Seven New (to me) P.W. Akkerman Inks

[halidak]

(I'm terribly sorry about the images if they are just too big for you. I couldn't manage to make the BB coding for downsizing images work, as I generally can do in HTML codes. They also appear somehow in different sizes while they actually all have the same width. Go figure???)

A few months ago I first saw the famous P.W. Akkerman inks from The Hague in a very long thread on FPN and, like many of inkaholics among us, I’ve instantly fallen for that beautiful vintage style bottles of these inks. No matter how much I liked the design of these ink bottles I wouldn’t order those all the way from Netherland just for the sake of having a fancy bottle. After all, it’s what is inside the bottle that matters most.

A little research revealed floating rumours about these inks being made by Diamine. Although I did not have much experience with Diamine all I’d heard about them were high praises about the quality of their inks. I thought it would be woth to try these P.W. Akkerman inks if they were indeed made by Diamine and the bottles were going to be the icing on the cake.

So I ordered seven bottles with gracious help of Heer. Paul Rutte, store manager of P.W. Akkerman shop. When my order arrived I was amazed by how well it was packed. This package could be air-dropped onto my house and even then the bottles wouldn’t be damaged.












These are the inks I bought;




From L to R: #05 Shocking Blue, #11 Trêves-Turquoise, #27 Bezuidenwoudgroen, #23 Bekakt Haags, #13 Simplisties Violet, #16 Oranje Boven and #22 Hopjesbruin

I have to say that I wasn't really impressed that much with build quality of the bottles. Yes, it is a very beautiful vintage design offering an ingenious, yet simple, solution to let you fill your pen with ease no matter how much ink is left in the bottle (for those of you who don’t know, I’m talking about the little marble that traps the ink in the upper section and thus always provides you a convenient deep well of ink). Nevertheless, the overall quality of the bottle, especially the plastic cap, leaves much to desire. I guess I’ve been spoiled too much by excellent build qualities of other bottles from Iroshizuku, Montblanc, Edelstein or Caran d'Ache.


Let's talk about the ink then. As I said, that's what matters most, isn't it?

I’ve prepared two sheets of sample writing; one on Rhodia DotPad 80gsm papper with TWSBI 540 (1.5mm – widest nib available to me at the moment) and the other on a very absorbent Koza (a Turkish paper brand) 80gsm grid paper with Cross Townsend (M – one of my thinnest nibs).


Now, if you promise to excuse my very poor handwriting here’s those sheets;




written with TWSBI 540 (1.5mm) on Rhodia DotPad (80gsm)




written with Cross Townsend (M) on Koza Grid Paper(80gsm)


Before we move onto the comparison sheets of these P.W. Akkerman inks with other inks I have in my inventory, I must apologize for the fact that;

1. I didn’t use a better quality paper for these comparisons. (Such a paper could demonstrate the true colours and shading properties of inks much better than the absorbent paper I used. I just started using this paper without giving it much thought and it didn’t occur to me until it’s too late that, for instance Rhodia dot paper (duh!) would be more suitable for the task.)
   
   
2. I didn’t use the same pen for each ink because I couldn’t take up the challenge of doing all that tedious work required to fill the pen, write the sample, flush the pen, clean it and fill it again for every ink.

However, I’m just about to start a whole new ink journal and as soon as I record all of my inks I'm going to post here additional comparisons. This time it will be done in the proper way, though.

(continued in the next post...)