I personally think fountain pens... have had their day and now are just a fashion statement. ( I can see the purists looking for a tree and a rope already)
No Sir, I can't agree with you.
:tongue:
You exert pressure on a ballpoint, and the ink flows, if you don't it doesn't. This is the only feedback this stuff can give you. You can write in black, blue, red and even green if you have a good stationary shop. You usually use a medium point, you can find fine or bold after some research.
With a rollerball, it is worse : you can press or not, hold it this or that way, up, down, on the left or on the right, it's just all the same. Absolutely no feedback. Schmidt can provide 12 colors (only M sized). You can find F or B point in black, sometime blue.
If you write with a fountain pen, you can sense the paper. You can feel the flexibility of the nib and its elasticity (two different things a RB or BP are light years from), you can use steel or gold nibs, from superflex to rigid. You can have FFF, FF, F, M, B, BB, BBB, round italic, crisp italic, architect, stub, combined with oblique left or right, from 10 to 40° or more if you like. You can choose from say 500 different inks, different colors, different fluidities.
So you can play with inks, papers, nibs according to your writing, your mood, the season, the recipient, the contents. It is much more richer than the RB or BP world.
I know quite a few people (including myself) who sometime just sit and write some lines with a fountain pen just for feeling, pleasure, quietness, a return to themselves, sort of a meditation. I know nobody doing that with RB or BP.
As a FP maker, smoothing the nib and sometimes shaping it to the customer's specs is a pleasure and an interesting skill to learn.
So, I am a pacifist and will not look for a tree and a rope
(hmm, well, does anybody has a mousetrap though? :cat: ), but please allow me to say that your opinion on fountain pens is not shared by the whole word. Even if I agree with the rest of your post.
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Seth, I wish you plenty of pleasure with kitless. Do not listen to old rodents :biggrin:: RB, BP, FP, all are very interesting, and I suspect the latter is playing in a richer world.