The Best Montblanc Pens Are From The Meisterstuck Collection

[DrDebG]

Fascinating discussion.

 

One minor point, however. Many people are loyal to a brand. They know what to expect. Perhaps their father, mother, brother, cousin, boss, etc. owned a Montblanc. So they obtain their first Montblanc. In their mind, Montblanc is the definition of "best", regardless of whether it is or not. So, they continue to purchase something they know and "trust". They know what to expect. Will a MB 149 today look quite similar to the MB 149 that their cousin bought five years ago? Yes Will it be reasonably reliable? Yes. Will it be comfortable for them? Yes Will it be expensive? Yes. Expectations met.

 

I personally do not think there is anything wrong with this. How many of us purchase a new Apple phone for the same reason?

[Tom Kellie]

Fascinating discussion.

 

One minor point, however. Many people are loyal to a brand. They know what to expect. Perhaps their father, mother, brother, cousin, boss, etc. owned a Montblanc. So they obtain their first Montblanc. In their mind, Montblanc is the definition of "best", regardless of whether it is or not. So, they continue to purchase something they know and "trust". They know what to expect. Will a MB 149 today look quite similar to the MB 149 that their cousin bought five years ago? Yes Will it be reasonably reliable? Yes. Will it be comfortable for them? Yes Will it be expensive? Yes. Expectations met.

 

I personally do not think there is anything wrong with this. How many of us purchase a new Apple phone for the same reason?

 

~ 5Cavaliers:

 

As a child there were cans of Campbell's Vegetable, Vegetarian Vegetable, Tomato, Manhattan Clam Chowder, and Chicken Noodle soups on the cupboard shelves.

I grew up feeling that they were the best meal, snack and ration for a growing kid. As it happens, I never lost that feeling, more than half a century later.

No matter the merits of other canned soup brands, or criticisms of ingredients, or comments about salt levels, Campbell's remains the canned soup brand of choice for me.

Is it the best?

Who knows, yet it more than fully meets my expectations. I know what to expect and the flavor remains remarkable similar to what I enjoyed as a young teenager.

If that signifies that I'm brand loyal, so be it.

Perhaps I've come to feel likewise about Montblanc, as for many years the only fountain pen and ink purveyors I knew about in Beijing were the Montblanc boutiques.

I've since expanded my taste (thank you, Fritz Schimpf, Pellikan, and L’Artisan Pastellier) yet Montblanc remains my go-to brand as it meets my expectations, year after year.

Thank you for your insightful comment, above.

Tom K.

[DrDebG]

 

~ 5Cavaliers:

 

As a child there were cans of Campbell's Vegetable, Vegetarian Vegetable, Tomato, Manhattan Clam Chowder, and Chicken Noodle soups on the cupboard shelves.

I grew up feeling that they were the best meal, snack and ration for a growing kid. As it happens, I never lost that feeling, more than half a century later.

No matter the merits of other canned soup brands, or criticisms of ingredients, or comments about salt levels, Campbell's remains the canned soup brand of choice for me.

Is it the best?

Who knows, yet it more than fully meets my expectations. I know what to expect and the flavor remains remarkable similar to what I enjoyed as a young teenager.

If that signifies that I'm brand loyal, so be it.

Perhaps I've come to feel likewise about Montblanc, as for many years the only fountain pen and ink purveyors I knew about in Beijing were the Montblanc boutiques.

I've since expanded my taste (thank you, Fritz Schimpf, Pellikan, and L’Artisan Pastellier) yet Montblanc remains my go-to brand as it meets my expectations, year after year.

Thank you for your insightful comment, above.

Tom K.

 

 

Yes, exactly my point!

 

For those of us growing up in the US in that era, there was nothing better than Campbell's Tomato Soup with a grilled cheese sandwich on a Friday night watching The Wild, Wild West (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FrVoH6BVi4) or Gomer Pyle, USMC. (.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9XUIGD0Y6E ). And how many of remember when we were sick our family members making us Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup.

 

Comfort. Yes, that what it is with Montblancs - sheer comfort.

