Review: Conklin 1898 fountain pen
Italian for "mysterious salad"
Hello! After some back-to-back high concept stuff—and also because I’m in the middle of writing book 2 in Great Leader Detective Agency—let’s do a plain vanilla review of the Conklin 1898. You know, relatively speaking.
Here it is:
The “1898” name refers to the fact that Conklin went through 1,888 trials before producing this product. Prior, failed iterations were rejected for being too long, too heavy, and too often tending to leak a corrosive fluid that made the pen permanently fuse to the user and then, after a painful death, turn the user into a vengeful monster that rose from the grave on the eve of the blood moon to seek gory vengeance on the descendants of the Conklin design team.
It’s your basic Pumpkinhead situation, as long as you are not familiar with the actual plot of the movie Pumpkinhead.
Anyway, don’t worry about that: The 1,898th try was the charm!
Now, if you are thinking “is this the exact same pen as the Conklin All-American, because it looks an awful lot like the Conklin All-American,” the answer is no. This one is called the “1898” and it costs more—sometimes a lot more—so it’s totally different.
The reason the 1898 costs more because it has a little band that says “1898” and the resin is made with misto technology, which is Italian for “mysterious salad.” This is a complicated production process that requires mixing multiple types of resin together in a salad bowl while yelling about soccer.
Of course, you might notice that some of the All-American models also come in a mixed resin, like the one I have, and wonder exactly what the difference is. And the answer is hey man, maybe don’t notice that!
Just kidding. The real answer is that the 1898 has Italian stuff and it is therefore worth more. As an Italian, I can verify this does in fact increase the value of the item—it says so right in my passport. My personal 1898 is more valuable because I owned it; you, reader, are more valuable just for reading this blog! Prego!
And otherwise, fine, yeah, it’s pretty much the same pen. I bought the 1898 when Atlas Stationers had it on sale because I really like the All-American and was hoping the 1898 wouldn’t have the same quality control issues I had on my All-American.
Specifically, here’s the clip on my All-American:
Whoops, we’re missing some finish there.
I figured that the higher price point meant that maybe someone would have inspected the pen to make sure all of the finish and stamping were correct. For example, on the little band that says “1898,” which is one of the things that distinguishes this from the All-American.
You can probably guess where this is going.
Oof. Why even bother putting these little flourishes on the pen if no one is going to check if they’re done correctly? Why not just make simpler design choices that allow for more margin of error? This is like when Pineider coated silver nibs in black stuff that made the nibs not work at all, instead of printing them in black metal.
So the “quality control” part of the pen is a negative, but you can solve for that by buying in person or just caring more than I did and sending it back if it’s jacked up. I’ve heard that Conklin is pretty good about addressing this kind of thing, but since I only paid $55 for the pen (a Black Friday sale) I wasn’t up for paying another $10 or whatever to ship it. I probably would have if I’d paid retail.
Now that we’ve addressed that, here are the things I like, because on balance I really like this pen.
IT’S A BIG FAT PEN. This pen is fat but not long, which means it’s good for someone who has smaller hands with long fingers—surgeons, pianists, world-famous pen blog morons, etc. See our full explainer of this here. Your weird long fingers will be able to relax because they don’t have to be overly curled up to hold the pen, and its regular length means it won’t stick out of your hand in a way that causes you to fight it. This pen is exceptionally comfortable to write with for long sessions.
IT HAS A GOOD GRIP. Similar to the last point, this is a comfort thing. I prefer it when pens have a grip that makes it obvious where you are supposed to hold the pen and let you then hold it pretty much any way you want—that is, no forced “ergonomic” triangle grip. This is often a frustratingly tall order, but the 1898 and the All-American both use a simple, well-defined grip that just feels nice and works.
IT WRITES WELL. I often don’t know how to talk about this. It’s pretty obvious when a pen writes poorly, in which case you either say “it writes poorly” (if you don’t otherwise like the pen) or “it has a sweet spot” (if you do). This isn’t a speciality nib or something else fancy; it’s just a regular steel nib that works.
VERDICT: Should you get this one? If “comfort” for you means “big fat pen,” then sure. There really aren’t a ton in that size range, this one is pretty solid, and the core colors tend to go on sale—I got mine at 50% off last year, and I think it’s pretty competitive at a discount like that. BUT: I would buy it in person, both so you can inspect it for any QC issues and so you can get the resin pattern you want, as this kind of mixed resin will vary from pen to pen (this is the mystery of the mysterious salad).
OTHER STUFF
PROOFS ARE IN: The proof copy of Great Leader Detective Agency is in! This is a final pre-publication step in which you make sure you didn’t mess up the cover file and then obsessively re-read the book to make final edits even though it’s already been professionally edited and proofread because you saw you used the same adjective twice in a chapter and that bothered you.
I ended up changing the cover after doing some A/B testing on BookSirens; the click-through rate for this cover was like 150% higher than the original one, which is nuts.
Thank you to everyone who has already downloaded a copy to read; if you haven’t yet, there is still time and it is still free for another month or so. Go to this link to read the summary, a sample chapter, and get your copy.
NOT ONLY FOR COOL TEENS: Commenter Gary points us to this deep dive he did on the Rotring Core (see our excessively long review here). It is amazing. The old marketing materials he dug up have some of the greatest lines of all time.
This email serves as notice to my wife that I will be quoting this relentlessly for the foreseeable future. Thank you, Commenter Gary!
ONLY ONE TO GO: Check it out! Just one more pen to go and then all of the start-of-year review queue pens have been handled. This is a dramatic improvement over last year where I had to do a “here’s all the stuff I forgot to review” post at the end.
1) That cover is amazing and now I want to read it.
2) I’m shallow like that.
3) The first and last Conklin I ever bought was stamped HOIO instead of OHIO. #yafa