When I saw this pen on eBay, I knew I had to get it! This is a Peter Pan fountain pen made in the old days by a company called Salz Bros. Inc. (New York). I don’t really know why they call it a Peter Pan fountain pen – with its mega-petite size, I would more likely call it a Tinkerbell fountain pen instead! Let’s not wait anymore, I want to present the pen’s vital stats to you now, so you know how small it is! Vital stats: Length of pen when capped: 6.6cm (including the ringtop) Length of pen uncapped: 5.5cm Length of pen posted: 8.8cm (including the ringtop) Have you ever seen a pen so tiny before? This is my first time! Salz Bros. Inc. was a company that made nice little pens and this Peter Pan is probably the world’s smallest fountain pen, if I may dare to attempt this statement. The best part is, despite its size, it is supposed to be fully functional, although I cannot imagine how much ink can actually be contained within it – 2 drops? You may guess that the Salz Bros. Inc. is no longer in existence, as they went […]
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Hey, ho! I think I am on a roll lately blogging about fountain pens and reviewing them at top speed. Today’s review is going to be about a really cool music pen – the Platinum Music Nib Pen. What is a music pen used for, you may ask? Is it only for writing music? Clearly not, even though the nib is supposed to be optimized for writing on sheet music when placed upright on a music stand. You can use the music pen for everyday writing, that is, if you like the line variation that it offers. There are 3 brands that I know of which are carrying the music pen. Platinum music nib on a Platinum 3776 pen (which is the one I have) Pilot/Namiki has a music nib that you can install on the Custom 74 or Custom 742 pens Sailor also places their music nib by default on the Sailor 1911 fountain pen. The Platinum and Pilot music nibs have double slits and triple tines, a feature which is supposed to improve the ink flow via the feed to the tip of the nib. This enables a consistent ink delivery to the sheet music even when you write vertically. […]
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If you’re like me, you probably love online shopping on places like Amazon.com. Have you ever wondered which fountain pens are the bestselling fountain pens on Amazon? Here I put together a list of the top 10, and I’m happy to know that I have already got reviews of some of them! Top 10 bestselling fountain pens on Amazon 10. Lamy AL-Star I have the review of the AL-Star right here, and it’s being compared with the Lamy Vista fountain pen, which is in a similar family as the Lamy Safari and the Lamy Vista. Often a little more expensive than the Lamy Safari, I suppose it’s why it ranks 10th this time. Personally, I like how the aluminium body feels, but probably due to the price, it seems that this is a less preferred option than the Safari. 9. Jinhao X450 I haven’t seen this pen before, but it looks just like a classic cigar-type fountain pen. I am guessing that people like this pen because it looks a little bit like a Mont Blanc or a Sailor pen (but I could be wrong). It seems to be a nice pen, and Jinhaos are rather popular for being well-built […]
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Cute pen alert! Today I am going to review the adorable little Stipula Passaporto. This pen was first introduced to me by ShangChing in her review here, but I hadn’t had the chance to grab one for myself until now – and lucky am I! It’s such an adorable little baby-sized pen, it was too difficult to resist not getting it when someone on the Singapore Fountain Pen Lovers Facebook group offered it up for sale. I met up with the guy near where I live to collect the pen, and it was really a little smaller than I had expected it to be! I had to be extra careful not to lose it, because I was on my way elsewhere after the meet-up. The seller gave the pen to me together with a little glass dropper, and it is to be used to fill up this petite eye-dropper pen. What is an eye-dropper pen, you may ask? As the name suggests, the filling mechanism of sucha pen is via the use of a eye-dropper, which is really the same thing as the glass dropper that you see in the picture. The advantage of eye-dropper pens is that you can […]
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Howdy, Readers! I haven’t been blogging for 2 months now – what a mess! In today’s post I’m going to introduce something pretty exciting: a very flexible nib on a modern pen! I hope this makes up for the lost time and lost pen-love on my blog! Those familiar with fountain pens may know that flexible nibs are great for writing really nice cursive calligraphic styles, such as the Copperplate style. The tines of the nib are bendy, thus the term “flexible”, or “flex” in short. When you apply pressure onto the nib, the tines bend, spread apart, and a thick line of ink is laid onto the paper. We are able to find a number of such nibs in vintage pens, which are definitely the more popular choice, because – there isn’t really isn’t much of a choice. Modern flex pens tend to be expensive and there aren’t a lot of options to choose from. One alternative to put a flex nib on a modern pen, but once again, you’ll need to search for the right nib in order to fit the pen that you like so much! There are also options to get the nibs modified (or “modded” in short-speak), […]
