Episode: 1941
Title: HPR1941: What's in my case
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1941/hpr1941.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 11:31:59

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This is HPR Episode 1941 entitled What's in my case and in part of the series What's in my toolkit?
It is hosted by Dave Morris and in about 33 minutes long.
The summary is I'm a fountain pen and you just hear what's in my pen case.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
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Hello, my name is Dave Morris and I've got a show today which I'm calling What's in my case.
To be honest what I'm talking about is pens and stationery and that type of thing,
particularly fountain pens. The reason I'm calling it What's in my case is because I recently bought
a leather pen case from China which I bought through eBay and it's where I can transport my
favorite fountain pens when I do that. So I've been a bit of an enthusiast with regard to pens
and stationery and stuff. Pretty much all my life I think. I think it must run in families because
my son's also an enthusiast of these things and so's my daughter to a lesser extent
though she loves writing in journals and notebooks and that sort of stuff.
She always got loads of those but the pen side of it, my dad also was an enormous enthusiast
for all of these things. You could always know what to buy for his birthday or Christmas,
anything pen or pencil or paper related and he'd be happy. Anyway I thought I'd share this stuff
with you on HPR because I've encountered a number of people throughout my career and I've worked
in IT so I've met a lot of, I don't know how to put it, geeks I suppose is the way to put it.
The people who really enjoy working in the IT field and so many of them seem to really have
an enthusiasm for pens, paper, ink, writing and that whole thing. I think it probably goes with the
the outlook, the mindset. So the reason I think I like doing this sort of stuff is when I was at
school around about age seven or eight that would have been in the mid 1950s. We were taught to write
with ink pens as a transition from using pencils. The school I was at had a supply of dip pens
and nibs and ink and blotting paper in order to facilitate this. The pens are quite primitive,
they just had a wooden shaft like a sort of pencil type of thing with a metal nib holder on the
end into which a nib could be inserted and if you had a broken or damaged nib you'd just
gone get another one. The nib you got was fairly scratchy thing that needed a fair bit of care
to use otherwise it dug into the paper and made a mess. We each got a sheet of blotting paper
to mop up ink spills and to block the work we'd done so we didn't smudge it. In each desk we had
in the school had a hole in it for an ink well. You'll still see them in sort of antique shops
and stuff I guess and in it you fitted in our case anyway a white ceramic open top ink well
it had a fairly small opening you could fit the pen in but it didn't it helped to stop the ink
evaporating too quickly. A lot of the desks not all but a lot had a sort of brass slider thing that
covered over the ink well to stop it drying out when we weren't doing writing and the class would
always have a designated ink monitor whose job it was to fill these ink wells every week maybe
I can't remember the frequency and of a large stone bottle full of ink. It's amazing and you
think about it, it's seven or eight year old splashing around ink with this sort of abandoned but
it seemed to work. The color of the ink we got was always blue black I don't know what that was
sort of the regulation color or something I've no idea but that's what it was. We were taught to
write using cursive writing and we followed the teachings of I think a Victorian I've got notes
in the in the show notes there are links there and her name was Marion Richardson many many kids
of that era would have learnt Marion Richardson writing. I think it taught us good writing habits
didn't really feel like it at the time it just felt like another imposition but I think it did
do good things for us. When I got to high school later it was expected we'd write with either with
the ballpoint pen which were just coming into to fashion or preferably we'd use a fountain pen
and fountain pens are quite cool in those days and a lot of the kids had them and there was a lot of
comparison and rivalry about what pen you had and who got who had the better one and that sort of
thing not so much the writing but just the pens. I think the the ritual of buying or being bought
a fountain pen was a sort of right of a passage as you moved on to high school from what in those days
was called junior school in England where I lived. Anyway I guess all this stuff made me like
writing with a fountain pen and of course as I said before my experiences will be shared with many
people who are of my sort of age and older it'd been through the UK school system and speaking to
people from other countries I find quite a lot of Europeans have had similar experiences perhaps
later on in time than than I did so why do people like writing this way and a lot of them do
I think there's quite a lot I could say here but I won't go into a huge list of reasons but just
to say briefly that if you use a fountain pen it can be generally more comfortable to use for
