Jump to content

Hello From Sydney


austollie

Recommended Posts

Dear fountain pen lovers,

 

I’ve been following this forum for a while and I considered that it was about time that I joined as a member. I thought I’d give some background to how I developed my passion for fountain pens.

I spent my formative years in Germany, where all school kids were required to write with a fountain pen. When I started primary school, just about every kid wrote with a blue Pelikano Series 4 with an “A” nib. When I moved to Australia in my early teens, school kids looked with a degree of bewilderment at the kid using a fountain pen (by that time I was writing with a Pelikano Series 5), which I continued to use until I ran out the very healthy supply of cartridges that I had brought with me.

At university, I purchased a Parker 25 Flighter, which I used only sporadically, until rediscovering my passion for fountain pens about 15 years ago. The Parker 25 is one of my several daily writers and my preferred pen for travelling interstate. It is particularly well behaved on aeroplanes. Provided that the cartridge is full, I can even use it when the plane is climbing, where other fountain pens would be spluttering ink all over the page.

More recently I have developed a moderate obsession for collecting fountain pens and the primary focus of my collection is where my usage of fountain pens started, that is school cartridge fountain pens from the 1960s to the 1980s. In particular, I use and collect:

  • Pelikano fountain pens with metal cap: I have examples in multiple colours for Series 1 to 7. My favourite would have to be the 1983 Super Pelikano. I also have various other Pelikan cartridge fillers.
  • Montblanc Carrera pens: As a kid, I fell for the marketing of these pens, but I could never afford to buy one. I just loved the gimmicky tyre fountain pen stand (I now have several of these, which I rarely use). I also have examples of the related Montblanc Caressa Line in my collection as well as one Monte Rosa although the one that I have is not branded Montblanc.
  • Lamy pens: To me, Lamy is a prime example of an organisation applying simple design principles to produce highly functional and attractive products at reasonable prices. I use a Lamy 2000 EF Makrolon as one of my daily writers as well as a Lamy Linea for which I recently purchased a gold nib. Naturally, given my interest in school pens, I have several Al Stars, Safaris and a Vista with my Lamy Safari Petrol being my favourite of these (and I adore the Lamy Petrol ink).
  • Kaweco: I have several of these, including a piston filler from the 1950s and modern cartridge fillers including an Al Sport and a Special. The Special is another of my daily writers.
  • Parker Pens: While I have one English Duofold and a Sonnet, I actually prefer the cheaper pens. Apart from my Parker 25, I have several Jotters and a Vector calligraphy pen. While the nibs on all of these may be nail hard, I find that the lower end Parker pens write surprisingly well.

The other area, where my interest has evolved is with respect to ink colours. At school, I exclusively used blue cartridges. I then move onto bottles of black ink and stuck with that for years, until slowly adding other colours. At first, I bought red ink, for marking up texts and then added more and more colours as time went by. I now seemingly write with every colour in the rainbow, although I prefer darker colours, because I think that they look more professional at work.

Being a keen wood worker, I have made myself various custom boxes to contain my pen collection with the manufacturers’ logos and other diagrams created in wood inlay.

Well, that’s my obsession explained in a nutshell. I look forward to contributing to this forum in due course.

 

Cheers,

 

Ollie

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 12
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

  • austollie

    2

  • ThomasB

    1

  • Henricum_Tropen

    1

  • infinitypen

    1

Hello Ollie and welcome to FPN, from Cape Town, South Africa.

To sit at one's table on a sunny morning, with four clear hours of uninterruptible security, plenty of nice white paper, and a [fountain] pen - that is true happiness!


- Winston Churchill



Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hello and Welcome to FPN!! Glad to have you as a member!!

PAKMAN

minibanner.gif                                    Vanness-world-final.png.c1b120b90855ce70a8fd70dd342ebc00.png

                         My Favorite Pen Restorer                                             My Favorite Pen Store

                                                                                                                                Vanness Pens - Selling Online!

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hello and welcome to FPN.

Recite, and your Lord is the most Generous  Who taught by the pen

Taught man that which he knew not (96/3-5)

Snailmail3.png Snail Mail 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Welcome!

 

Glad you are with us!

 

:W2FPN:

"The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it."  - Selwyn Duke    

 

 

 

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks for all the warm welcomes. I did notice that the most recent posts relating to Pelikano and Montblanc Carrera fountain pens are quite old. Are there any other fans of these out there? Perhaps it's time for me to start a new thread with pics of my collection.

 

Cheers, Ollie

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Welcome to the FPN. It has been a rewarding forum to learn a lot about our American vintage pens.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 5 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

Hello and welcome from Port Stephens.

Words flowing from the soul and conveyed to paper, require the touch of a fountain pens soft carress.Distinct and individual like a lovers touch.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

Hello! I was in Sydney for holiday a month back. Loved it. Beautiful place with very friendly and awesome people.

Welcome to FPN and you should visit Singapore some time!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now


  • Most Contributions

    1. amberleadavis
      amberleadavis
      43844
    2. PAKMAN
      PAKMAN
      33501
    3. Ghost Plane
      Ghost Plane
      28220
    4. inkstainedruth
      inkstainedruth
      26627
    5. jar
      jar
      26101
  • Upcoming Events

  • Blog Comments

    • Shanghai Knife Dude
      I have the Sailor Naginata and some fancy blade nibs coming after 2022 by a number of new workshop from China.  With all my respect, IMHO, they are all (bleep) in doing chinese characters.  Go use a bush, or at least a bush pen. 
    • A Smug Dill
      It is the reason why I'm so keen on the idea of a personal library — of pens, nibs, inks, paper products, etc. — and spent so much money, as well as time and effort, to “build” it for myself (because I can't simply remember everything, especially as I'm getting older fast) and my wife, so that we can “know”; and, instead of just disposing of what displeased us, or even just not good enough to be “given the time of day” against competition from >500 other pens and >500 other inks for our at
    • adamselene
      Agreed.  And I think it’s good to be aware of this early on and think about at the point of buying rather than rationalizing a purchase..
    • A Smug Dill
      Alas, one cannot know “good” without some idea of “bad” against which to contrast; and, as one of my former bosses (back when I was in my twenties) used to say, “on the scale of good to bad…”, it's a spectrum, not a dichotomy. Whereas subjectively acceptable (or tolerable) and unacceptable may well be a dichotomy to someone, and finding whether the threshold or cusp between them lies takes experiencing many degrees of less-than-ideal, especially if the decision is somehow influenced by factors o
    • adamselene
      I got my first real fountain pen on my 60th birthday and many hundreds of pens later I’ve often thought of what I should’ve known in the beginning. I have many pens, the majority of which have some objectionable feature. If they are too delicate, or can’t be posted, or they are too precious to face losing , still they are users, but only in very limited environments..  I have a big disliking for pens that have the cap jump into the air and fly off. I object to Pens that dry out, or leave blobs o
  • Chatbox

    You don't have permission to chat.
    Load More
  • Files






×
×
  • Create New...