Saturday, July 26, 2008

Ink Quality

One of the complimentary joys of using a fountain pen is using bottled ink from which to fill the pen. Sure, it is messy, time consuming and frustrating - my fingers always get stained. Today, a drop of black ink even fell into our light beige carpet. Shhh . . . Don't tell my wife! And that is all worth it, if your pen produces the kind of rich line and dark black or deep blue (or whatever color you like) that you expect from a fine pen. All of that is background to my first woeful experience with my Libelle Epic F.P. After the cartridge that was packed with the pen was used up, I installed the converter and filled it with Shaeffer "Skrip" black ink, which a sales person had assured me was quality ink. It worked okay on a yellow legal pad but when I used it in my moleskin journal the ink was grey, rather than black, and it bled badly. Initially, I was disappointed with my new pen until I realized my other pens wrote well on the moleskin paper. So, purchased a bottle of Waterman black ink and filled the Libelle F.P. and it worked great - nice smooth rich black lines - the way it is supposed to be.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

And you've been loyal to Waterman ever since. Can you rearrange the items in this picture so that I can see the pen? I feel the urge to reach into the computer screen and slide the bottle of black ink out of the way so I can see what's behind it. What is that, anyway?

Veemack said...

Just scroll down to the June 28th "Libelle Epic F.P." post and you can see the very pen.

Anonymous said...

I thought so! That's another fine way of saying, "Look at my beautiful discontinued pen. You'll never have one. Ha!"