longer periods when you're writing things by hand I know people tend not to write by hand
as much these days as they used to keyboard skills are regarded as being more important but
there are still times when writing by hand can be can be good you keep a diary keep a journal
those types of things write letters to people there are many nib styles so you can find one that suits
your writing and can be enjoyable to use it can take a little while to find exactly the one that
you want admittedly but once you have you can have a pen which you really enjoy using which
will last you your life and using a fountain pen can generally be more economical there's a can
be a higher cost to start up with when you buy the pen and get the one with the right nib maybe
you've tried a few along the way inks cost a bit although you can get some quite good value ones
but the point is that you you don't have to throw the pen away and buy another one you can
just refill it from your from your bottle of ink and a bottle of ink in the last years and years
and years I recently finished one from school and that's a that must be a good 40 years that that
bottle has been around nowadays there's also a novelty value in using one it's also becoming a
bit more cool I think in some respects and it gives a certain air of gravitas to if you assign
something with a with a fountain pen or if you use one in a in a meeting or something like that
I'm not sure that's a that's a big plus that anyway there is very much resurgence in the interest in
fountain pens and I've pointed to various links in my notes supporting that there's a bit of
terminology around fountain pens that you might not be aware of first of all a fountain pen is a pen
with a nib through which liquid ink flows and it's got an ink reservoir that differentiates it
from the sort of dip pens that I was talking about earlier the reservoir is usually refillable
although there are some disposable pens who use just use up the the ink inside them and chuck it
the nib is the is the writing part as you dive this gather and it's usually metal or they have
I have had plastic ones in the past not very good but have used them and they have different
tip sizes varying from extra fine to to broad and there's a variety of shapes very wide variety
actually but we'll not go into a lot detail there the pen nib is piece of metal usually with a
small blob on the end which which actually comes in contact with the paper and it's usually
divided into two there's a split down the middle sometimes with the breather hole in it and the split
makes the two halves move in in relation to one another as you press down on the pen and it also
helps the ink to flow down to the tip of the nib these two pieces that you find are called the
tines t i n e they won't go through this whole list there's a list if you to refer to or just
there's anything in particular that I mention I'll try and refer back to the to the list so I
thought what I'd do it just go through my pen collection now I'm not a very I'm not a heavy
collector of these things I have very few I have about 19 usable pens at the moment and I use
maybe six on a regular basis so I'll just talk about my top six and my style of writing seems
to suit a fine nib so I have a fairly small handwriting so I tend to buy nibs classed as fine
or extra fine the pens that's originate in Japan tend to have finer nibs than European pens so
one marked as medium from a Japanese manufacturer is similar to a European fine
so going through the list of pens then my first one and these are sort of ranked in in order
of preference I guess so my top number one should have done a countdown you know never mind
you probably don't care either way anyway it's a pelican pelican I think is the way you've
pronounced because it's a German pen the one I have is a classic range M215 with a sort of diamond
or rhombus pattern on the side that was given to me by my son for Christmas 2012 so one I've done
in each of these cases there are three pictures of the pen there's one with the pen just
with its cap on so you can get a general idea of it there's same pen with the cap removed so you
can you can see it this sort of general structure uncapped and then I do a close-up of the nibs so
you can get an idea of that I finish with an example of what the writing looks like obviously it's
my handwriting so it's nothing generic but just to give you some idea of how it how it looks when
you write with a pen like this so the one I've got is an extra fine nib writes really beautifully
and smoothly ink flows is great that's one of the the features of a fountain pen cheaper ones
tend to to skip they don't the ink flows not so good sometimes you can resolve that you can
clean them out and work on the on the nib do things for the nib to make the flow better
the pen this pelican has a metal body and cap so it's quite strong the the clip this is the
characteristic of the this brand pen has a sort of look of a pelican with a pelican's bill if you
look at it carefully it's fairly small it's not a big pen it's operated with a piston now my
terminology list explained a little bit about what pistons are but basically it's a it's a knob at
the end of the barrel that you turn and it moves a a small piston up and down the inside of the
barrel which will suck up ink or push it out if that's what you want to do but in this particular
