Just buy a Pilot Parallel already

they're like $10 come on

This is the Pilot Parallel.

I have a bunch of them.

I know: it looks like a cheap plastic pen. It is. They’re like $10-$15 on Amazon.

You’re not buying it for the body. You’re buying it for the nib.

And you can put these nibs in other pens. Here’s one in an Opus 88 Demo.

We’ll come back to that.

The Parallel combines the sandwich-style nib of an automatic pen (a specific kind of dip pen) with a fountain pen feed.

Instead of the ink flowing down a slit to a point, it flows through those two plates. This means you can write with the whole nib making contact with the page, just like a regular fountain pen nib, but it’ll also write with only part of the nib or the edge making contact.

i got a new phone so we’re upping our GIF quality here

This lets you try calligraphy styles like Textura, Rotunda, Batarde, and Fraktur, all of which are stupid hard with a regular italic nib because they require twisting the pen or using the edge of the nib to make hairlines. A normal fountain pen will struggle with this because you’ll lose the contact point that makes the ink flow, but the Parallel’s nib design solves this problem.

This “B” and “f” in Batarde, both of which require twisting the pen, and a “G” in Rotunda, which requires two hairlines, are all stupid hard with a fountain pen. (Also generally hard, as these hastily-done exemplars show, but that’s not the pen’s fault.)

The Parallel’s nib also has some flex, which is useful for single-width styles like Neuland where you have to twist the pen or pivot your wrist a lot. The Parallel’s nib having some give lets you accomplish this; unlike a fountain pen, though, it doesn’t change the width of the line.

The Parallel’s stock ink can take a long time to dry, so sometimes you need to make the letters look spooky to hide the fact you smeared them with your dumb fat hand

The Parallel comes in a whole range of sizes from 1.5mm to 6.0 mm. The skinny side is always about 0.5mm, so it’s a 3x to 12x difference on skinny to fat strokes.

The Parallel uses Pilot cartridges. You can buy special Parallel ones optimized for the pen with more flow. These are fun and last two seconds.

If you want to use your own ink instead, you can pop the nib unit out—you just yank it out—and shove it into an Opus 88 pen that takes a number 6 nib.¹ (Thanks to Josh from Nibbed In The Bud for telling me this.)

This is nice because you can use any ink you want and the Opus 88 pens actually fit in pen cases, so you can do blackletter calligraphy on the go.² A heads-up that doing this can make the flow weird and randomly gush, especially if you fiddle with the shutoff valve. You can mitigate but not totally solve this problem by swapping the Parallel’s standard O-ring (which will be on the nib unit when you get it) with one of the O-rings that came with your Opus 88.

If you don’t care about using your own inks and simply want the pen to look cooler than the stock Parallel and fit in pen rolls, the sections can be swapped with BENU sections as the threading is the same. This looks very stupid once you take the cap off, but it also works (CAVEAT IN FOOTNOTE).³ You still have to use Pilot cartridges (or a Pilot converter, I guess) with this method as you’ll be using the Parallel’s entire section.

actually this one looks cool

There are also Moonman pens that allegedly take the nib units, but I strongly recommend you watch a Youtube video of someone successfully doing this on the specific pen you’re interested in before you buy it. For example, I read it works in the M2, which I already owned, and it definitely does not.

Because the pens are so inexpensive (relative to fountain pens, not to art supplies generally), there’s also a ton of stuff you can do to customize them if you have a Dremel and a can-do spirit. Jake Rainis’ website has a bunch of stuff on this, and here’s a video where he demonstrates nib modification.

I’ve been using the Parallel for over a year now. Originally only for dedicated calligraphy sessions (due to the big long shape), and then once I got the Opus88 Demo that could take a Parallel nib it’s become a daily carry. If you have even a passing interest in blackletter calligraphy—and especially the more complicated types—this is a strong recommend, especially for $10-15.

OTHER STUFF

Owl In A Trench Coat: Is going strong. All of this week’s chapters are queued up at Royal Road, releasing every weekday around 12 ET. This week Hank and his new friend Timmo, the legless snotgoblin, try to escape the Great Fish Pile and deal with Big Snippy.

New here and concerned you’re having a stroke? Owl In A Trench Coat is a serialized novel based on the “three owls in a trench coat” joke. Read it for free here—the first major arc finishes this week.

A Good Box: Remember when I talked about Diplomat boxes being the best boxes but I didn’t have a picture? Here’s what they look like.

The top is a metal sleeve that wraps around the box part. The box part is cardboard and slides into the sleeve. This design lets you use the entire height of the box to store stuff, where a traditional pen box that opens like a clamshell only lets you use the bottom part. I use this one to store single-pen cases not currently in use.

1. I can’t stress that enough. It doesn’t go into the Opus 88s that use the little #5 nib. Only the big ones. You do not have to push hard to get it in there at all if you’re using the right pen. It definitely works with the Demonstrator (shown), but not the Koloro Demonstrator (which I also own, and yes this is confusing).

2. It sounds like I’m joking about that but I’m not. I also own a Kaweco 2.3mm nib in case I need to hand-letter a diploma using only what I have in my pockets, like a calligraphy MacGyver.

3. Important BENU caveat: I’m pretty sure, because BENU seems to standardize their stuff, you can swap out a Parallel section for any BENU pen—I think every BENU pen is threaded the same way. They won’t all work, though. The original BENU cap has to be big enough to allow for the Parallel’s section and nib to fit in there, so I think you’ll have better luck with the full-size, big-nib BENUs (like the Tattoo, the one shown here). This probably won’t work on the pocket-sized ones, but let me know in the comments if you find otherwise.