Pelikan M200 Smoky Quartz Fountain Pen

The Pelikan M200 Smoky Quartz has arrived, and of course I'm in love. The earthy, slightly translucent dark brown is everything I could've dreamed of - a perfect workhorse match for my M400 Tortoiseshell that was last year's special edition from Pelikan, easily one of my favourite pens. It's been a good season of Pelikan releases for someone like me. Best of all, for a limited time, we're offering a free bottle of Smoky Quartz or any other Pelikan Edelstein ink with the purchase of the pen. To make use of this offer when shopping online, leave a note in the comments with your order indicating the colour of ink you'd like. Or of course, we'd love for you to come and visit us in the shop! Known for their reliability and steadfastness, Pelikan pens are ones that will serve you well for many years - it's part of the reason so many vintage Pelikan pens are still around today. The M200 is one of Pelikan's entry-level pens, with a steel nib, but still features Pelikan's famous piston filling mechanism, allowing you to hold ink in the barrel. It's perfect for this Smoky Quartz colour, as the pen is just slightly translucent - its darker colour allowing you to use it in more serious workplaces while still translucent enough for you to see how much ink is left in the barrel.                           The famous Pelikan/pelican beak clip. The pen itself is similarly sized to the M400 - it's on the smaller side of a standard sized pen. It's lightweight and perfect for my hand, but here's a picture of it in Jon's hand, and then next to the M400. Pelikan steel nibs are just ever so slightly bouncy - not the same as a gold nib, but a pleasant feeling. I got a medium nib on mine, and here's the writing sample with the matching Pelikan Smoky Quartz ink. So the newest pen in my collection! I'm a big fan of Pelikan pens, aesthetically as well as functionally - both because and despite their pens feature hteir well-known piston-filling systems. I do like cartridge-converter pens for their ease of cleaning, but really because of the more frequently occurring sense of satisfaction I get at writing a pen dry, and being able to fill it with a new ink. However, there's no denying such an elegant and flawless filling system like Pelikan's, that simply holds a substantial quantity of ink, and works again and again and again. There's also something a bit romantic about Pelikan pens - they've been around for so long with such a classic design, and perhaps especially so with this vintage brown colour, Pelikan pens give off an aura of old world writing. Even as Pelikan makes subtle upgrades and improvements to their designs over the years, the pens still hold a sort of nostalgia to them that makes me think of days long ago when everyone wrote with a fountain pen, days when a fountain pen was a precious gift and you held onto it through school and composition papers and writing letters.

***

And in other news, we've got a sale table going on in the shop. Normally we have an IKEA cart with a few sale items, but with the fall, we've been cleaning and dusting and organizing.  Things will slowly trickle onto the website as well, so keep an eye on our Specials section of the website, but if you're in the neighbourhood tomorrow (Friday) and Saturday, please stop by and see what we have. There are some slightly damaged goods (like notebooks with corners that are dented from shipping) or pads of paper without their plastic packaging that we opened for photos for the website, as well as a few things we're overstocked on or maybe discontinuing. And maybe a few surprises! Who knows! (As of this point in time, literally no one!) This isn't going to be quite the same magnitude as our warehouse sale last summer, but this summer has been a busy one so we haven't managed to get our act together to hold another big sale like that. However, if you do stop by the shop, you might be able to grab a good deal or two.