Edited November 26, 2019 by 5Cavaliers

[Pen Nut]

Ah the art of over thinking ! Dont you just love it

[arcfide]

IMO, something that people often forget when comparing the "old" to the "new" is that the new is, well, fresh off the line, while the old are only those specimens that were of sufficient worth or in sufficiently advantagous circumstances to survive the ravages of time. Time has a way of weeding out the terribly bad. How many of the old MBs that people have are absolute, 100% pristine and represent exactly what the customer would have received out the door during the 50's or 60's? I know for my part, every single one of my fountain pens has changed significantly in one way or another after some use.

 

The whole reason I discovered the Expression nib was because my 146 Le Grande's nib (the second nib on this pen) had finally worn down from an EF to what amounted to a stub medium. When I took it into the boutique to have it looked at, the salesman couldn't believe that I actually had an EF nib based on how it wrote.

 

If you took that older nib and then compared it with the modern EF nib, the newer nib would be demonstrably better simply because it writes the way it is supposed to and isn't worn down from extensive use over time. It's pure writing performance would be superior. Maybe there would be some collector value or the like in the older nib, but in terms of just writing performance, the newer nib will be better.

 

But the same thing can go the other way. You maybe have a set of pens that were cared for and selected for their writing performance or otherwise treated well, and they maybe weren't used too hard, but they were given a bit of a tune up during their time, so that they are "low mileage" pens with a bit of TLC on them. Such pens may very well write better and more consistently than your modern pen that hasn't been so tuned. Maybe they've been worn in a bit so that the rough edges are taken off, and thus those who like something smooth and a bit more broken in will find them better. But were they better, or just broken in?

 

I don't study the vintage pens enough to know for sure that this is the case.

 

It's definitely true, I think that we could make a case for MB doing some things to improve the cost of manufacturing and the like. However, just because something is made cheaper does not mean that it is made worse. There are many newer technologies that allow for equal or better performance out of cheaper and easier to produce materials. In many cases, these cheaper production methods also result in increased tolerances and precision. There are a huge number of examples where the use of cost cutting technologies has resulted in higher overall performance while also decreasing costs.

 

I don't know where MB falls in this space, but it's not as easy to compare as some people make it out to be. You can't just take an example of a pen from the past and a current pen and compare the two of them side by side, because they haven't been through the same life. Ideally, you would need to take a statistically significant sample of mint, never-used, new in box pens from whatever era you wanted to consider, and compare them against the equivalent modern day models.

 

To do this comparison, one has to account for ink. Modern inks are not the same as the traditional inks. To answer the question of whether the fountain pen experience was fundamentally better in a previous era than now, you would want to test them with "brand new" ink formulations of the past. This would allow you to test vintage inks with vintage pens and determine what the vintage experience would have really been like. Comparing vintage and modern pens with modern inks only isn't quite the same thing. You might be able to answer which pens are, in the moment, most suitable for a given experience right now, but that doesn't answer the question of which pens were fundamentally better in their time or which pens had better manufacturing. One must be careful about assigning causal responsibility to manufacturing when the number of potential influences on a pen's writing characteristics is so great. Does that old pen write well because it was tuned, broken in, manufactured better, or designed with greater tolerances because of the older inks it would be used with, or are modern inks just more friendly to it, or is it just one of the abnormally good pens of that era to survive, or something else entirely?

 

And then of course, one only need to look at the Expression Nib threads to see that people don't agree on what makes a quality writing experience. I myself currently lean towards the writing experience of the traditional steel needle-point dip pen, which gives extreme amounts of control, at the cost of a significant bit of scratchiness, whereas others seem to feel that smoothness of the writing experience trumps precision every time. Pens designed for one or the other metric would be considered very poor writers by the opposing metric. For example, I have a wet writing Waterman that some people would undoubtedly love for its smoothness and bold line, which I find nearly unusable for those same reasons. I took in my EF 146 to be "fixed" because the line was getting too bold and imprecise, writing more like a stub, but some people would probably say that such a nib had terrific character and wonder "line variation" for an EF, making it desirable to them.

[arcfide]

Ah the art of over thinking ! Dont you just love it

 

I'll see your over-thinking and raise you a "professional over analysis". (See post above.)

