I have had several fountain pens in my life. I think in school we had to write with a fountain pen and I had a Pelican. When I was fifteen I saved up to buy a Lamy 2000. Had that one for a long time, lost it, bought another one in the 90s, lost that one. Liked it but didn’t love it. About twenty years ago I bought the first gen Lamy Dialog. Interesting mechanics, a twist-action fountain pen. After a while I noticed it wasn’t very comfortable in my hand. The third generation Dialog is probably pretty nice, but I doubt it will feel much better than the old one.

Why do I want a fountain pen when ballpoint or rollerball pens cost almost nothing and write just fine? I like the way fountain pens work, the way they effortlessly glide across the paper. If you can find a nice one that uses an internal ink chamber and a piston instead of plastic cartridges… that reduces waste. Dip pen into glass with ink, turn knob and the retreating piston sucks up enough ink into the chamber for a week of writing. Look, no plastic, no waste. 

I had given up on fountain pens. For a while I used dipping pens. I actually enjoyed writing with those a lot. Not something that works well when traveling though, which meant I was always using ballpoint and rollerball pens. 

Paper and pencil versus the Swiss Army-knife smart phone. The smart phone, or pocket computer, replaced so many things… it’s a camera that is better than most point-and-shoot cams, it’s a video recorder, it does email and web-browsing, it plays music, it records voice-memos, it is a programmable metronome, it replaces GPS devices and does turn by turn navigation… but, at least for me, it will never replace pen and paper. So many times I thought I should make do with my phone. Travel light, use your phone for everything. And, invariably, I ended up needing to buy a new blank notebook. Because my thoughts don’t always fit into the conditions of the software. I don’t even like lines or graphs or dots on my page, just a blank book without any marks. And when I make plans, or organize a tour or put an album together, I do much much better when I have pen and paper. Maybe it’s my age or maybe it’s what writing does for us, maybe it’s how it engages the brain. 

Recently I read a newsletter from Ganzeer, where he wrote about his vomitbook. He mentioned using the Kaweco AL Sport, fitted with a medium nib. What’s that? Never heard of that brand. Kaweco is a German company that began making pens in 1889. No, never heard of them before. Here is their website.

I didn’t want to get a pen that uses cartridges and looked for a piston model instead. Something as small as the AL Sport, which is much smaller than any fountain pen I had used before. Then I discovered that Kaweco had just released a piston version of their AL Sport fountain pen. It doesn’t look as cool as the all silver or all black AL Sport that uses cartridges but I figured I can live with the gold colored clip and accents, if that’s the only style that is available. I bought the pen and a small glass jar of Kaweco black ink.

For scale, this notebook is 3.5 x 5.5 inches.  Closed, the pen measures 4 inches. 

I have had the pen for a couple of weeks and love it. I do believe I may at last have found the perfect writing implement for me. That makes me smile. :-)