case it's it's integrated into the pen you can't see the piston mechanism and but there is a
small viewing window in the barrel and you can see how much ink is currently in the pen so this
is quite a large German company pelican which makes a number of pens which vary quite a lot in
terms price this is an example of a of a manufacturer that does produce some pretty expensive
pens right at the top of the range so it's it's not not a type of pen I'm going to buy many more
of unless I get very rich since pretty unlikely so my number two example is from a company
TW SBI that everybody pronounces twisbee and it's the eco model twisbee is a Taiwanese company
and the letters stand for something that I'm not really sure about because I've seen various
explanations of it and I'm not sure which one is right anyway the eco is one is a new model
which I bought from myself July this year 2015 and it's the lowest price one in there in
their range but it's quite nice the you can see from the pictures that it's a transparent pen
with a non-transparent cap it's type pen called a demonstrator which is a thing explained in my
list of terminology I bought the extra fine nib for this and it's um it's just really nice
it's a piston action pen the piston is operated by a knob at the end of the barrel as usual
and it's made of acrylic resin and this particular one is remarkable in as much that it can be
completely disassembled and maintained by subit it actually comes with in a box with a little
plastic spanner which lets you undo the parts of the pen there's even instructions on how to do it
and it's also got a small jar of silicon grease which you can put onto the the piston to help it
to move as pistons can get a bit jammed up over time it writes really really well it's very fine
nib it's it's very good um it's there's slight scratchiness to the nib but it's it's hard to get
away from that with a very very fine nib it's a really nice pen to use so my next one is
from an American company called Nudeless they actually primarily make ink but they they may go
a range of pens as well I've got two of these Nudeless pens but the one I'm talking about here is
when I like the best it's fairly cheap pen I should have said that the twisty was not all that
expensive it's around 40 pounds I think it was the Nudeless pen that I'm talking about is
called the Conrad model and the color is a fairly dark blue which has got the name and sometimes
the names are a little bit fancy Hudson Bay Fathom I call it it's a resin material which is
different from many others it's not acrylic it's got an odd smell to it but that seems to be a
selling feature actually but there are um other there are a full acrylic pens in the Conrad range
but they're about twice the price of this one and this was about 17 pounds and I bought it
it's a medium fine nib and it's unusual in the split between the two tines there's no
breathable in it and the split extends the entire length of the nib which allows the nib to
bend more when you write it's called a flex nib that means that the width the lines it produces
varies with the amount of pressure that you apply and people like to do use this for doing
caligraphic effects in copper plate handwriting and that type of thing I don't do that myself
but I find it very smooth and pleasant nib to use piston filler but in this case you have to
do a little cap at the end to reveal a knolled knob that operates the piston and it's a transparent
pen I didn't say that hopefully you can see that from the pictures and my writing sample
is using the other ones have used a a black ink which I quite like but in this one I've put a
blue ink and it's some you can see an example of its use so the noodle is ink company based in
the USA and it's slightly idiosyncratic and quite a fun company I think the pen boxes just a
little cardboard boxes come with pictures drawn on them from an original that was that was done
by the owner of the company I think and they particularly the the inks are a good value the
next one is called the reform 1745 now this was another birthday present from my son in 2012
the old mom is a christmas present it's a small pen and I assume the nib is a fine one but there's
no indication it doesn't come with any documentation or anything but I'll come to that in a minute
it's a piston filler with a with a knob on the end as you can see in the in the pictures
there's also an ink viewing window in the barrel it's green darkish green and black with a copper
colored cover of copper colored pieces on it the clip and the ring at the bottom of the cap
and it's got a two-tone nib which is nice now the that particular one tends to
gush ink rather a lot you can see from the writing that there's quite a lot of ink on the
deposited on the paper which is you know it's good and bad it's it'll it'll get less so as you
use it it's only recently been filled this one I think now the interesting story about these
things is the the colors are actually the colors of the the city of Berlin it's they were originally
manufactured in Germany in the 1930s and 40s and they became particularly popular with school
children some stories say that they were made for school children not clear whether that is the case
they were at one time in the in that sort of era reported to be the best selling pens in the world
