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UKFP Uncapped: 22nd September 2019

I’ve been active enough on the blog this week, so I’ll keep today’s post brief.

Community

This is not a pencil blog. But I do love factory videos.

I told you I was going deep into the world of typewriters. This was doubly joyful for me because I love Firewatch.

It was the Pelikan Hub on Friday. I made it (for an hour!) to the tiny meetup in Fleet, UK. The highlight of the occasion for me? A Retro 51 rollerball of the Space Shuttle Discovery, and a chance to write with a NOS Montblanc Virginia Woolf. Gorgeous and a great writer.

On my doormat

Oh boy, the postman has been busy this week. Here’s what I unpacked:

  • Lamy 2000 Bauhaus. Really it just feels like a treat to have another new 2000 to play with.
  • Onoto plunger filler prototype. Hoo boy, are you guys going to love this. I have a review in progress.
  • Eboya Natsume M in Shinkai. My first purchase from the wonderful Inktraveler, who answered a load of my questions on a Sunday night, and shipped out almost immediately.
  • Pelikan M1005 Stresemann. It’s actually better than I hoped. And would have got a lot more hand time this week if there wasn’t such stiff competition!
  • Santini Toscana. I’ve been watching this Italian maker’s new designs with interest. They sent me a Toscana in Ambra. I’ve only just had the chance to ink it up, but it feels very different to most other pens!

Published

You guys are lucky. I treated you to three posts this week:

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  • I got all giddy over the Lamy 2000, inspired by the new Bauhaus edition.

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  • I shared my first thoughts on the Pelikan M1005. It is big, beautiful, and worth the wait — although I’m still not convinced about Pelikan’s quality control, even on flagship pens like this.

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On my mind

Holy traffic, Batman. I’ve always been rather open about the traffic to this blog — I’m not competing against other blogs, so it’s not a trade secret. Normally I get around 800 pageviews a day. This Monday I got over 4,000 views, and over 10,500 for the week so far. Google picked me up. I wish WordPress gave better analytics so I could see exactly where the traffic was coming from. Anyway, hello to all you new visitors!

The Writing Desk. I’ve been a customer of this shop, run by Anna and Martin Roberts, for over ten years. They’ve kindly agreed to provide me with some free review samples of a few pens, ink, notebooks and such, which are on their way to me as I write. As always, please check my ethics page in the top bar if this concerns you, but I would like to throw out a personal recommendation for the Writing Desk here, independent of the review posts as and when they appear. I’ve always had friendly and fast service and I’m proud to support a proper independent pen shop.

Omas, a few years too late. A dear friend of mine just sent me three Omas pens to play with. I fell in love with a metal-sectioned new Paragon, and that sent me off on an eBay hunt. I discovered that Omas made a limited edition pen with Ludovico Einaudi, one of my favourite composers, and so I ended up ordering one in Milord size (the Paragon wasn’t available anywhere). If you have an Einaudi Paragon you’d be willing to part with, do get in touch!.

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The Platonic Pen? I’m working on a project at the moment to measure and analyse the dimensions of all my pens, to work out the average, which should equate to the most comfortable (given that I’m only measuring pens I like enough to keep). Lots of mucking around in Excel.

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3 Comments

  1. Bruce D

    Great news on your increased traffic. Well deserved and surely to continue its upward climb.
    While your are gathering data about with your Platonic Pen metrics, I might suggest including the weight of the pen uncapped (assuming you don’t normally write with it capped) and where the center of balance point falls between the nib tip and the back end. I’ve found the combo of weight and balance point to have a noticeable influence on my comfort and command of the pen.

    • Anthony

      I’ve been capturing uncapped weight but not balance — I’ll think about the best way to express that and then try to capture it!

      • Bruce D

        A couple of options come to mind- as a percentage of the overall length starting at one end or the other as zero, or the actual dimension back from the nib. Not sure which, or another measure, or perhaps both, best captures the impact on handling and feel. And it may be that once the data is collected it turns out that most pens have a very similar balance point or that one measure over the other makes more of a difference. The data may be needed first to reveal the relevant measure.

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