idea. I don’t even do much highlighting, though I will be making an effort to do more.

You might buy it if

1. you just love the idea;
2. you do a lot of highlighting, have some disposable income, and want something high-quality to highlight with. This isn’t just a novelty item, it really is a good highlighting pen. The ink flow is regular and the nib, while broad, is still a lot more precise than a squishy felt tip. I couldn’t honestly tell you that it would save any money, but it would be a more effective tool.
3. you want to buy a present for somebody who does a lot of highlighting, and likes pens. The box really is lovely. Do you have any academics, lawyers, students or other people who review a lot of paper papers in your life? Is it their birthday soon? Are you sure they wouldn’t rather have a case of wine? Bear in mind that you can buy this as well as a case of wine. Go on, they deserve it. It’s only money. You can’t take it with you.

The 69L is made in India – I understand that the company has two main lines, the Wality (I have a couple of these too) which is designed for export, and the Airmail, which isn’t, despite the name. I purchased mine from the seller ashishwakhlu via a sales post on Fountain Pen Network for a very reasonable sum, and at time of writing there are three left, but I understand that they are also for sale on eBay.

You’ll see that it is pretty big – it might be a bit much if you have teeny tiny hands, though I didn’t find it too bad even though I mostly prefer smaller pens. You will also see that it holds a lot of ink. Some readers might not be familiar with the “eyedropper” filling mechanism – this is one of the earliest and simplest systems. Instead of inserting cartridges, or putting the nib into a bottle of ink and sucking some up with a piston or a squeezy sac, one just unscrews the top of the pen and pours ink into the reservoir. (The name “eyedropper” refers to the common use of an eyedropper to do this, and some antique ink bottles had integral eyedroppers in the caps. Some – e.g. the 4.5oz bottles of Noodler’s inks – still do, but otherwise you will need your own eyedropper, or syringe, or very small funnel, or miniature squid, or other).

Eyedroppers have their issues – they’re a bit awkward to fill on the move, they can be messy to fill, and when they are low on ink the heat from your hand can make the air in the reservoir expand slightly which results in the odd blob coming out of the nib. They do, however, excel in terms of simplicity (there’s simply nothing to be broken) and capacity. There is no filling mechanism to take up space inside the barrel and so the whole thing can be filled with ink. The Airmail holds about 4.5ml of ink, which is around 3 times as much as a piston-filler or gel pen, and you can easily see how much is left and top it up, say, before a trip or exam.

The nib is a fine one¹, and of good quality – smooth and a comfortable writer. Combined with the huge capacity this means that you’re even less likely to run out of ink. I’ve not had any issues with starting or writing; flow seems good and regular. The pen feels tough and secure when held – thick plastic with a screw-on cap – but it is not heavy, and the balance is good, not too biased in any particular direction (I’ve not written with it posted, nor would I want to, but the cap is not too heavy). In terms of looks, I’m not a fan of showy pens, but I find the swirly purple colour attractive and not distracting – in any case it balances the simplicity of the transparent barrel.

Overall, I’m very happy with the Airmail. I have it loaded with Noodler’s Heart Of Darkness and it’s become a general go-to – comfortable and useful for all purposes, very much a “desert island pen”. Certainly for the money it’s of excellent quality, and if you like a fairly fine nib and do not have an issue with largish pens, I would definitely recommend it.

However, I recently found a link to another shop, Glassworks Studios, which is not specifically a stationery seller and thus probably does not google very highly for notebooks. They do however have an awful lot of Traveler’s Notebook accessories. Supplies of refills and basic products can be a bit erratic with different suppliers, and the Journal Shop has sold out of a lot of refills recently, and hasn’t had updates for months now.

I bought two of the lightweight paper refills from Glassworks and had them delivered very quickly at a good price. There is an important point to make here, though. They have a flat rate for delivery of £6.50 which is based on their general product line – clothes, bags, other heavy sorts of items. Obviously this is a bit much for a couple of items of stationery. I emailed them and they were very happy to send the refills by regular first class post, and refund me the difference. Apparently they are going to update their site with differential postage rates, but until that takes place, you are advised to:

1. Order and pay as usual, including the delivery charge;
2. Send them an email saying that you would like to have delivery by Royal Mail instead;
3. Receive a refund.

(I did enquire whether this would be all right to mention for other people to use, and they said yes.)

1. not lying flat
2. having the knot at the back
3. having the metal lump at the top
4. not having a hard cover

were just a constant annoyance to me. I was looking around at other journals and eventually, after filling five refills (enough for one of their binders) I bought a small Habana notebook and started to use that.

Stopping using the Traveler’s Notebook was quite easily the most emotionally traumatic stationery-related experience that I have ever had. I felt guilty, like I’d betrayed a trust, like I was mistreating a loving and blameless pet. Like in Breakfast At Tiffany’s where she throws the cat out. I had to hide it behind things on the shelf to stop it looking at me with its wide notebook eyes, not quite understanding why it wasn’t being used but still sure that it loved me and I still loved it and soon we would be having happy notebook fun just like before.

Apart from the supremely tactile experience of just picking the thing up, and the way that it gradually molds itself to your hands and habits, the Notebook balances being refillable with being simple enough to feel like an intrinsic part of your writing.

Let’s start with the refillability: there’s a continuity of the physical aspect of your notebook, no matter how long you write in it. In fact, the dual refill structure is quite cunning – I found that I would finish refill #1, have another one behind it, start refill #2 feeling as if it was just a simple continuation of the previous one, then, after a little while, remove refill #1 and put blank refill #3 behind #2. In other words, you’re writing in a notebook with endless pages. I write an awful lot – observations, self-indulgent diarising, work plans, ideas for characters and games and widgets and plots, a lot of testing of pens and inks – and an average A5 notebook lasts me about a month if I am lucky – this is not enough time to really become attached to one, even something otherwise quite characterful (e.g. the Paperchase Noto which I should write about that at some point). I’m afraid that as good as Webnotebooks are they’re really not individually lovable.

Then there’s the simplicity and, er, intrinsicality. A ring binder or a Filofax is refillable, after all, and I could technically carry an A5 ring binder around and top it up with blank paper, but folders just never to me feel like they are all that connected with what they contain. They’re storage mechanisms rather than things to write in. As for Filofaxes, I admit that I’ve never used one so I might be underestimating their level of personal character, but they’ve always seemed like rather fiddly devices, with metal clips and thick covers and teeny tiny refills on thin paper half the size of the cover. The Traveler’s Notebook is so simple in itself that when you put a refill in it, the paper feels as if it has grown there. The word “refill” itself seems inappropriate. (Midori also encourage you to add things to the structure of your notebook and its contents, pen loops and pockets and such, just to tie you cruelly to their product line.)

It doesn’t hurt, incidentally, that the plain refills use the best paper that I’ve ever written on. I cannot think of a single aspect of it that I don’t like – it’s gorgeous. I prefer it even to Rhodia paper, which is saying something.

This is a long-winded way of saying that I’ve gone back to using the Traveler’s Notebook regularly. I find that the leather has softened and become molded to a degree that means the knot is less bothersome, and the soft cover is not bothering me nearly as much as it used to. Also, it loves me. If only I could now ignore the looks coming from my OHTO Tasches.