People often ask me "what is your favourite pen?" or "which pen should I buy?" and are disappointed when I reply "it depends" or "go buy a
Lamy 2000."
I have many pens, each useful in its own way: the pen I use for work has very different characteristics to the the pen I use to write Christmas cards. A better question might be "which pens are your everyday carries?" to attain a view of the pens I find most useful, most regularly.
You see, most fountain pen enthusiasts carry more than one, if only to avoid the embarrassment of slumming it with a ballpoint on those occasions the ink runs out.
The term
everyday carry has a connotation of a workhorse pen. I don't agree with this definition because every fountain pen user I know carries two, three or more pens, typically only one of which is a workhorse. Read on if you're interested in how I select my everyday carries.
Depicted here are my
Box,
Folder and
Roll. At the bottom, the two pens on top of my
Pouch are my current carries. What isn't depicted is the
Archive of valuable and sentimental pens at my family home. To spare you the suspense, my everyday carries are the
Lamy 2000 (L2K) and the
Visconti Homo Sapiens with an
Oblique Broad nib and a
Double Broad nib respectively.
My
everyday carry strategy is to carry a workhorse and a character pen. The workhorse is always a Lamy 2000 loaded with
Iroshizuku Kon-peki, the ink my entire family standardised on a few years ago. The Lamy 2000 is utra-reliable and the ink is an acceptable blue for business and the workplace.
My character pen is currently the Visconti Homo Sapiens loaded with
Iroshizuku Ina-ho. The character pen is the one I tend to reach for first, and the primary reason I'm using this ink is at the moment is that it -sort of- matches the bronze inlays of this pen.
Next week, who knows? It's a matter of taste and a week from now I might change. See that mottled orange
Edison pen in the box? It's loaded with an
orange ink so vibrant you'd question your orientation. The Black and green
Pelikan? It has a
red/black ink which simulates the experience of writing in blood so well you might find yourself hunting homeless people for sport.
In synopsis, my philosophy of
everyday carry is the hedonism of a character pen and the pragmatism of the ultimate workhorse, the L2K.
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