[tamiya]

It's not just all about the nib though...

 

Have tried many of the other MB models along the years, some are oddball to hold and others downright uncomfortable or weirdly balanced (I'm not a habitual cap-poster). I'm sure they've all got pretty good nibs from the MB nibmeisters, but I'll never get to find out because their barrels are too unusable.

 

If I were readying for a long bout of writing, a resin Meisterstuck comes pretty close to perfection for balance, weight and comfort.

[meiers]

 

On the contrary, the best is my favorite. Full stop. Now where do we go from here?

 

... put our favourite fountain pens to work and write...

Fountain pens are connected to the enjoyment of writing and communication.

[Intensity]

My vintage Montblanc 252 runs loops around my more modern (but still from the 80s, though serviced and upgraded) 149. Both are easy-to-fill Piston-fillers with smooth piston mechanisms that work perfectly. Both have ink windows. Size difference: sure, matter of preference. The 252 nib runs circles around the 149 nib. The Medium 149 nib had work done on it and writes in a crisp cursive italic now, but it's still got nothing on the beautifully springy and soft, naturally stubbish OB of 252. The 149 nib--the "business end" of the pen--is very large, made of gold, has customized grind, but nothing special otherwise to value it over good vintage nibs by the same brand.

 

Therefore Montblanc 252 is the best Montblanc, better than the modern Meisterstuck Collection.

 

Am I doing it right?

Edited December 15, 2019 by Intensity

[meiers]

I have never tried the 252. Now I am curious.

Edited December 16, 2019 by meiers

[aurore]

More accurately, the later version the pen is from, the better it performs

 

 

While I quite like modern MB 146/149, in my experience 146/149 from 70s/80s definitely do not perform worse.

[Pro-forma]

My vintage Montblanc 252 runs loops around my more modern (but still from the 80s, though serviced and upgraded) 149. Both are easy-to-fill Piston-fillers with smooth piston mechanisms that work perfectly. Both have ink windows. Size difference: sure, matter of preference. The 252 nib runs circles around the 149 nib. The Medium 149 nib had work done on it and writes in a crisp cursive italic now, but it's still got nothing on the beautifully springy and soft, naturally stubbish OB of 252. The 149 nib--the "business end" of the pen--is very large, made of gold, has customized grind, but nothing special otherwise to value it over good vintage nibs by the same brand.

 

Therefore Montblanc 252 is the best Montblanc, better than the modern Meisterstuck Collection.

 

Am I doing it right?

This is actually where the question started.

 

With improvement in all aspects over time, the satisfaction level of customer should only increase. However feedbacks from many users indicate the contrary.

 

This thread was started to discuss this question as well as to consider factors such as the business model, research and development, and customer feedbacks adapted inside MontBlanc.

Particularly to the Writing Instrument department

 

Remarks: Edited to remove typo.

Edited December 17, 2019 by Pro-forma

[txomsy]

This is actually where the question started.

 

With improvement in all aspects over time, the satisfaction level of customer should only increase. However feedbacks from many users indicate the contrary.

 

This thread was started to discuss this question as well as to consider factors such as the business model, research and development, and customer feedbacks adapted inside MontBlanc.

Particularly to the Writing Instrument department

 

Remarks: Edited to remove typo.

Sorry, but that's unscientific.

 

You are drawing conclusions from a biased and relatively small sample of the full population. The sample has been drawn from subscribers to FPN who are people that, in principle, have an interest and may be expected to be more knowledgeable on FP arcana than the average user, and these people is further biased because they value factors that most users don't, such as nib flexibility.

 

To be scientific, you would have to get satisfaction data from a more representative sample. The reason FPN users complain is because nibs and pens have different properties across time. For those in the know, therefore, older pens are better. But ever since the introduction of the ballpoint pen, and more the felt-tip and other variant pens, most users no longer appreciate flexibility as they do not know how to use it or even that it exists and would indeed likely consider it a hindrance and defect.

