Parker Duofold c. 1941

And over at Wikipedia today, the featured article was one on Fountain Pens, which led me to some very interesting sites.

Seriously. While some guys stay up late and surf porn sites . . . I surf fountain pen sites. I’d kill for one of the vintage Waterman pens or a vintage Parker Duofold. But I really prefer something like the Vacumatic Maxima (although any of the contemporary models would do).

This is starting to get serious.

(For what it’s worth, I have two fountain pens. Both are manufactured by A.G. Spalding. One is a translucent green resin-y thing that I bought for myself a few months back to match a rollerball that my best friend gave me last year. The other is a brushed steel version that she gave me last week. I’ve learned that each of the pens has a personality of its own, a preference for what is being written. I’ve found that the green one is good for prose, while the steel one is best suited for poetry (although both of them do fairly well with websites). As a sidenote-within-a-sidenote, when I went in to a high-end pen store here in town a few weeks back to buy refills, the fellow behind the counter sniffed in a fairly officious manner when I told him the manufacturer name. With pens being sold for hundreds of dollars in his case, my forty buck Spaldings didn’t even hit his radar screen . . . and to top it all off, the snobby fucker sold me blue-black instead of black ink.)