Inky fingers being friends
Many of us on SC will have grown up with ink on our fingers from using dip pens or leaky fountain pens. Do you still have those old fountain pens hidden away in a draw or a box in the loft or garage. If you do look them out and consider are they worth anything. You may be surprised to know that many people such as myself collect old fountain pens and much earlier pens and repair them so they can be used once again.
Older Parker, Schaeffer, Onoto and Waterman pens are now quite valuable. Some other British makes such as Swan and Conway Stewart again can depending on the design will also command premium prices.
I still write with a fountain pen the way the ink flows onto quality paper is so much better than using a ballpoint pen. The only disadvantage to our modern way of writing is spell checker, spelling is skill I have after nearly after 60 years i’ve not mastered. My blog is look out those old pens and write with them they bring so many good memories and happy times.
Love letters in ink always bring you closer in new relationships than what is a typed letter. From a big softie called pat
I still have some of the old pens, they are put away, I will have to take a look at them but I doubt that I would part with any. I have lots of old things, coins, Postcards, and so on but I will let my children have them all. Good blog Pat.
I don’t think I ever had a love letter in real ink, but I can believe it could ,ake a difference. Pat, do you have any quill pens? I was always mystified by those.
Rose, still have a couple which I keep ih old leather writing cases I also have an old calligraphy set.
Whenever i wrote with the fountain pens my paper was littered with big blobs of ink……. would put the pen in the pocket of my white school blouse……….more ink stains…..and the pink blotting paper was soon a crumpled up blue ball…….nah ball point for me………..but i can see the sentiment and romance in a love letter written with the quill or fountain pen……xx
when i was in POrimary school we always had to write with pen and ink fromink wells situated in our school desks, we would receive a new book , eachweek to write in and i always said to myself i am not going to blob ink on this one ,no sooner would i say that , plop a little ink would splotch on the page , i hated that ,… the blotter would come out and i couldn’t remove it , always one of my worse nightmares … ha ah ah
I’ve only used a fountain pen in either grade 6 or grade 7. I remember it was sometimes a mess to change the plastic cylinder containing the ink. If I learned one thing it was, once you start don’t stop until you’re done. Don’t hesitate.
ha ha Havent thought about “inky fingers in ages …. For me I think it was worse being a leftie .. I took a bath in the stuff …. mum would get on my case for getting ink on my white school blouse … thanks patak
Oh…my… I win …I confess I use my fountain pen daily and it has been the same nib for 20 years….buy cartridges in bulk just in case they go out of fashion.lol.
You have made me feel very very old and completely eccentric…….let me think about this…….think I might be both.
Gyps.
PS.Patak………never thought about my pen before……
it has written 100’s Xmas cards,birthday cards,shopping lists,daily jottings in a diary,recipes and then big things like wills and mortgage deeds.Not to mention the cheques(Not so much these days)but it certainly has spent some money I can tell you.I would probably be lost without it.Love how the ink flows too and could never use a biro….
From one inky to another thanks for your blog….now where did I put my pen?
Long time since I had inky fingers, must admit I couldn’t wait to get rid of the ink,but I will admit I did write much better with the pen.
My son is 18 years old and studying hard (!) at college.
About a year ago, he spotted me using a fountain pen and seemed very interested, so I gave him a rather old, slightly battered fountain pen, a proper one that fills from an ink bottle.
He’s quite a practical boy so I left him to work out how it all worked. A few hours later, and not only did he have it filled and working, but he’d done all his homework for the night using the pen! Boy did he make an inky mess of his hands though…..fingers, palms, back of hands, everywhere… Of course, hed never used one before, so this was perhaps to be expected from an entusiastic teenager! He did admit to me that he hadn’t realised it didn’t come off, but that he didn’t mind. Then he raced off to pick up his girlfriend in his car, goodness knows what she thought.
Fast forward a year and he now has three “filling” pens of his own, and does all his college work with them. His handwriting has improved a lot. Inky fingers are still a problem, though much less so than that first day, in term time he pretty much permanently has two inky fingertips and one inky thumb….after a few attempts at telling him off about this, I ended up just accepting it….and he has introduced two of his mates to fountain pens as well.