Watches, Pens, and the Craft of Analog Living
Ellen Ashford · September 1, 2026
Best Blue Fountain Pen Inks: 10 Bottles I Have Used and Ranked Blue is the most crowded shelf in fountain pen ink, and most of the differences that matter are invisible in a swatch. A colour that looks gorgeous painted on Rhodia can feather into a smudge on a photocopier’s paper, take ninety seconds to … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 25, 2026
Two Metropolitans, one Safari, and a stranger’s pen sitting on my kitchen table — that’s how this whole mess started. A woman across a coffee shop table once picked up my Pilot Metropolitan, scratched out three words, and made a face. “This feels rough,” she said. “Mine’s way smoother.” Hers was a Lamy Safari, medium … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 24, 2026
Sixty-two dollars changed hands at a flea market table for a pen that, frankly, I could’ve bought new for less — and that transaction is what got me thinking about this whole tier of collecting in the first place. By the time you’ve filled a stack of notebooks with entries from my under-$50 picks, you … 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 24, 2026
Years back, cataloging a different pen entirely, I wrote in my journal that a “clean” Parker 51 nib meant no hard starts and left it at that — no mention of feed condition, no note on the section threading, nothing about the cap lip. I look at that entry now and wince a little, because … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 22, 2026
Every January, when I sit down to break in a fresh notebook, I’m reminded of a mistake that cost me an entire page of research notes: I once assumed that any fountain pen ink would simply become waterproof if given enough drying time. That assumption turned out to be badly, expensively wrong. I’d filled a … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 11, 2026
Nowhere on a pen brand’s spec sheet will you find a warning about ink pooling in your cap after a warm afternoon, or a note explaining that a converter’s plunger sometimes stalls out well short of full capacity. Fountain pen converter vs cartridge gets treated like a footnote decision — pick one, fill it, move … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 10, 2026
A single letter stamped into steel — just “F,” nothing else — is all the identification my old Pilot Metropolitan nib ever gave me, and for a while I figured that letter also stood for “flawed.” Fresh out of the box, that pen caught on every upstroke like a fingernail dragged across window screen. I … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 8, 2026
Sitting in my pen cup at this very moment is a Pelikan M200 with a faint ghost of iron gall staining near the feed — a scar left by a clog that took three full weeks of soaking to undo. That pen is also the reason strangers write to me more often about clogs than … 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