and manufacturing continued into the 1970s their stories of Nazi officers
being captured during the Second World War having these in their in their pockets and they were
they were taken prisoner and the pens being well known and respected as a consequence of
people finding them I don't know how much of that is true it's hard to find a good definitive
story on this anyway the pens were made in vast numbers I think and they're still available
they're they're called old new stock which I thought was a very strange thing until I realized
what they mean is it's an old pen that's never been used and it is just as it was manufactured
and you can still still buy them and the problem with them is that I don't know whether time or
maybe a little bit of misuse along the way or maybe the manufacturing process means that the
quality can be a little bit variable my son actually bought 12 of these things in a job lot
from eBay and he went to to the trouble of fixing this particular one so it worked better and
since then I've bought a couple myself they cost around 12 pounds each on eBay they have to be
quite selected though some people will charge you a lot for them and I've learned a bit about how
to tune the nib so that it's not scratchy and delivers the ink properly so they can be quite
quite good to have they're a really nice first use pen but you have to be careful of this thing
so my next one is the pilot MR I bought this from Amazon July this year 2015 just because I'd
heard about it and thought it would be nice to give it a try I'd heard a lot of comments
from people on the internet and also there was a discussion about this on Gnu's social
that I frequent from time to time it's in Europe it's called the MR but in the USA it's called
a metropolitan and is well regarded as a as a good value first time pen it's all the one I've
got is all black with a slightly shiny bit around the middle of it I think it's all metal I think
well mostly metal anyway the barrel and the cap are metal it's got a medium nib but it's a
Japanese pen so it means it's actually quite fine it's a cartridge pen this particular one
it takes pilot branded cartridges cartridges but it also takes international size cartridges
there's a converter that supposedly works so I've not tried it I've written down details
of what it's called and I also have a waterman's pen which I won't talk about here but I've got
some ink cartridges for it and I tried one of those in the pen it's much longer than the
the international size one so it's a good capacity and it works absolutely fantastic so my writing
sample is with the black ink waterman intense black it's the name of the ink it's a really nice pen
it's a really good writer smooth pleasant to use and it's around 15 pounds in the UK
I'm told that it's some sort of pricing dollars in the state so it's a it's fantastic pen for
for very little money pilot the pilot corporations are Japanese pen manufacturer and they make
quite a range of of pens some of which are pretty expensive this is this is right at the bottom
range but it's still an excellent pen so my last one is from a French company I bought this in
August 2015 and the company is called what it looks like Jay Herbin but it's pronounced with a
in a French way Jay Urban and they're mostly known for their inks but they'd started this year
selling a fountain pen and a ballpoint pen the ballpoint pen is refillable with fountain pen ink
which is interesting so I bought the ballpoint for my daughter because she likes to use that sort of
pen and see if she liked it she didn't my son was very keen so he's he's got it now but I kept the
fountain pen for myself it's a transparent imagine polycarbonate type of thing it's only small
it's about four inches the barrel and to the nib it's four inches so without the cap you have to
put the cap on the end which is called posting I've mentioned that in my terminology to you have
to do that to make it a reasonable size has a fine nib and it's as a said transparent pen it
cost only eight pounds and the roller ball was five pounds it takes international size cartridge
there's there's two sizes in the international range of small and and large and it takes the small
ones because it's so tiny but I have found a converter for it though I haven't used it yet
and the converter is made by Monte Verde it's called a mini ink converter just in case you
this interests you and you want to follow it through the pen is really nice to use it right
well I bought some Jéa Ban ink cartridge just used with it and tried out a reddish color
which again has a French name as you might imagine Tère de Thure which I think means
earth fire earth fire or fire fire I think it's it's meant to be sort of terracotta actually
so it's like a sort of fireplace or something I don't know that's just me guessing
so Jéa Ban is quite a well known an old company so some interesting they made more pens I'd
be interested in trying them out and writes really nicely so as I mentioned at the beginning
I've got a case for my pens I bought it on eBay it's nothing very much actually but it's it's okay
it'll take 12 pens in total and I have been known to carry them around several of them around
in this this thing but it's it's not a thing I do often mostly when I meet friends are all
to into fountain bends we can compare notes so what did you buy recently recently oh I've got one
