I use a fountain pen because it makes me slow down and mean what I write.
That's the honest answer. A biro (BallPoint Pen) lets you scribble without thinking. A fountain pen doesn't. The ink flows, the nib drags a little, and you end up paying attention to the words. My handwriting is better, my notes are better, and I keep more of what I write because I actually cared about it going down.
There's the feel too. A good nib gliding over decent paper is a small daily pleasure, and I'll take those where I can get them. It costs nothing extra once you own the pen, and it never runs out mid sentence the way a cheap ballpoint always seems to.
The stained fingers
If you catch me with black or blue fingers, don't worry. I haven't been in a fight with a photocopier. It means I was recharging the pens. With this many on the go some are always sitting empty, so I don't top them up one at a time. I wait until there's more empty than full, then do them all in one go, bottle fillers recharged and cartridge pens swapped out together. Filling from a bottle is a slightly messy business and I'm not precious about it. A bit of ink on the fingers is the toll you pay. It washes off eventually, mostly.
What's on my desk
At any given time I've got ten to twelve fountain pens sitting on my desk. Not in a drawer, not in a case, on the desk where I can reach them. People ask why I need that many. I don't need any of them. That's not really the point.
Different pens suit different moods and different jobs. A fine nib for quick notes, something wetter and broader when I want to enjoy it, a few that are just nice to pick up. Rotating through them keeps it interesting. It doesn't stop at the desk either, there's always one in my bag so I'm never caught without.
Most of what I own is modern, and there's nothing wrong with that. A good modern pen writes beautifully and costs a fraction of the old ones. There are modern Sheaffers, a Cross or two, a Rotring, a few other Parkers, a Zebra, a Pentel Tradio, a Paper Source and a Waterman or two. A few are worth calling out. I've a Parker calligraphy pen that comes with three nib widths, so one pen does fine, medium and broad depending on what I'm up to. There's a Lamy Safari. And a Moleskine and Kaweco collaboration, small and neat, the sort of pen that's easy to keep on you.
A couple of the older ones are worth a mention too.
There's a Sheaffer Imperial VIII, and it earns its place.
The Imperial VIII came out of Sheaffer's Imperial line in the early sixties, and it sat right at the top of the plastic barrel models. What makes it special is the nib. Sheaffer set the 14 carat gold nib flush into the section, inlaid rather than stuck on top, so it looks like one clean piece. It's a design people still admire sixty odd years on. It fills with Sheaffer's Touchdown system, a single push down of the plunger and it drinks up a full load of ink, which was their simpler answer to the fiddly Snorkel that came before it. Gold filled cap, the little Sheaffer White Dot on the clip to say it's the good one. It writes like it was made yesterday, which tells you plenty about how they built things back then.
And there's the Parker Snake.
A word on the Parker Snake
The Snake is the one people notice, and it's the one I reach for most. It's a sterling silver snake coiled round the barrel and cap, with emeralds for eyes, and it looks exactly as odd and lovely as that sounds. Mine is number 4095 of 5000.
The story behind it is worth knowing. Parker first made the Snake in the early nineteen hundreds, as part of their Lucky Curve range. The bodies were black hard rubber, wrapped in a hand chiselled silver or gold snake, with the eyes set into the metal. The silver ones wore emeralds. The gold variant went one better with diamond eyes. Every one was worked by hand by a goldsmith, so no two were quite the same. Parker's own advert called it "this odd and fantastic design of a snake's body, the eyes set with green stones." They weren't wrong.
They didn't make many, and they dropped it from the catalogue within a few years. That's exactly why the originals became a sort of holy grail for pen collectors. A genuine one turns up rarely and sells for a small fortune.
Parker brought the design back as a limited edition in 1997, a run of five thousand in silver, each one numbered, with an eighteen carat gold nib and the same emerald eyes. Mine is number 4095 of that run. It's easily the showiest thing on the desk, and it's the pen I use more than any other. So much for keeping the good one for best.
It's also the one I take with me when I have to sign something important. And by important I mean something that actually matters to me, not the endless bits of paperwork that only matter to a bank. So not a loan application, not an insurance renewal, not a delivery slip or a form at the counter. I mean a card for someone I love, a note in the front of a book I'm giving away, a guest book at a wedding, a birthday message, a letter to a friend, the sort of thing a person might keep. If my name is going on something that will outlast the moment, it goes on with the Snake.
It came with me for the legal side of my transition too. Every form that mattered, and above all the Name Change Application, got signed with it. When you're putting your real name down for the first time, on paper, for good, it feels right to do it with the pen you love rather than a chewed biro from the bottom of a drawer.
It gets a reaction, that pen. It always does. People spot it and there's a pause, then the questions, then the polite bewilderment. I rather enjoy that part. It truly stands out and is a really beautiful and rare pen.
The point of it all
None of this is practical. A pack of biros would do the job and cost less than my ink bottles.
I'll still pick up a biro when it makes sense. If I'm caught short with no fountain pen to hand, a biro does. And when I need to press hard to copy through onto two or three sheets at once, a fountain pen won't do that, so the biro wins. Right tool for the job and all that.
But writing is one of the few things I do with my hands all day, and it's worth doing with something that feels good. The fountain pen slows me down, makes me think, and gives me a small bit of ceremony in the middle of an ordinary day. Stained fingers and all. Not to mention its a fascination for most.