 

If we had access to MB satisfaction polls, I'd bet that satisfaction has been increasing or stagnant during most of last decades as most users would be happier with modern hard nibs than with older flex or italic nibs. Again, if we had access, I would bet that MB must have detected a trend shift: with the advent of the computer, there must have been a shift from writing experience (where lately, being BP-like was good) to ornamental display, which would explain their move from the plain designs of old to the elaborate LEs. And more recently, I'd bet, they probably detected a decrease in the interest for ornamental pens as their justification as an ornament was being further reduced by the lack of need of paper signing.

 

The main need for an ornamental LE pen is to show it, which is only justified if you need to use it. Which leads me to suspect another paradigm shift might be underway. I'd suppose that MB have detected first a decline in demand for FPs and recently an upsurge in demand by a new kind of users, people who wanted the pen not to sign, but who created their own justifications for buying and using one. Hobbyists who prefer writing on paper over the computer and who try to keep the "ancient art" of writing alive and enjoy it. These persons (I'd guess) are looking back to old pens again, and to old scripts, and have been demanding flexible and tailored nibs for over a decade. While they were a minority, MB and others have ignored them. That MB has produced now the Calligraphy nib makes me suspect that the ornamental interest just for plain signing is decreasing and they want to cater for the new users who want an ornamental pen but not just to display it while signing, but to display both a beautiful pen and/for their beautiful writing.

 

Any way, that's all speculation.

 

But a few points seem to arise: first, if most makers have not changed their nibs is because most buyers want a modern, BP-like nib, and second, if knowledgeable users say that vintage pens are better, then maybe they actually are.

 

In the end, it reduces to whom do you take into consideration to emit your judgement: if you take the vast majority of BP users, modern pens should be better, if you consider knowledgeable writers/collectors, then vintage pens are better and quality has decreased as nib options and versatility has been removed.

 

Whatever one decides, it is a matter of definitions that goes beyond anything we can friendly discuss among ourselves.

[Amit.]

Anyone has any sort of figures as to how many RB / BP or Fountain pens does MB sell / manufacture in a year ?

[Karmachanic]

The 252 nib runs circles around the 149 nib.

 

234 1/2 - same.

[sansenri]

an interesting topic.

I have a practical question that seems to fit.

Consider I'm a non-user of Montblanc, I only own a 146, which I do like, but possibly not as much as several other pens I own. So I don't really have sufficient experience to make up my own mind...

I'm in the peculiar situation of possibly acquiring a 149 or a Leonard Bernstein practically at the same price...

In view of the discussion above, and wanting to use the pen, would you go for the Meisterstuck or the SE?

[aurore]

.

In view of the discussion above, and wanting to use the pen, would you go for the Meisterstuck or the SE?

 

 

I believe there is no objective answer For exemple I like a lot many SE designs. Fabulous pens and for sure great writers. However I adore 146/149 simple design and performace. I even have a leather cigar case for these pens, so nothing else is actually tempting (despite all the beauty)

Edited December 18, 2019 by aurore

[DrDebG]

 

an interesting topic.

I have a practical question that seems to fit.

Consider I'm a non-user of Montblanc, I only own a 146, which I do like, but possibly not as much as several other pens I own. So I don't really have sufficient experience to make up my own mind...

I'm in the peculiar situation of possibly acquiring a 149 or a Leonard Bernstein practically at the same price...

In view of the discussion above, and wanting to use the pen, would you go for the Meisterstuck or the SE?

 

 

 

BOTH!

[sansenri]

 

I believe there is no objective answer For exemple I like a lot many SE designs. Fabulous pens and for sure great writers. However I adore 146/149 simple design and performace. I even have a leather cigar case for these pens, so nothing else is actually tempting (despite all the beauty)

 

 

 

 

BOTH!

 

I was afraid you'd say that!

 

obviously I know almost everything about the 149 (despite not owning one yet) but almost nothing about the Bernstein.

Does anyone own one and can give a quick comparison vs the 149?

Particularly in terms of comfort in the hand and writing experience (including nib). Thanks!

[meiers]

I find all Montblanc pens to be excellent writing instruments: ergonomic and enjoyable. But there are differences that will affect your experience of each pen. That experience is defined by subjective preferences, I think.

Edited December 19, 2019 by meiers