Watches, Pens, and the Craft of Analog Living
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 · 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