I recently bought a fountain pen to try something new.

It’s remarkable how fast the YouTube algorithm starts filling your feed with recommended videos once you’ve made that first search. We’re talking Pen reviews, nib size comparisons, a thousand different inks, and a NEVER ENDING flood of Lamy Safari and AL-Star colourways. 😦

I quickly realised that there isn’t really a one size fits all when it comes to fountain pens.

I found myself browsing this small Gothenburg based pen retailer, looking at everything from entry level 150kr pens to monstrous 5800kr industrial engineering art pieces. Even some vintage used pens that were selling for upwards of 5000kr. 😵 I didn’t want to end up with the wrong pen, so I put in a few hours on a couple of forums and ended up settling on a ”Fude De Mannen 55” from the Japanese brand Sailor.

It’s a pretty cool pen! The thing that differentiates this pen from your more standard fountain pen is the ”Fude” nib. It’s looks like a normal nib but bent at a 55 degree angle allowing you to drastically alter the line width by angling the pen. It’s designed to imitate the strokes of Japanese calligraphy brushes, and is apparently popular with artists online. 🙂

Where it falls a bit short for me though is in writing, (ironic isn’t it?) especially as a left handed person. The sharp tip of the nib tends to dig into the paper at high angles making it a bit of a skipping mess. However, I did buy it for sketching and illustration so that doesn’t really bother me.

I’m Cooked

*A couple of weeks later*

I went and bought a second pen lol. And yes, it’s a Lamy. 💀

What can I say? The marketing machine worked.

It’s hard not to find a positive anecdote about the Safari. Lamy loves colours, and they have a ridiculous amount of SKUs. They come in 12 standard colours (21 if counting special editions) with five different nib sizes. Yes, that’s at the very least 60 different models of the same pen…

I fell for the Vista, a fully transparent Safari. It’s something known as a ”demonstrator” in the pen world, a pen where you can clearly see the internal mechanism. Very cool and exactly the kind of oddity I was looking for after having seen pens like the Diamond 580 from TWSBI. It was cheap too, the same price as a normal Safari (240kr).