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The 1670 Inks collection celebrates the life and adventures of J. Herbin, a famous French sailor.

On his travels, J. Herbin gathered formulas for inks and sealing waxes. The inks in this collection pay homage to this history.

Each bottle contains 50ml of finest quality Herbin ink in colours only available in this collection, and include tiny flecks of gold; whilst these give another dimension to the ink and to your writing, we recommend that you don’t leave this ink unused in a pen for a prolonged period of time. The gold flakes do make it an ink that deserves extra care.

When writing with Stormy Grey ink, you’ll notice that the ink will go down a deep grey colour and dry to a slightly lighter grey with an intense gold sheen. The gold sheen tends to linger at the centre of your writing, taking on a grey shadow effect.

The Ocean Blue and Rouge Hematite inks seem to give a more consistent sheen of gold all through your writing, adding a little sparkle to what’s usually more conservative colours.

New colour for 2016, Caroube de Chypre is a deep golden brown colour, with a green sheen when laid down very heavily, and a warm gold sparkle.

£14.59 a bottle, if you please.

I’m sure I must have mentioned Cult Pens before. Their monthly newsletter is chock full of pen porn.

I don’t go in for super expensive fountain pens. I have a nasty habit of performing life-altering surgery on my pens (generally by grinding the balls off (!)). This doesn’t always work out so good, so I can’t afford to experiment on the best. But they have really good cheap pens, too. And all kinds of unusual things.

Like Herbin, the guys who make the hoity-toity ink above also do handmade, all glass dipping pens. Nib, barrel, the lot.

Here it is plain, spiral and marbleized. They sure are purty, but. I dunno. Does this sound like it would work to you?

You sharpen them with sandpaper.

Comments


Comment from dissent
Time: November 30, 2016, 10:34 pm

Oh, in my youth I did dabble in some calligraphy and ink sketching. Can’t see getting back into it at these prices though.


Comment from Deborah HH
Time: November 30, 2016, 11:04 pm

The court reporter in the little town where I lived took the transcription with a fountain pen and a bottle of ink. He didn’t fill the pen, but dipped it in the ink bottle. He said he’d been doing it so long, he knew how many lines he could cover with one dip of ink. He kept extra pens and ink in reach, and never missed a word. He would have liked the all glass pens. His shorthand was legendary for being virtually indecipherable. It started out as Gregg and morphed into his own.

I love fountain pens and calligraphy pens, though I recently gave all my calligraphy and Speedball pens to my 14 year old granddaughter. Even my vintage gold-tipped Osmiroid set (ca.1974)(gulp). I discovered that I loved lettering with a brush, from an eyelash thin whispy to a 4 inch wide foam brush. You can do some badass calligraphy with a 4 inch foam brush.

Might have to buy one of those all glass pens. I usually write my thank you notes and condolence notes with a fountain pen on Crane paper.


Comment from ExpressoBold
Time: November 30, 2016, 11:19 pm

I ruined many a shirt in elementary school by carrying around a leaky fountain pen in my shirt pocket. Then I discovered Pocket Protectors and the world changed!


Comment from Skandia Recluse
Time: November 30, 2016, 11:41 pm

I thought I wanted a Mont Blanc fountain pen when I didn’t have one. I mentioned this to my ex girlfriend before she was my ex. She bought me one, and I loved it. I signed my mortgage documents with it, using the Mont Blanc black ink.

Years latter, looking at research notes I had written with that pen, I discovered the ink fades over time. I’m thinking my mortgage documents now appear to be unsigned.

The pen sits in my desk drawer; seals dried out, leaks ink when full, unused.


Comment from Mitchell
Time: November 30, 2016, 11:58 pm

I have a glass pen like those, but fancier. Writes like crap though. :-/

I bought a Parker Duofold fountain pen a couple years ago for my birthday – it’s nice but I don’t use it nearly as often as I thought I would. I should dig it out again…and maybe get new bottle of ink! Fortunately it looks like Amazon stocks it over here.


