How many of you have written with this type of pen?

Yep I must confess that I have an old Schaeffer snorkel fountain pen that I received from my parents while I was in high school, I still have it but I don't use it any longer,(probably wouldn't work now anyhow). It was nice pen, but I prefer a ball point , less trouble. I can't understand the fasination with fountain pens myself, but to each his or her own.
 
My brother who is left handed also, used a fountain pen throughout his HS years. I just got in trouble with them, the ink smeared and then when I discovered that you could "fling" ink on someone from them, well let's just say the board of education was put to use!
 
I still have two of them! An antique Parker in tortoiseshell, and a modern Mont Blanc. I use the Mont Blanc frequently.

In grade school - back in the stone age - we went from dip pens to Schaeffers that used plastic ink tubes. That was in thrid or fourth grade, as I recall, so around 1952 or 53, I guess.
 
according to many business magazines, Fountain pens are being purchased by the board members of major businesses. it is a helluva lot cheaper to buy a pen than a Bugatti or other super car.
 
I use as many as I want to make!;)
I do use one, but with a german nib. It's a pain to use a FP in the medical field, but at home...they are fun!
 
I used one when I was a teen, but by choice, they had ink catridges, but they leaked too much and I ruined a few shirts and pants, so I switched over to a parker for the next 10 years.
 
Only by choice and not frequently :D A fellow I know uses them pretty much exclusively, he likes to do calligraphy.. He has a Monte Blanc I tried once, it was.. touchy so it didn't work so well for me but I could see with some practice you'd get good control over the lettering.

I did try using a goose quill one year when we killed a goose for ?thanksgiving? (there was no snow so I think that must have been it) and I salvaged some wing feathers. I had no idea (zip zero) idea what i was doing and there was no internet to look it up on at the time so kind of made it up as I went along. I used some stove black and water for ink and it worked surprisingly well (after I had mangled a good dozen quills figuring out what kind of worked). Was almost as legible as my normal handwriting (which is not very legible so admittedly the bar wasn't very high :rofl:).
 
My high school years were about the time of the beginning of the ball point.... but we weren't allowed to use ball points for our term papers, they were required to be done with the fountain pen.... I think mine was an el cheapo snorkel type from the local five and dime... senior year I got a nice parker with the semi covered nib... wrote much better, but that year term paper was required to be typed... go figure.
 
I have a favorite fountain pen that I really like to use, but I cannot buy the ink any more, in any of the office supply stores. It is the kind that comes in bottles, not cartridges.

Of course, now that I am retired, I probably wouldn't use it enough to keep the tip from drying out. Oh well.
 
I had to use a dip fountain pen when I was my Lutheran grade school. Don't recall when I was allowed to graduate to a ball point. I did have some bladder type fountain pens over the years. Hated them.
 
I used some of them throughout the years, the cartridges are cheap and convenient as you can carry them on your pocket, and exchanging them is fast and clean.
As per the pleasure of writing it will always depend on the pen and on the nib, but it will always be a subjective impression ( quality considerations apart of course)
 
When I was a kid all of our desks had a hole in the upper right corner. The hole was just right to hold a bottle of ink. The pens that the school provided were basically a tapered stick (sort of like an artists paint brush). The business end was wrapped in cork. There were metal pen nibs that slipped into a curved cut, that was in-turn inside of the cork sleeve (where your fingers held the thing).

You could write a word or two; then you had to dip the pen into the ink bottle for a reload. Load it too light; you didn't get to write much. Load it too heavy and you got a mess. I still have some of the pens and some nibs. If your dad was rich enough that you could afford a new car every few years you would have a fountain pen---they cost 10 cents. All fountain pens were the bladder type at that time.

By the time I was in Junior High School fountain pens were not unusual. A high-end, graduation gift quality student pen was around $15.00. A pair of good shoes sold for around $4.00 and a loaf of bread was around a dime. So you can see that a good fountain pen was fairly expensive. By the time I was in High School fountain pens were very common. Mass production brought good fountain pen prices down to a buck. A good mass-produced pen was a dollar. It was still a bladder pen however (no cartridges yet).

I was a doctor by the time ball point pens were invented. There was all kinds of whoopla about them. You could write upside down was one of the sales pitches. They didn't mention that you could blow your breath on someones signature, press the fat part of your thumb on it, the signature would copy onto the thumb and then you could use your thumb like a rubber stamp and print it on another check or whatever.

Shut up Bradley.

Enjoy,

JimB
 
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