I come from woodworking, and the selection and fine tuning of tools is programmed in to me at this point in my life. Pens are just... more tools. But I dork out about my tools, and so too my pens. And, compared to mahogany dye, ink stained fingers are a piffle.
I once discovered that gel pens didn’t bleed like rollerballs on the copier paper forms at work. Ten years later, my work pen is a gold nibbed Pilot running Diamine Registrars - you know, it doesn’t bleed either. I have just purchased my first oblique nib (old Pelikan 120!) and I am treading into vintage bladder fillers. I block print, so flex nibs are lost on me. Even so, I’m not bored yet.
Where do I go from here? I go on. This week I resharpened my patternmakers chisels, purchased 30 years ago and still invaluable for (maybe) 2% of my work, a specialized tool. Tomorrow I want to sort out a PenBBS 266 that hard starts. It wasn’t about the chisels, but about the wood that they cut. The pen just writes because I have something to write, and that keeps going.
Get Well!
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