October Currently Inked

 

 

The fall is here and with it some autumn inks in my pens. This is sort of my year round colour scheme but even a broken clock is right twice a day, and your favourite pen clerk once a year.

 

 

We recently got a Rohrer and Klingner shipment in, with their newest special edition Sanddorn for 2025, a bright orange just in time for Halloween. Did R&K plan it that way? Do Germans celebrate Halloween? Or perhaps it’s a harvest colour.

 

 

A richer, warmer, browner orange from Sailor: Syvash. This is an ink from their collaboration with the Satellite Crayon Project, which has other inks and matching Sailor pens.  

 

 

Octopus Ink’s Unicorn, a fantastic sheening ink. I love sheen in an ink because it’s a little hint of surprise on the edges of your writing, and doesn’t affect flow or thickness. Octopus has a whole line of sheening inks, which have been a lot of fun to try out.  

 

 

And a tried and true favourite, the Rohrer and Klingner Alt-Goldgrun. Back when we started the shop a thousand years ago at 906 Dundas West (I walked past it the other day and it’s now a hair salon), Alt-Goldgrun was a wild ink and very popular because it was such an unusual shade of green, beautiful and lovely and layered. Now we have thousands of inks in every imaginable shade, but I have a lot of nostalgia for this one.  

 

 

 

Platinum’s Classic Khaki Black, which is a modern day iron-gall, so gentle enough for fountain pens but not something to leave in your pen for months. It’s a permanent ink that becomes more permanent with time, as the ink oxidizes and—the most interesting part of this ink—gets darker as it oxidizes. Very satisfying to enjoy some Middle Age technology and sink deeper into my own existence as an anachronism.  

 

 

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It is fall, I have some fresh pens inked up, and I love seeing all the colours. How fun to fill out a permission form in orange or green! I do miss the days when I was a teacher for many reasons, but one of them is the joy of marking tests with different colours. Are there teachers out there who need help with marking? I suspect the joy would only last so long. Or maybe not! It’s always different when they’re not your kids.

 

In any case, hope you have some pens filled up with ink that bring you joy.