I went to St Michael's Grammar , a small school in Melbourne. Something of an anomaly in Australia, the school was originally run by nuns in a very British tradition. We wore gloves and hats, and ran the risk of expulsion if we were caught eating in the street, or sullying the schools good name with similar disgraceful behavior. Such little ladies (and gentlemen) we were, that we exclusively used fountain pens.
Recently I've rediscovered the joys of ink stained fingers, and have spent many happy hours obsessing over nib details and ink colours . ( I wont go into the pain of losing my
whole pen collection in Fiji last year, except to say, don't miss the lamy Safaris (nails); slightly miss the Lamy 2000 because it is such a beautiful pen, but -by way of consolation- its medium nib
was a little firm and big for me).
To give you a summary of my current favourites,
Nakaya are the makers of my ultimate dream pen;
Probably not to everyone's taste, but I'm mad about everything with this pen. From what I can gather, the texture is created by wrapping the ebonite pen form in linen, which is then laquered with Urushi (sap of a Japanese lacquer tree), and partially removed. The process of collecting the Urushi and applying many layers of lacquer to this fountain pen takes three months to complete.
Nakaya nibs are very fine, with some flex to give more character to your letters.
Japanese nibs tend to run to much smaller sizes than others, and I like extra fine nibs that make my letters look like ants have crawled out of an inkwell.