Comment from Uncle Al
Time: December 1, 2016, 12:21 am

The best pen I ever had for my simply purposes was an oddity called a Tintenkuli. I had a couple of them as a boy living in Argentina c. 1960. It was a stylograph and delivered ink by means of a very fine steel tube through which ran an even finer steel rod. I’d call it a wire but it was stiff. The wire protruded just slightly past the end of the tube, and when you’d touch the tip to paper, the rod would retract just a tiny bit and allow ink to flow around it and down to the paper.

This was more a drafting pen, as line thickness was more or less fixed, but it took very little getting used to and it had just the right balance between drag and smoothness.

I’d mix red and blue inks to get a nice purple. I prefer purple ink to this day, at age 67, but I don’t do fountain pens any longer. Fortunately, there are a couple of manufacturers who sell purple ball points, gel pens, and felt tips that are nice.


Comment from Ric Fan
Time: December 1, 2016, 1:09 am

I’ve written with a glass pen. It worked fine and you get a lot more writing out of it than you can imagine.

Shimmery inks seem to be a thing. At your site, they also advertise Diamine shimmering ink at a much lower price. You can also buy various additives to make your ink shimmer if you are so inclined.


Comment from bds
Time: December 1, 2016, 3:33 am

If you want fountain pen and related stuff in the US, I highly recommend GouletPens.com. Good people and really good service.

I have a small J. Herbin glass pen, and it writes okay but not great. You don’t get a lot of writing between dips. I imagine the sandpaper would be more for smoothing than sharpening.

Even more than the pens, I’m a bit of a nut for trying different inks, which is where the glass pen is handy – much easier to clean than a fountain pen. The shimmery inks are pretty trendy right now, but I like a lot of Noodler’s permanent inks. There are some that glow in UV, and some that are not only permanent in the archival sense but also can’t be removed chemically or even with lasers (their Warden series). Interesting stuff, and the guy that makes the Noodler’s ink is a nutty libertarian-ish Yankee who is pretty interesting in his own right.


Comment from Deborah HH
Time: December 1, 2016, 12:44 pm

Stoaty—the Rating Widget sure is fussy. It works on some comments, but not others.

Part 2. It let me rate some comments before I posted this comment of my own, but would only let me rate others after I commented.


Comment from Wolfus Aurelius
Time: December 1, 2016, 2:03 pm

OT, but appropriate for our hostess: I present . . . the zorille!

https://infogalactic.com/info/Striped_polecat I happened to be examining the text of the Constitution in the back of Volume X of my Britannica, and then was idly turning pages until I saw what looked like a cross between a skunk and a weasel. An attractive animal, but not one you’d want to have as a pet, according to the article. I just thought its name, which apparently means “little fox” in Spanish, was intriguing.

Okay, go on back to whatever you were doing.


Comment from BJM
Time: December 1, 2016, 4:09 pm

Ooooo…I want.

BTW-This thread is an example of what I love most about the web…so many interesting things to see/learn and creative people following their bliss/passion.

I installed a new DSL modem recently and it struck me that the shape and look was like the last monolith in 2001; It’s. full. of. stars.


Comment from Steve Skubinna
Time: December 1, 2016, 5:25 pm

Uncle Al, the pen you describe sounds much like a Rapidograph, by Koh-I-Nor. I used to have a wide selection of them in high school and college and used them all the time, for both writing and drawing.

After graduating and trying to have a real life, it turned out that I wrote much less often than before.


Comment from Ric Fan
Time: December 1, 2016, 11:35 pm

I have a couple of expensive Pelikan pens, a few cheap Pelikans, and dozens of other cheap fountain pens. I will admit that one of my favorites is the $3 buck non refillable one I have. I have Silverlines, Osmiroids, and a Mark V (some sort of old German pen which I like).

I had an expensive bottle of Herbin bite the dust. I used it to fill my pen and left it by the sink and forgot about it. Later, I saw a large drop of the ink in the sink. Days later, I turned my garbage disposal on and heard theis large grinding noise. Reach down into it and found a bunch of glass. Oh, well, it was may favorite color, too: Forget-Me-Not.

If you like calligraphy or a broad nip pen, try Pilot Parallel pens. You can pretty much use any time of ink in them by refilling the cartridge or just putting in in the barrel.

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