Why have one fountain pen when you can have 124?

This story is part of the December 16 edition of Good Weekend.See all 21 stories.

One of the joys of writing novels is the writing itself, and by writing I don’t mean typing. I’m not the only writer I know whose first draft is in longhand, but the practice has become so uncommon as to have a whiff of the 19th century about it. I love the flow of ink across the page. I don’t look forward to the staccato, bicycle-shoe cleat, clack of the keyboard. I used to write my novels with a Cross mechanical pencil. It fell, or leapt, out of my pocket one day and I never saw it again. Losing that pencil was nature’s way of telling me that there was a better way to write. I had a single fountain pen at home, a Sheaffer, with a beautiful inlaid nib. I hadn’t used it in years. I got it back into working order, and I wrote a whole novel with it. So, I had one fountain pen and one bottle of Quink black ink. And then I made a glorious mistake.

I bought a second fountain pen, a Waterman Hemisphere, and a second bottle of ink – Waterman Serenity blue. Who would need more than two fountain pens and two bottles of ink, particularly as the new Waterman cost a lot more than a biro? I couldn’t write with a biro. They’re disposable for a reason. It’s so you can get rid of them. You can’t form a bond with a biro. Every time you use it you’re taking it one step closer to the bin. A fountain pen makes certain demands on you. It tests your commitment. You have to learn how to maintain it. You need equipment, support materials, in an ideal world, staff. You need a brass shim to floss the tines, a blunt syringe to clean the converter or to clean and refill a cartridge, a bulb syringe to flush the feed and nib. You need to know the differences among nibs – fine, extra fine, medium, broad, 1.1 stub, architect, cursive oblique, music, steel, gold. And filling mechanisms – cartridge, cartridge converter, piston, vacuum, lever, button. Yes, there’s stuff you need to learn.

And so I made a third glorious mistake. I bought a third fountain pen. This was a Sailor 1911S. It’s ivory white with a fine, gold nib. Sailor nibs are famous for the sound they make on paper. Ballpoints, rollerballs, gel pens are all mute. They have nothing to say to you. A sailor nib has a voice. This is called feedback, but that’s a poor word to describe the mellifluous zip of a good nib on good paper.

And so I bought my fourth pen; a Waterman Carène. If you write a sentence with a Carène, doing the same with a biro is unthinkable.

It’s perfectly reasonable to ask why someone would need four fountain pens. You can only use one at a time. This is true. And so recently, I bought my 124th fountain pen.

A fountain pen makes certain demands on you. It tests your commitment.

Pens are one thing. Inks are another. At the beginning of 2023 I had just those two bottles. I’d fallen for pens. I wasn’t going to fall for inks. All right, I thought. I’ll just get another blue, and maybe a third blue and that will do. Only that wouldn’t do. I write my novels in blue ink, so initially my ink exploration was limited to blue.

Then a friend sent me a bottle of Pilot Iroshizuku Yama-budo. To most people those words are a blizzard of vowels and consonants. Ink nerds know that Yama-budo is a fuchsia purple/magenta delight. It wasn’t just the ink; it was also the bottle, which is a splendid piece of Japanese design. Down the rabbit hole I went.

As with pens, there’s stuff you need to learn about inks. There are standard inks, shimmer inks, sheening inks, shading inks, chromashading inks and chameleon inks. Inks come in every shade of every colour. Accumulating them all would cost a fortune and require an extension on my house to store them. There are, however, ink samples. They are dangerously cheap and I now have an absurd number of these small vials of coloured fluid.

Fountain pens are demanding companions. They are especially demanding about the type of paper they’ll deign to write on. They don’t, for example, like the paper in moleskine notebooks, which is a grave disappointment because these are the notebooks I like to write in. I’m not disappointed in the pens. It’s the notebook that’s let me down. Moleskines aren’t cheap. It turns out that the paper in them is cheap. Biros do well on cheap paper, because like is drawn to like.

As with pens and inks, there’s stuff you need to learn about paper. Tomoe River, Japanese Bank Paper, Midori, Cosmo Air light, Rhodia, Clairefontaine – all these are fountain pen-friendly papers, and there are plenty more.

In 2023, the great triangle of pen, ink and paper enriched my life and vocabulary. You should try it. Just start with one pen and one ink. You may have to clear some shelf space, though. You’re going to need it.

Robert Gott’s ninth novel, Naked Ambition (Scribe Publications, $30), was published in May.

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