I want to thank all of you nice folks who read this blog and who write me such wonderful pen pal letters, or are otherwise just good friends and family, who remembered my birthday. You all make getting older easier to cope with. :-) I’ve been meaning to get this written and photographed for a few weeks now, and have finally gotten around to dragging my laptop to a Wi-Fi location for an overdue post about my newest pens. I bet these are ones you don’t see every day! Get ready to be totally jealous…first, my newest, and perhaps manliest, pen: the Monteverde Innova!
This was a birthday/post-COVID-19-coping gift from my dear friend Barbara from New Zealand. When it arrived, "Assistant Editor/Postal Inspector Maggie" insisted on a thorough sniff-test of it to make sure the package did not contain any explosives, unauthorized treats or hidden cats. She takes her security duties quite seriously.
When I opened it, I was amazed. Just look at this pen!
The body of the pen is made from carbon fiber, then “jacketed” in clear lacquer or resin, and trimmed in rose gold. They make ultra-tech race cars out of carbon fiber! My cousin Kirk has an Ironman triathlon (the Run/Bike/Swim athletic competition; not the red & yellow armored fellow from the movies & comic books) racing bicycle made of carbon fiber! They probably use carbon fiber in fighter jets and space ships. Arnold Schwarzenegger probably has a carbon fiber skeleton. And now, yeah, I have it in a fountain pen. Top that! :-)
The Medium, stealthy black nib (a first for me) is made by Jowo in Germany, and it writes very smoothly with just the right amount of feedback—NOT scratchiness—as if you’re writing with a nice freshly sharpened pencil...but one that makes thick rich lines. Ink flow is surprisingly juicy, and it does not skip or hard-start.
Even the box in this thing is somehow both refined yet manly. Perhaps it’s just like the box James Bond’s pen would come in, if James Bond ever bought a pen from a proper pen store, rather than one issued to him with a grenade in it or something. It comes with a bottle of Monteverde’s “Innova” ink, a very deep rich black, which I believe cannot be found in any other manner than by getting one of these pens.
I had another photo of the nice interior of the box, and the bottle of ink it comes with nestled within, but am not quite sure what happened to it. I'll try adding it later the next time I'm near a Wi-Fi spot.
Having said that, this bottle of nice black ink being shipped with that pen was a real bonus. For some truly weird reason, my only black inks I had on hand before the bottle of Innova Black arrived (aside from a little bit of Noodler’s Heart of Darkness” that I have all but used up) was a bottle of Noodler’s American Black Eel, so named because it is lubricated for pens that have poor ink flow and thus “slippery like an eel”, and a bottle of Higgin’s calligraphy ink (not suitable for use in fountain pens) from an art supply store. Over the course of last winter, while sitting on my desk in my climate-controlled living room, BOTH of these black inks…neither of which were very old...somehow turned faint and greyish, as if they’d been diluted with tap water?? How does that even happen? After that, I suddenly had a shortage of black ink. Then, along comes the Innova, and it’s “problem solved”!
Barbara also included a package of Monteverde Midnight black ink cartridges (thank you again, Barbara!) and a lovely bottle of Monteverde California Teal which has rekindled my interest in teal inks. Monteverde, as well as Diamine, have really proven to be a great source of affordable, fun inks! I’ve used one of those Midnight cartridges in this pen as well, and it worked with equal aplomb in this great pen.
One more thing I’ll mention: that elegant pocket clip with its upswept end makes it super easy to get onto and off of a shirt pocket. And being a Monteverde, it’s got that handy threaded converter like you see in Conklin pens (both are owned by the Yafa company) so it can’t slip out of the grip section. I wish every converter-filled pen had that feature.
Now, speaking of Conklins…
Just LOOK at that.
Remember my fire-engine red Conklin “Mark Twain” Crescent Filler pen with the gold trim that I was so proud of? Well (sigh) it recently made its THIRD trip to Yafa’s warranty repair facility in Canoga Park, California, and this time it was for the second instance of a broken/ruptured ink sac. I got up one morning to find it oozing ink down my nice wooden test tube rack—er, cleverly repurposed pen stand—and all over my desk through the crescent button hole in the middle of the barrel. It has come to the point where I keep a few blank copies of the blank Yafa repair request form on hand…and this time, I used that form to request a replacement rather than a repair, as I was getting tired of constantly sending it back to them. It’s had two ink sacs, an appalling piece of useless pot-metal for a nib that it originally shipped with, and the gold cap band fell off of it once.
Yafa seemed to agree that constantly repairing it made little sense, and kindly agreed to replace it instead this time. However, they told me over the phone that my nice red & gold colored version of it had now been “retired”…their own words…and I’d have to pick a different color from the options currently available on their website. I almost picked the chased-black one with rose gold trim, which was the one I originally wanted anyway, but had been eyeing that nice “marbled” vintage green & black one for a while, and picked it instead.
Naturally…it came with another lousy, useless “busted nib”. (See what I did there?) I have no idea why they put a black nib on a pen like this, but they did, and it wrote like a dull rusty nail. It doesn’t seem to have any tipping material on it. One has to painfully DRAG it across the page, causing hand & wrist fatigue to go with your crushing disappointment.
So, I pulled the darned thing out and replaced it with a shiny gold-colored Goulet Pens #6 Extra-Fine nib I happened to have lying around (those are also made by Jowo) and something magical happened. Somehow, that extra-fine nib and that particular Conklin feed were a perfect combination. This was “serendipity”, I tell you. They work so well together that despite being an extra-fine nib, it writes more like a Fine-Medium, writing very wetly, smoothly, and consistently! Despite having such a fine tip, it just GLIDES across the page! It put the factory nib to utter shame, which now lives in a small plastic baggie in my “box-o-parts” until such time as I figure out what to do with it.
Vintage, “yester-year” styling, combined with modern engineering courtesy of Jowo, have created a couple of ideal pens for me.
On a different note, I’m still making hummus with my new mixer/blender like a madman, ha ha. I’ve somehow managed to use up over half a jar of tahini already. Ever wondered what your kitchen sink looks like after peeling/pinching the skins off of two cans of chick peas?
It took me just under an hour on a Sunday morning to do all that. Google told me that hummus will have a creamier texture if you peel or pinch the skins off of your chick peas first, in case you’re wondering why the heck I spent an hour of my life doing this. And don’t worry; I cleaned the sink quite thoroughly afterwards. :-)
See you at the mailbox!