Fountain Pen Ink Sample Booklets

PENS'n'INKS

Fountain Pen Ink Sample Booklets

Fountain Pen Ink Sample booklets

The Beginning:

Over the last years I have bought and collected far over 300 fountain pen inks in cartridges and bottles. Just every brand and color I could get was immediately taken to the counter for purchase.

I started with the more common brands as Pelikan, Montblanc and Parker, quickly moving on to Waterman, Sheaffer or Lamy. From now on I was searching for more and more different ink colors. During the later 90's it seemed that ink colors beside black, blue, green and red gained popularity so that many new products came on the market.

Herbin was introduced in Germany by their distributor Waltraud Bethge Papiere (W.B.P) with not only Herbins original 21 colors but also with W.B.P own line of ink, exclusively mixed by Herbin - first 12 Classic Colors and soon after 12 additional Cool Colors were available. Omas also started offering special edition inks to their special edition pens like the Italia 90, the Hong Kong, Triratna and the Roma 2000.

This seemed like a true ink color renaissance, and it was not unusual to see more unusual ink colors being offered by traditional companies as well. By now you could easily find a couple of yellows, greys and all shades of orange and pink in the stores.

In the USA Private Reserve inks were offered, in Germany Galerie Jansen also started to mix their own ink colors and selling them with quite some success. At least Private Reserve inks rapidly gained a great reputation among collectors and fountain pen users all over the world.

I kept buying more and more inks and started to search for a way to have samples available for viewing and comparison. The first problem was that they should be brought to paper all the same way for comparison, so using a fountain pen would be almost impossible (extensive flushing ould be necessary to keep the original color, and due to the fact that some inks only come in brand specific cartridges would result in a big ink mess; not to mention the question which pen and what nib to choose). I decided pretty fast on using a dip-pen with a steel nib, resulting in the same ink flow and nib width on all samples.

Next question was what paper to use for the ink samples.

I first tried a couple of nice looking notebooks, but making a mistake on one page could easily ruin the whole project. Also the paper was nice looking but not suitable for fountain pen inks in most cases - resulting in feathering.

I ended up using plain white index cards. The surface of those cards usually is smooth enough to show the ink samples nicely.

This way I found a way to share actual ink color samples. I completed the first part of my ink chart with c. 100 inks including some rare colors like Pelikan Cyan Blue, Cherry Red, Orange and Orange Red or Silver Grey.