Handmade Kitset and Montblanc Permanent Black

This week's riveting episode of Simon Chooses a Fountain Pen is for @PattiWebbb and I think it's a rather lovely story.

Today's selection is a Handmade Kitset Fine paired with Montblanc Permanent Black.

First the keyboard and mouse. Serious nerds tend to use a mechanical keyboard instead of the membrane keyboards most people are familiar with. Mechanicals have switches under the keys which makes them more tactile and they last many years longer. Unlike other nerds I prefer the aesthetic of natural materials and the corporate office spaces I work in are typically highly artificial environments. LED lighting, electronics and plastics and so on. My wooden keyboard and touch slab are two of the antidotes to that.

These devices were constructed in Orée-d'Anjou on the banks of the Loire in western France. They are hand made from a single piece of French Walnut and each key is hand carved and engraved. These were eye-wateringly expensive and I'm pretty sure the lifetime guarantee they came with isn't worth much as shortly after winning loads of pretentious design awards and shipping mine the company Orée Artisans went out of business.

Now the pen, which is the lovely bit. A few years ago a lady I worked with was wandering around the office selling ballpoints her husband made for very little money. I had heard he was not very well and I had the distinct impression making pens was something he was doing to bring much-needed funds into the household. She was selling them for ludicrously low prices yet wasn't getting too many takers, a situation she seemed resigned to.

And I too, spurned the bitch. Because I would never purchase a ballpoint and because I'm a horrible person who revels in the suffering of others. Then I asked if her husband would take on a custom job: a fountain pen in French Walnut to match my keyboard and pad, for which I would pay four times the amount she was charging for the ballpoints.

He accepted and here it is.

Pen parts are sold in kits like this for hobbyists who are into woodturning. A good kit costs about $30-40 and includes all of the components except for the body, cap and sometimes the section (grip.) These kits effectively do all the pen-y aspects so the woodturner can focus on the artistry of his craft. The kits are surprisingly high quality, durable materials.

What I like about this pen is that it was made for me, that it has weight, and that the clasping mechanisms are better than almost every other pen I own. What I don't like is the metal section and the size #5 nib which is smaller than my taste.

Now the ink. As I've written before most fountain pen inks are water soluble. Most permanent inks (which in the past were mandatory for authenticatable documents) are Iron Gall, which is an ink recipe from antiquity revived in the Middle Ages. The problem with Iron Gall inks is they contain ferrous materials which can damage fountain pen mechanisms if not used carefully.

To get around this problem and no doubt to save themselves the cost of servicing their customer's pens, Montblanc switched away from Iron Gall inks about a decade ago. This ink is something else, some sort of ISO compliant whatever. I like it simply because it's very black and I can use it for important documents knowing it won't damage my pen. I'm picking that it won't last on the page for as long as an Iron Gall but that's more of an issue for my descendants than it is for me.

So there we have it. I got to make a sick person feel celebrated for their art and to inject some cash into a household that probably would have appreciated it. In return I have a pen that matches my aesthetic and a reminder that sometimes, I'm not completely terrible.

My everyday carry for the next week is a fine custom laying down the indelible blackness of my soul though.

-SRA. Auckland, 8/vii 2024.