Fountain Pen Deal of the Century
Buy this.
These pens arrived today and I’m blown away. I’ll be reviewing them in an upcoming Fun With Fountain Pens segment on my show but these are such a good deal I wanted to get this out there ahead of time.
These pens are nominally a calligraphy set. The set comprises seven pens with different sized nibs: 0.7, 1.1, 1.5, 1.9, 2.5, 2.9 & 3.0. What makes them attractive is the astonishingly low price for exceptionally good pens: $NZ10 for all seven which works out at $1.42 each.
Buy them here and I’ll explain what is good about them below…
The Lamy Safari is an extremely popular pen for good reason. Retailing for around $NZ50 they’re popular -particularly in academia- for their quality and reasonable price. They’re also popular in schools where the triangular section (grip) enforces an orthodox and ergonomic hand position.
The design of the Safari and its successors such as the Al-Star have been broadly copied, particularly by Chinese manufacturers. Some of these are homages while others are in my considered opinion, straight up counterfeits. I’ve reviewed a few on Fun With Fountain Pens which you can find in this archive.
The pens in this calligraphy set fall into the former category, an homage to the Lamy Safari design. The big difference is the nib: Counterfeits use the standard shoulder-less Z50 nib for interchangeability with authentic Lamy pens. This pen is different, using a more tradition nib shape from the highly-regarded manufacturer Iraurita.
On the sizings, the first three (0.7, 1.1 and 1.5) are perfectly normal fountain pen nibs for everyday writing and at the absolute outside, so might be the 1.9. The others are definitely calligraphy nibs most people wouldn’t find useful for everyday writing. The nib and feeds appear to be press-fitted on these pens so they might be replaceable, though I’m not going to find out: even though they’re inexpensive I’m not going to risk wrecking one.
In synopsis this is the fountain pen deal of the century in my opinion. These pens are equal in quality and design to a $50 Lamy Safari for 1/35th of the price. Even if you were just interested in the 0.7mm (halfway between a Western medium and a Western broad) I’d recommend this calligraphy set just to have the others around for parts and to save yourself 40 bucks.
-SRA. Auckland, 29/v 2025.