Two LOLs to you, good sir: One for the above comment, and the other for your location which I just noticed.
I love good pens and always keep a small collection of them around. Let’s see what I have on my desk…
[ul][li]A simple but sturdy Lamy fountain pen, plastic body, medium nib
[/li][li]A more elegant Rotring fountain pen, black and gold, extra-fine nib
[/li][li]A very splendid Rotring fountain pen, massive thick steel body, fine nib
[/li][li]A Lamy rollerball, black; the body is a bit too thin for my taste
[/li][li]A propelling pencil, Faber-Castell Grip Plus 0.7, with extremely comfortable thick rubber padding
[/li][li]A regular Pelikan ball pen, nothing remarkable; only used for carbon copies
[/li][li]A nice set of Lamy ball pen & pencil with thin metal bodies that I got as a present from a newspaper subscription
[/li][li]A Yard-o-Led Viceroy Barley rollerball, massive silver body, fantastically expensive but wonderfully thick and heavy[/ul]
[/li]
I also have a Yard-o-Led Viceory Barley fountain pen but can’t actually use it except for signatures because the nib is far too wide… quite a waste of money. The best fountain pen that I actually use is the steel Rotring and that was only around 80 euros. I wouldn’t pay more than €100 for a pen today.
Check eBay. Do a search for Montblanc ballpoint, and you’ll certainly find something to fit in your budget… a quick search reveals this one which may be suitable.
There’s a couple things about Montblanc. Firstly, the ink cartridge is fantastic. It flows even and smooth, and writes beautifully. Secondly, the pen is perfectly balanced in your hand. Now, I really like some of the new cheapo pens with their rubbery gel grip, and I also have a Cross Morph that I really like (and it’s a bargain for $21!), but a Montblanc feels great. Lastly, the Montblanc icon is instantly recognizable, and, like freshly shined shoes and a nice watch, shoes business partners you mean business.
If that sort of stuff is important to you, anyway… /shrug
I used to be a bit obsessive about good pens, but that seems to have faded away and now I’m firmly entrenched in better living through stealing office supplies.
My pens are all black and say “US Government” on them. They looks like something a NASA engineer would use on the back of a napkin in the 60s to calculate how much oxygen Apollo 13 had left.
Ha! I found it. The black one pictured here:
Wow, I feel a little better about it now:
Retractable, refillable, ball point pen is imprinted with “U.S. Government” and is a rugged, yet economic “workhorse” of the U.S. Government and Military. Ink does not skip or smear and is in a brass refill cartridge for extended shelf life. The barrel color indicates the ink color. Pen is designed to write anywhere including land or water regardless of climate and altitude.
Thanks for the recommendations. They both look good. I’m interested in the Cross Morph, but can you tell me a little more about it? Is the writing smooth and is there any “skipping” as you write? In other words, is the ink flow consistent and clean?
Thanks again.
Any similar “reasonably priced” recommendations for fountain pens?
I suppose you can’t get Rotring in America? They really make great pens…
Perhaps my optometrist is wrong and I should wear corrective lenses.
I’d like to talk about this some more. A good pen is great, but it’s nothing without some nice quality paper. Where can I get some thick, coarse-grained, acid-free paper for cheap?
I’ll throw another vote on the pile for Uniball. I somehow ended up with a signo RT gel and I love it. I’m also a fan of the fine-point sharpie, but only in those rare circumstances where bleed-through doesn’t matter. I tried to balance my checkbook with one once and oh boy.
On a slightly related note, I did a google search for “uniball” to get the above link and boy, did I have a few milliseconds of terror after clicking the search button.
I don’t have any experience with this paper but it looks promising. Personally, I want something bound in leather but maybe these guys offer something along those lines. I haven’t checked yet.
You can get it repaired. I’m planning to get a Decimo, a slimmer and lighter version of the Vanishing Point.
How about a Pelikan M200 (body only $45) with a custom steel nib ($40).
Single sheets? Journal bound? Lined? Is 10 cents a sheet cheap? $0.05?
The Mont Blanc Meisterstuck ball point pen should be within your budget, and it’s a perfectly good pen. I’m so happy that it’s finally popular enough in Canada that I can get the refills from Staples.
There’s also Lamy, which are more techy looking. It was explained to me once by a shop in London that Lamy pens are what University student buys, and then once they start making money, they move up to Mont Blancs.
Thanks to this thread making me do some google-fu, I found the “Fountain Pen Hospital” shop site, where I found these ACME Homer Simpson Pens.
I knew that. My wife was supposed to get that taken care of, but I think we were supposed to send the part back to get the free replacement (they warrant them for a lifetime, but unfortunately are not as good as Dell at just sending you the replacement part first), and I now have no idea where the pen, the broken part, or the replacement part (if they ever sent us the damn thing) is.
Pilot G2. Probably anything in the G2 line would work for me, but I use the original. I really can’t stand anything else for any purpose beyond jotting down a phone number or something.
Edit: Oh man, how could I forget? It also HAS to be blue, fine point.
My wife got a free pen from the Viagra rep at a drug-company lunch. The pen came folded in two, and when you wanted to use it you would press a button, and the pen would slowly unfold into it’s full size, as a fully… well… straightened… pen.
To tell you the truth I’m not sure whether the pen even writes or not but it was worth a few minutes amusement. They really got the unfolding action just right.
Geoff
Hey, my name is also Geoff! Represent.