of these oh that's amazing I should get one of those those types of meetings I told you I'm a geek
I'd like to find something better for storing pens in a wooden box or something like that
but at least having a case let me join the what's in my toolkit
series I wondered if you yourself might be interested in coming a fountain pen user it's something
at least it's worth having a try at just to see how you get on with it so if you're interested I've
listed a few pens that you might want to buy to experiment with the first one is from pilot and
it's called the the pen or the V4 I think it might vary depending on where you buy it it's Japanese
pen again it's a disposable pen it's got a medium sized steel nib and it's available in multiple
colors it has a large capacity around quite a long time in the UK it costs around four pounds
in the United States I'm told and possibly other countries it's known as the Varsity and I have
one of these and I really like it it's lovely pen it's you can tell it's not not high quality but
it's great for it's a good writer in it always writes and it's very reliable and it's a good
thing to have I have a red one which I use for for marking up things or highlighting stuff the
other one similar to this is from a company called Platinum another Japanese company and it's called
the Preppy this is a clear polycarbonate pen the the pilot one was not not completely clear it's
refillable this one with a proprietary cartridge and there are several pen colors and ink colors
available there is an adapter I'm told I've not tried this myself to allow it to use international
small cartridges and it's also there's also three nib sizes medium fine and extra fine in the UK
this this pen costs around three pounds but I've not actually bought one of these to try it so I
can't can't comment on it myself but it's well spoken of and if you're interested it's probably a
good starter pen to just try out and then there's the Jair ban transparent pen I've just mentioned
which is around eight pounds and then there's the pilot MR or metropolitan again which I've
discussed already and that's around fifteen dollars in the US so there's four pens that you might
want to try out just to see whether you enjoy writing with a fountain pen now the other factors that
I haven't mentioned much about is this recording could go on far too long if I did is the joint
subjects of paper and ink so I've made some references to paper and ink in relation to writing
and fountain pens there's some good articles on Wikipedia getting the right sort of paper
good quality for using with a fountain pen it's important because it allows the pen to write
smoothly and also it mustn't be too absorbent otherwise the ink will sing in the paper and make
a sort of fuzzy mess as it silks into the fibers which is referred to as feathering and if you've got
good quality paper then you can write on both sides of it so if you're writing notes or something
you keep in a journal or a diary then you don't want to turn the page after writing on it and find
that you can read what was on the other side from the at the back so what I tend to go for
an 80 GSM paper GSM is a term from the paper world grams per square meter so it's a measure of
the paper density that's not all that's not the entire parameter list for for what to
or makes up good paper because some printer papers and copy of papers can be 80 GSM and yet they
tend to be very absorbent so you need to look around for for good quality writing paper I've
actually found this is a UK thing probably there's a range called ox foot which says which sells
books and writing pads and refills for ring binders and some of their papers in their academic
range are excellent for using with a fountain pen I could go into a lot more detail here but I won't
unless you ask me to but for now I'll stop so just finish off with speaking about inks now there's
a huge number of these things with a vast range of colors and it's quite important to choose
inks made for fountain pens because there are others which are made for dip pens and maybe
drawing pens and that type of thing that if you put into a fountain pen will clog it because they
they tend to dry out and that will contain materials that will damage the inside of the pen a good
basic ink made by a pen or ink company such as Parker or Waterman it's a good choice to use to
start things off if you have access to the nudler zinc range then those are also very good value
there's a very large market in fountain pen inks some of them can be remarkably expensive a big bottle
especially a fancy glass bottle can can cost you as much as a it's a good quality pen which seems
daft to me I'm not buying those I have discovered recently that some of the sellers in the UK there's a
brand in UK called Diamine which is a good quality ink that's not massively expensive they sell a
small sample bottle which you can you can buy just a sample inks you know so you you'll get maybe
years worth of use out of such a small bottle I forget the size of them but you can sometimes
get these and then you can decide on a color that you like and then buy more of it in the larger
bottle perhaps which is a better value so it's it's another large subject that I'll leave for now
so I hope that wasn't too geeky for you and you found it interesting so that's it bye now
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