January - April 2024: Four Months in Stationery

I’ve decided to do a little retrospective of stationery use and discoveries of the first four months of 2024. I like looking back and seeing how I am doing, and I hope you’ll enjoy this too.

Pens

Leo Momento Zero Andromeda: Catch and Release in early January, I had it for two days before I turned it around. I already have a Momento Zero, and it did not feel necessary to have two - even though the Andromeda was very pretty. Following my guidelines for 2024, immediate catch and releases do not count towards my pen purchase count of 2024.

Scribo Feel Maddalena in 18k M. I really wanted this pen in this particular colorway - something about the color and the midcentury sensibility of it appealed to me. This is my first pen purchase of 2024, bought second hand in March. I am happy with the Maddalena, but the nib has a song which is not exactly to my liking, so envision a trip to a nibmeister in this pen’s future.

This is the fourth Scribo in my collection, and officially the most pens I’ve owned of any one brand. Two Feels, two Piumas. I want more Scribos - they are just very me - and at the same time I am aware of their imperfections and am not sure if I truly want to keep collecting them.

I do want to keep collecting them but I want them to work perfectly for me from the get-go, which has not been quite happening.

I also used my pre-existing pens a lot. The Aurora Internazionale continues to be the highlight of my collection, and I’ve also enjoyed my Leo Momento Magico, Onoto Keats, and Scribo Piuma Impressione in terms of this year’s highlights.

One from Each Brand

Rachel has been doing an interesting thought experiment where you can only keep one pen from each brand. I don’t have a lot of pens, twenty in total right now, and they are pretty evenly distributed, representing thirteen brands. My favorite brands so far have been Scribo and Aurora, of which I have multiples - four Scribos and two Auroras. I also have two Onotos, and two Leonardos. The other brands are all represented by a single pen. So I must go about this thought experiment a bit differently - so I am asking myself which pens I would keep if I had to only keep one per brand (when I have multiples) and also reduce my overall collection.

Here is how it shook out:

Scribo - tough choices there, I love these pens. I think it would come down to the Maddalena vs the Piuma Impressione. I think the Piuma Impressione would win with a very narrow margin, but I keep going back and forth on this.

Aurora - I have a lovely Optima and the Internazionale, but this is a no-brainer: the Internazionale wins.

Onoto - I only have two pens from this brand, but both are beloved. If I must only keep one, I’m keeping the Keats, because it has sentimental value, but I do not want to give up on the Scholar - it is a fantastic pen.

Leonardo - I have the Leo Momento Zero Viola, and the Momento Magico Bohemian Twilight. The Magico has been inked continuously since September 2022 when I got it. It’s the most used pen in my collection, and the most useful - it is a piston filler with an ink window and an interchangeable Jowo nib, and as such, this is my Goldilocks - I keep it inked with shimmer and it works beautifully. Keeping this one for sure.

Montegrappa - Miya 450 in Yellow Celluloid. I love this pen, but I also do not use it as much as I thought I would, so if I need to reduce my collection drastically, this pen would become a sale contender. I wouldn’t mind another Montegrappa - I’ve been eyeing the Elmo 2 design, so perhaps in the future my response here would be different.

Visconti - Only have one pen from the brand, the Bronze Age, and I’m keeping that one.

The rest can go.

I will be sad to see them go, but it’s fine. So if I’m only keeping one per brand, that’s 6 pens, and if I’m keeping every pen I want to keep, that’s 9 pens. I am sneaking in another Scribo - the Piuma Ratio.

Unsurprisingly, my currently inked reflects these preferences - from top to bottom Onoto Scholar, Leo Magico, Scribo Piuma Impressione, Scribo Maddalena, Onoto Keats, Aurora Internazionale.

Ink

Total of five bottles of ink purchased so far: Wonder Pens Dominant Industry Chicken in the Sky with Diamonds and Tuna with Olives (January), The Wet Pen Elliott Bay and Deception Pass (February), and a newcomer Montblanc Klimt Blue (April). All of these inks are a success for me - I love the color of DI Chicken in the Sky with Diamonds especially, although I do like my inks to be wetter. MB Klimt Blue is wonderful, and I hope to post a full review of it soon.

I had no ink guardrails for 2024, which was an experiment. Usually I keep to under 10 bottles a year. Having bought 5 bottles already, I am definitely ahead of schedule there, but still not enough to chicken out and impose a limit.

Ink Journal

I have been keeping a little ink journal in my Travelers Passport accordion folder insert. I’ve been very happy with it - initially I wished I used a regular size accordion insert to get more ink in, but I love this, actually. It reflects my preference for a compact currently inked of 5 or 6 pens. If a lot of ink is running out and I am reinking multiple currently inked pens during the month, things become more tight - this happened in January.

Paper and Journaling

I finished one Hobonichi Techo Day-Free A6 insert (Jan-Apr 2024), and am finally starting another in May. I became very attached to this journal, and my notetaking crawled to almost a full stop as a result as I did not want to finish it. I have rotated it out last night. I marked the cover of the finished notebook with some special stickers. It’s too early to fully archive it, as I need many of the notes and ideas in the book and have to migrate them somehow.

I used my Bible Plotter quite a bit, and continued to enjoy it. In April, I purchased two new kinds of inserts - a Blue paper in quadrant grid layout, and an A5 in chart grid. The chart grid is only available in A5.

I’ve been looking for a quadrant grid layout for quite some time and so was very excited to see the blue insert, but it is just too small to be really useful, and the pretty blue paper is too dark to show off inks and be readable. I’ll use it up, but don’t see myself buying it again.

As for the A5 Chart Grid, it is a winner. It’s imminently useful for me for the way I organize my academic submissions, and the A5 format gives me more room to maneuver. This is a surprise, as I’m usually an A6 or a B5 user and feel that an A5 is too large to comfortably fit in my setup, but this is making me rethink. So an A5 Plotter binder might be in my future.

In less successful experiments, I gave my Travelers system another try while I was in Oregon and it was a no-go - I am not really enjoying this system, although I love the aesthetics and the quality of the paper. I was briefly tempted by the new Tokyo LE for Travelers, but I am glad I passed - it sold out almost immediately, and I don’t really have a good way to use it (yet).

What’s next?

Next on my stationery agenda is another trip, this time an international one - I am going to Estonia. With family. To a conference. I’m dreading this one a bit, just logistically - both of us spouses are presenting at this conference, and we’re taking our teenager with us. He has a developmental disability, and travel is stressful for him. But I’m looking forward to what I might do and find in Estonia.

When I come back, I want to sell some pens, and use the money to buy another pen. I’m well within guardrails for pen purchases for the year, but there’s still plenty of time to do damage. I’ll be thinking about acquiring an A5 Plotter cover as well.

See you on the other side!