List: the absolute best pens (that my wife did not like)

plus: stegz

I got into pens, and fountain pens specifically, because my wife bought me some nice pens as a surprise gift one Christmas. Since then she frequently buys me a pen when an occasion calls for a gift, and so a recurring theme on this blog—besides, you know, sharks—is me reviewing some kind of pen that she gave me.

And this works out well for you, dear readers, since the way I write this blog basically ensures no one is ever going to send me a free pen to review.

PITCH TO SPONSORS: would you like to promote your brand?

In exchange for a free pen, I’ll write a deranged 2,000-word review that will talk about the pen for one or two paragraphs and then spend the other twenty paragraphs on an admittedly tenuous analogy to an episode of a late-90’s cartoon that no one remembers.

(You might think that I just wanted to write about the cartoon and your pen was a convenient jumping-off point, but I assure you that your new pen really does evoke the joie de vivre of the “ColossoDome” episode of Extreme Dinosaurs.)

IMAGINE THE POSSIBILITIES!! (from here)

To sweeten the deal, I’ll make sure the post is aggressively anti-search-engine-optimized, will make up a backstory for your brand which involves a wizard or goblin or something because your real story is like “I wanted to make a pen” and ugh so bored, and there is a good chance I will make a GIF of me throwing your pen across the room in anger or because it looks fun.

It’s the deal of a lifetime! Spaces are limited!! Contact me for details!!!

Anyway: today we’re going to look at the pens I have tried to give her as gifts—which, in most instances, have not landed well. (And she doesn’t use fountain pens, so all of these are not-fountain pens.)

Too big: the Caran D’Ache 849 Rollerball

The Caran D’Ache 849 is a pretty legendary pen; it’s basically the shape of a Ticonderoga pencil with a very smooth click-to-deploy mechanism. I’ve previously talked about my own version, the classic ballpoint, as one of the best clicky pens.

So, I thought the rollerball variant might go over well. It did not. Why? First, BECAUSE IT IS HUGE.

It’s hard to grasp this just by looking at a picture of it by itself, so you might think “hey that just looks like the ballpoint, which is actually pretty svelte.” No. See:

Why is it so much bigger than the ballpoint? What other kind of technology is being crammed into a pen that does exactly the same thing as the slimmer version? I do not know, but I know this made the pen too big and too back-weighted for my wife.

Second, my wife thinks the silent click mechanism is lame. I did not understand this criticism until she explained that she views it like those horrible soft-touch silent keyboards from the early 2000’s, which were basically like a padded room for your fingers. This is now all I can think of and I hate my 849 too.

Too much work: the Yookers Metis

My wife likes felt-tip pens; she has a pen cup at her desk filled Lamy 2000s Papermate Flairs. Yookers is a brand that makes felt-tip pens that can be refilled with fountain pen ink; I had bought myself a Yookers Yooth to try it out, and then bought her the up-market Metis because I thought she might like a classy upgrade to the Flair.

She did not. And if you have a similarly-situated person in your life, I do not think they will like it either.

You see: these pens are great if you are already into fountain pens and thus both (1) have a lot of fountain pen ink that you might want to use in a different way and (2) have priced in some pen maintenance to your daily routine.

If you are not already into fountain pens, this is like saying “hey, you know that disposable felt-tip pen you like? Here’s one that you have to fill and clean yourself, and just FYI the nature of fountain pen ink means the stuff you write will never look as saturated as the felt-tip ink you are used to using. I know you were looking for a complicated way to get worse results, so here you go.” Whoops.

Too reminds-me-of-another-pen-that-I-didn’t-like: the LAMY Pico

Sometimes the best part about buying a non-pen person a nice pen is that you are basically buying yourself a nice pen when they are like “what even is this and why did you get it for me?”

That is how I briefly owned my very own LAMY Pico.

The Pico is a ballpoint pocket pen from LAMY’s “fine let’s just let the designers do whatever they want” line, which means it has a super cool texture, a complicated opening mechanism, and a proprietary refill that only works in like 4 pens. It is like the ballpoint pocket version of the Dialog, which meant I saw it at a pen show and wanted to buy it for my wife so she could have something wildly dumb for herself.

I mean, look at how it opens!

Unfortunately, the mechanism for the Pico reminded her of these telescoping pens from Zebra that I used to buy for work and she utterly hated because they were incredibly slim—like writing with a refill, basically.

She associated these together so much that she assumed the Pico would also be punishingly small and left it in a purse somewhere. She went and found it so I could write this post—she knows how important writing stupid stuff about pens twice a month is to me—and was like “you can have it, it’s too small for me.”

But then I was like “are you sure, it’s basically the same size as pens you like,” and she was like “huh, you might be right” and took it back.

So, technically this one might turn out to be a success, it just took a couple years to percolate. The five minutes where I owned it were glorious though.

Just right: the Kaweco Sport

Let’s end on a high note by talking about what has gone over well: the Kaweco Sport rollerball. My wife likes this pen so much that she owns three and uses them almost exclusively.

These pens are small and lightweight, use easy-to-find refills, and are nice enough to enjoy writing with without being so nice that you feel like you have to be precious about it.

The downside here is that Kaweco only makes a subset of their pens available in a rollerball, so there’s no opportunity to surprise her with one of the limited editions or seasonal releases. You get basically the standard lines, the denim-jeans-inspired Stonewashed Sport for some incomprehensible reason, and that’s it.

But don’t worry: our local pen show is coming up in a couple months, which means I’ll have an opportunity to buy her one of those new BENUs that she will definitely not use love. Stay tuned!