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OK, the TWSBI Diamond pens are not very new pens but I’m reviewing them because of their popularity. Yes, TWSBI pens are pretty popular for their pretty designs and reasonable prices. Here I will review the TWSBI Diamond 580 and the TWSBI Diamond 530, the only two TWSBI pens which I have at this moment. For those who didn’t know what TWSBI is: it is a Taiwanese fountain pen brand, and I think you can pretty much count on Taiwanese brands to provide good quality products. The name TWSBI is created in an interesting way – TWS is the backward initials of sān wén táng “三文堂”, which is Chinese for “Hall of Three Cultures”, while BI is the Chinese pinyin of 笔 (pen). Pretty grand! In English I suppose the most instinctive way of pronunciation would be something like “twis-bee” (rhymes with frisbee), thus the frequent misspelling of “Twisbi”. I have two TWSBI pens, the 580 and the 530. The 580 is the improved version of the 540, which in turn is the improved version of the 530. I don’t have a 540, but many who do have mentioned that there hasn’t been much noticeable difference between the 540 and […]
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Oh me, oh my! How lucky I am to find this beautiful tiger of a pen: the Pilot Metropolitan fountain pen. I went on a visit to a pen shop as I hadn’t been there for a long time, and I really hadn’t planned to buy anything at all that day. I mean, really. I promise! But well, maybe my subconscious had actually thought, “How nice it would be to buy a nice, new, inexpensive fountain pen, eh? How about that?” so when I browsed up till the Pilot section of the shop, this nice little pen totally caught my attention. I had to request to touch and feel it. Actually, up to this point, I hadn’t imagined what the price of this pen would be like, as it looked moderately premium and felt pretty solid and decent in the hand. When I flipped the price tag over, I was stunned. It was just a mere twenty-odd Singapore dollars! How can this pen pop up just like that, how can it read my subconscious mind, knowing that I wanted a nice, new, inexpensive fountain pen? How? I actually hesitated for a moment before getting this pen. I set it back […]
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(Note: I have invited Martin Pauli from ManuPropria to do a guest post on my blog and share his great knowledge on Urushi and the art of the Japanese lacquer. This post is written by Martin Pauli himself, with some very minor edits on format and punctuation by me.) First I would like to thank Maybelline for her excellent post and event on my fountain pens. I would also like to express my appreciation on all your positive comments after visiting my website. I allow myself to write down some information on urushi lacquer for those that are not too familiar with it. Urushi is a precious natural material and is the most important material in Japan lacquer art. Only 150g of sap can be collected from each mature lacquer tree over ten years old. In comparison to the world’s annual yield of diamonds which is about 30 tons, only 1.5 tons of the internationally recognized highest quality Japanese urushi can be obtained in a year. Last February I had the chance to pick up 1.5 kg of finest “sakari urushi” harvested in late Summer 2007 in the mountains of Nagano, Japan. Today in Japan, 90% of the urushi lacquer used is Chinese origin, processed in Japan because it […]
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I haven’t been blogging for a month now! The start of InCoWriMo coincided with the Chinese New Year festive season, and for me, it was followed by a week-long business trip, countless meetings, piled up work which I needed to clear even during my evenings (even nights), the extraction of 4 teeth to prepare for braces, and a lot of accumulated fatigue. And I thought I was busy enough during the second half of last year! Seems like life is going to get more and more hectic from now… When life gets busy and you need time out, no better time-out can arrive in the form of awesome fountain pens. I received 2 fountain pens sponsored by Manu Propria ~ Angular Momentum of Switzerland upon returning from my business trip, and oh did I spend a long time admiring them! I intend to make a review of these pens as well as put one of them up for a giveaway, for my website has reached a milestone of 100,000 views! In fact, it has exceeded 100K and now it stands at around 105K views, which is making me exhilarated. Watch out for details on how you can win one […]
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Today we’ll be talking about a new pen that I’ve got last year: the Noodler’s Konrad Acrylic fountain pen. We’ve had a new dealer for Noodler’s stuff in Singapore and he’s part of our fountain pen club, so when he brought all the stock in, you can be sure that we snapped them up like hungry hyenas. I bought two of the Konrads myself, and was pleased to hear that, being so new, the ones I have chosen hadn’t even been named yet. Let’s take in their entire beauty: Of course, these pens have been launched last year, and they have since been named beautiful names. The top, red and purple swirl patterned pen, is the Forbidden City, while the bottom blue-swirl patterned one, is the Marbled Marianas. As I’ve said before, I’m not such a great fan of red, but this red and purple is such a striking combination that I just had to get it! So this is the pen I am going to review today. The only other Noodler’s pen that I’ve ever owned or reviewed has been the Noodler’s Ahab Jade fountain pen. The Ahab and the Konrad both use the standard Noodler’s nib, and […]
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