Calum Andrew Morrell

When I was in my mid teens - the late 1980s or very early 1990s - I bought a fountain pen. It cost me around £7, was a pale blue slightly chunky plastic device, came with a couple of plastic cartridges of blue ink and was probably the cheapest option in Woolworths at the time. I knew nothing about fountain pens and bought it on a whim. On getting home I unpacked it, inserted a cartridge and tried to write.

Nothing happened.

Eventually I realised I had to push the cartridge into place in order to puncture it, but still nothing happened. I gave up.

A few years later I bought a "better" fountain pen, a Parker Jotter, and tried again. This time I gained a spattering of uneven ink as I moved the pen's nib over the page. Still not very impressive, but at least there was visible ink. Still, over the following few tries, that was the best I could manage and once again the pen was forgotten.

Roll on a couple of decades, so maybe a dozen or so years ago, and I decided to buy my mother a Waterman set containing a propelling pencil, ball point pen and, yes, a fountain pen. The pen came with an ink cartridge, but the helpful person in John Lewis explained that an alternative was to use a converter and bottle of ink. I bought those as well.

A converter, err, converts the pen from using disposable cartridges to using ink from a bottle. In essence you put the converter into the pen instead of a cartridge, place the nib into the bottle of ink, magic happens, and you have a fountain pen loaded with whichever ink you buy.

Unfortunately I didn't pick up on it at the time, but while the propelling pencil and ball point pen worked as expected, the ink from the fountain pen didn't flow properly from either the cartridge or converter. Worse still, the converter didn't suck up the ink from the bottle very well. It wasn't until I, once again, felt the need to try a fountain pen a little less than a year ago that I found out the Waterman didn't work with either cartridge or converter.

By this point I was absolutely convinced there was a significant level of magic involved in getting a fountain pen to work. I began researching the rituals and incantations I would need to perform, hoping it would stop short of a blood sacrifice. I don't know how many videos I watched on YouTube and blog posts I read. I don't know how many rabbit holes I went down throughout the days and weeks that followed. All I can recall is that it involved fountain pens, coated papers and specialist inks. Many many of each.

After a great many lists and a great deal of changing my mind I settled on a Lamy Studio lx-all-black (yes, all of it is black, every part, and I love it), the Lamy blue ink cartridge that came with the pen and a Clairfontaine notebook.

First, the notebook. It is exceptional. The paper is of an immensely high quality. Ink does not feather or bleed through the page, it has numbered pages with eight contents pages at the start to fill in as I go, and a few pages at the end designed to be detached easily should the need arise.

Next, the ink. Yep, it's blue ink and it's perfectly fine. I would have no concerns using it again in the future, but a large part of the fountain pen revival is the ability to select not just the colour of ink you want to use, but also the shade. I doubt I'll use Lamy's blue ink again, with the exception of future included cartridges.

Finally, the fountain pen. It works. It works beautifully. It worked within seconds of inserting the included cartridge. There was no magic, no secret handshake, all I needed was a pen that actually worked. Good quality paper helped, but the Lamy still writes on lesser paper, it's just not as smooth or easy to write with.

Over the course of the past several months I have slowly come to use and rely on my Lamy Studio more and more. I prefer to write with pen on paper rather than directly on a keyboard in front of a computer. I simply find I focus better as a result.

What next? This was a retrospective so I'll keep my latest developments and future plans for another, hopefully shorter, article.

Now I need to type this up and edit it. (Not any more, clearly, but I did at the point I wrote that!)