Fellow FPNers:

A couple of weeks ago I (with wife and daughter) was in New Orleans for a college visit (Tulane) and we stumbled across a brick and mortor shop 'Papier Plume' in the French Quarter. They sell stationary, journals, dips pens, nibs and holders, portable desks, some fountain pens (some Jean Pierre Lepine, Curtis (Australia) and Retro 51), but best of all, they make and sell their own inks!

The manager(s) of the store are a husband wife team, the husband is Patrick Rideau, who is from France and says he learned some classic French ink recipes there. So perhaps some Waterman/J Herbin like inks from here in the U.S.

Patrick puts his inks into 4 categories:
o Fountain pen ink
o Calligraphy ink - dye
o Calligraphy ink - pigmented
o Calligraphy ink - metallic

Price wise (from his web site):
o 15 ml bottles: $4.00
o 1 oz (23 ml) bottles (both plastic and glass): $6.00
o 50 ml bottle: $10.00

Patrick also says he sometimes will try to formulate new ink colors to customer requests... so the FPN posters who want 'Mayan Blue', or 'Aurora Taupe', can consider giving Patrick a try. For instance Patrick says he has a architect customer who requested an (old) Shaeffer Peacock Blue color since Shaeffer stopped making in (and moved their ink making to Slovenia). Peacock blue is now one of Patrick's regular ink colors.

See the Papier Plume web site for more details on inks, colors, and color samples: http://www.papierplume.com and go to inks. (Sorry I don't know how to make the web address a real-link, perhaps another FPN poster can explain how.

Patrick's Fountain Pen colors: (see http://www.papierplume.com/Webs/catalog/FP_Ink_shart1.html)
o Black
o Burgundy
o Caramel
o Forest Green
o Ivy Green
o Moss Green
o Forget-Me-Not Blue
o Midnight Blue
o Peacock Blue
o Violet

I bought several inks (fountain and calligraphy) and one of these days will do a review of some of them. In lieu of a full review, see attach photos that include mini-reviews of Fountain Pen Ink: Peacock Blue and Caramel.

-- Wells

You need to remove the last parenthesis off your link. I can't wait for some FPN reviews!! Caramel looks very nice!

done. thanks.

adding photos. OK, how do I do this. I edit my post, do the 'choose files and upload' but then I don't see them on the post.

to make this even more embarising, I'm a professional SW engineer.

Papier Plume

Here's the link to the previous thread about these inks.

Forget-Me-Not Blue, looks like it has some potential. Could be a rather interesting ink to try out.

Especially in a Forget-Me-Not Stipula Ventidue!

I was in N.O. this week as well, and I visited this shop, and talked to Patrick. Very nice fellow, as well as his sister-in-law, who also works there. I bought a very nice fleur-de-lis wax stamp, and my 10-year-old daughter just had to have this pink Retro 51 she saw. It is her first FP, and she just loves it, inky fingers and all. The next day, as we toured Laura and Oak Alley Plantations, she was steadily writing notes, w/ her new pen. Anyway, I also highly recommend this shop. I just happened to have a few FP's w/ me, and Patrick really liked my 823 and my newest acquistion--an orange LE VP. If you're in the FQ anytime soon, you need to visit this shop.

If you daughter likes the pink Retro 51, she might like the special edition of PINK Pelikano.
You can also get Pelikan Pink ink carts that fit it!

Thanks for the tip.

First, post your photos to a free photo posting site such as www.flickr.com. Then, use it's URL address in the box that you get when you click the "Insert Image" button under the font selection in the reply posting screen.

You can also upload one or more pictures from your computer to FPN by typing (or pasting) the filename into the field under the Manage Current Attachments pulldown menu. After uploading, you can insert the files into your post by clicking on the pulldown menu and then clicking the button to the left of the filename (see picture below) to "Insert attachment into text editor", which inserts a link into your text at the cursor position. Here's a picture of the pulldown menu:

Click to view attachment

Hope this helps.

Thanks Viseguy!

my problem before was trying to upload photos that were too large... which err doesn't work so well. so now lets try 2 mini-review scanned images (96 dpi) that take up very little space. I have not tried to color correct these but you get the general idea. I hope to do a full review soon.

also Annie, thanks for the link to the other thread on this ink. I had looked in the review index and didn't see any entries for Papier-Plume, I hadn't searched the threads. (Doh!)

first the caramel mini-review. Its a light yellow-ish brown, sepia-ish. Based on the Writing Desk "col-o-rama' on my monitor at least, similar in color to Diamine Golden Brown and Diamine Sepia. This is NOT a water resistant ink.
Click to view attachment


2nd Peacock mini -review
Click to view attachment
(on my monitor) The scanned image seams lighter, flatter and with less 'pop' than the the physical hardcopy.


-- wells