Ten Pens, but Make it Seven

I’ve been enjoying other people’s write-ups of the ten pens they would keep if they had to downsize. (Inky Imaginings, Ana at the Well Appointed Desk, Rachel De La Fuente, and other fine folks did them - please keep them coming!) I love this type of post and want to play, too. Except that ten pens is not really a challenge here -- as of this moment I have twenty total, so it’s not the same effort and thoughtfulness I’d need to select ten out of a hundred or even fifty. Ten is an arbitrary number, so I thought I’d go down to five. But that seemed too few. So seven it is!

Aurora Internazionale Arancio in the Alfie tray

1. Aurora Internazionale Arancio with an italic broad nib. This one is a no-brainer. In my mind, this is the pen that most represents the Gathering. It’s orange, ornate, it has a handcrafted shovel nib, and it represents my promotion to full professor. Yet, it is uninked right now. I need to change that.

The Aurora Internazionale and the Montegrappa Mermaid in a Galen Leather case.

2. Montegrappa La Sirena with an M nib. Not sure why I feel the need to apologize for this pen every time I write about it. I think it’s the mildly NSFW aspect of it. I love it tremendously, and it has a wonderful M nib.

3. Visconti Homo Sapiens Bronze Age with an M CSI nib ground by Kirk Speer. I’ve had this pen for five years, it has been my daily driver for a year, ever since I got the grind from Kirk at last year’s St. Louis Pen Show. Right now, it’s the one pen I would keep using if I had to use only one.

4. Onoto Keats with two nib choices - steel stub and gold 18k F. It’s been with me for many years as well, and in the beginning I wasn’t sure it was the right choice. At first, I’d wanted it in dark blue and gold, and I’d wanted another Onoto, but this is the one.

5. It’s amazing that I got to #5 without a single Scribo, but that’s ultimately because I have too many of them. By “too many” I mean four - three Feels and one Piuma. I don’t need to choose only one for this exercise, but it’s hard to figure out which one I would keep if I needed to keep only one. It would probably be down to the A Riveder Le Stelle and the Maddalena Feels. ARLS is an emotional pen for me, but the one I use the most is the Scribo Feel Maddalena with the EF Flex nib. I would not want to part with this pen.

Homo Sapiens Bronze Age, Onoto Keats, and Scribo Feel Maddalena.

If I had only 5 pen slots, I would stop here - but there are two more slots. Here they are:

6. Conid Bulkfiller Wild Tiger. I keep going back and forth on this pen. It’s awesome, but I do not love the bulkfiller system. The bulkfiller is huge and it takes a very long time between ink fills, and by the time I need to refill, I keep forgetting how it works. It’s more stress than I want in my hobby. But I love the potential of swapping #8 nibs, and the big capacity of this pen comes in handy. So I might or might not keep it in this slot in a year. We’ll see. There is an animal-themed Montegrappa I’m trying out which could take this spot if I make a different decision down the road.

7. Kilk Yggdrasil. Love this pen, it’s great for shimmer, but it’s hard for me to select a Fall/Winter pen at the height of summer :) I need a shimmer driver though, and the Ygg is awesome for that, and for everything else.

The seven pens in my Alfie tray with Menagerie friend turquoise raven.

So those are the seven I would choose today, but it’s a bit misleading too. The Gathering is the right size at around twenty pens. I tend to add and subtract a few pens each year. I would not mind going down to 17 or so, or going up to 25 (I’ve not gotten to 25 — yet.) My favorite pens are mostly grails, and I accrue them slowly. When I do get them, every new pen gets weighed against my existing pens - do I really want this pen to take a spot in my currently inked, as opposed to my beloved pens already in my collection? More often then not, the answer is no. But sometimes it’s a yes. I enjoy where I’ve landed in the hobby - the drive to acquire has become much more rare those days, but the joy I get out of the Gathering continues.

This is my last post from the old house before our move — hope to see you on the other side!

Bonus: temptations at Wonderfair. I did not get a single Taccia ink, but it was a close call.