Watches, Pens, and the Craft of Analog Living
Ellen Ashford · September 1, 2026
Best Everyday Pens for People Who Lose Pens: My Rotation I write about fountain pens that cost more than some watches. I also lose pens — in coat pockets, in the car, in other people’s houses, at a hardware store counter in 2023 where I definitely left a pen I still think about. For a … Read more
Ellen Ashford · September 1, 2026
Premium Rollerballs That Write Better Than Most Fountain Pens This is an awkward thing to write on a site with this much fountain pen content, so let me be direct: for a lot of everyday writing, a good rollerball is the better tool. Not the more interesting one. The better one. A rollerball starts instantly … Read more
Ellen Ashford · August 6, 2026
You’ve read my first pen refill compatibility guide, and you know the basics: Parker-style refills, G2-style refills, Schmidt upgrades, Zebra F-series. You’re armed with the knowledge that a Jotter refill fits a Lamy Safari ballpoint, and that most Japanese gel pens swap with each other. But you’re standing in your desk right now holding a … Read more
Ellen Ashford · August 6, 2026
The Pen That Skipped at the Worst Possible Moment I was signing a watch purchase agreement in a dealer’s back room in 2017 — a Tudor Black Bay I’d been chasing for eight months — and the ballpoint handed to me skipped clean across my signature, leaving a ghostly scratch instead of ink. I scribbled … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 28, 2026
My eyes go straight to the shoebox before I’ve even scanned the rest of a garage sale table. Taped shut, marker-scrawled, wedged under some card table between a dead clock and a stack of paperback thrillers — that’s the box I want. Last June I handed over three dollars for one labeled “PENS + STUFF” … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 24, 2026
So you’ve got a Lamy 2000 sitting on the desk, or maybe a Pelikan M400 someone gave as a graduation present — and the question nagging at you is what pencil could possibly sit next to it without looking wrong. The fountain pen itself isn’t the problem. Metal barrel, weighted just right, the sort of … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 23, 2026
Search collector forums long enough and you’ll run into two pieces of directly opposed advice: one camp swears a decent pen will always beat a pencil for daily writing, and the other insists any cheap disposable pencil does the job just as well as a good one. That second camp is wrong. After a decade … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 14, 2026
Four-tenths of a millimeter — that’s the entire gap between the lead size that wrecked my handwriting for three straight months and the one that fixed it overnight. Five years back, I picked up a mechanical pencil sized 0.9mm, assuming it was the ordinary kind, and spent a whole season producing lines that looked like … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 6, 2026
The nib sits bent sideways in my palm right now — tines splayed apart where a notebook spiral caught them and yanked hard, a $120 lesson in what happens when a Pilot Custom 74 rides loose in a jacket pocket like spare change. That’s roughly how careless my carry used to be: pens tangled in … Read more
Ellen Ashford · June 26, 2026
Eleven years and something like four thousand handwritten pages into this habit, the question I get most often has nothing to do with fountain pens or the notebooks I fill with them — it’s about mechanical pencils. For most of that stretch, I assumed the fault was mine: too much pressure, too little patience, lead … Read more