Hi, I’m an IT professional with a passion for the analogue beauties of life like handwriting, fountain pens and bookbinding.
We hadn’t used fountain pens in primary school. I was already a young adult when I first acquired a fountain pen. A great friend of mine had a Rotring ArtPen and a beautiful handwriting. She influenced my taste in many ways, including starting using fountain pens.
I barely remember my first fountain pen, it was a white plastic modest pen with a steel fine nib. The pen got lost so I ended up using dip pens for my correspondence with penpals. However as life became more busy, penpals drifted away and using a dip pen as an EDC was not going to happen.
A few years later I bought an ArtPen myself. This was around the time when I started college. I used my ArtPen to take notes for years and I grew really fond of this pen and its bauhaus elegance. Due to practical reasons I later moved on to taking notes on my notebook but the pen with its iconic red ring was always with me.
In 2015 we moved to The Hague. If you are into the hobby, it’s likely that you’ve heard about the legendary P. W. Akkerman store in the Passage. I had been attracted to fountain pens already but this fascination was still in a latent phase. I got hooked when one day walking through the Passage I stoped to take a look at the storefront of Akkerman and got completely mesmerised by all those beautiful pens. From that day on whenever I had any business nearby, I always stopped to take a look at the pens. I decided to buy a “nice fountain pen” and got a Parker Duofold International Green Check. I started watching a ton of fountain pen review videos. I already had a sneaking suspicion that I was going to buy a few more pens and inks to have a bit more variety.
It was down the rabbit hole from that day on and gradually started to buy more exclusive pens and more frequently.
I got acquainted with the Dutch fountain pen community when I went to the local Pelikan Hub for the first time. I started to attend pen meets and pen shows and became a happy member of the community. I have several pen friends in Hungary as well.
Lately I’m experiencing a shift in my attention to more artisan pieces. While I still have a huge respect for brands like Lamy, Pelikan or Sailor (in no particular order), I’m more captivated by hand crafted pens that are more unique, have a limited availability and have some interesting story to them.
For me fountain pens are an island of analogue peace in our noisy digital life.
“[…] It is very important to see what is really human about us. I think what is really human is this least computable about us. This, what is hard to digitise and compute is at the very heart of the human being and this is the value we have to protect. […] technology can bring only comfort to our life and it can’t bring fulfilment or good life.” — Wiesław Bartkowski
The Digital Enlightenment Forum presents:
Democracy and the COVID-19 pandemic,
a Tele-debate, recorded 13 Oct 2020
I like how the senses other than sight are involved in writing. Senses that are more direct, more involving and slower. First and foremost tactile feel of the pen material, the nib, the paper, the writing experience. Writing is about being connected. Not connected in terms of human connections reduced to passing digitised information via the Internet. It’s being connected to yourself and others in a more intimate and wholesome way.