Lamy tell you a story of a slippery slope

It’s been just over 3 months since I started journaling and down the slippery slope of fountains pens, inks, and notebooks.

I used Lamy rollerballs as a student, and a recent experience with their fountain pens left me disappointed with frequent hard starts and skipping.

I love their inks but really did not like their fountain pens based on this expperience.

I picked up a Lamy Al-Star Petrol in Extra Fine (EF) two weekends ago and realized that it wrote really well, inked with the 2017 Lamy Petrol. It quickly became one of my daily writers, replacing an Asvine V200 (EF) that I had been using for the previous 6 weeks.

I followed up with a Lamy Al-Star Bronze (again in EF) and inked it up with their Bronze ink from 2019 and found it very agreeable with great flow.

One thing has led to another and I soon found myself a proud owner of a Lamy LX Marron (again in EF). I’d originally thought that the Amazon listing was in error — a typo for maroon, but quickly realized that marron is French or brown, and hey, I love browns.

side note — if marron is brown in French, what’s maroon? It’s bordeaux!

And one of my favourite inks is the Mita Club Coffee (yes, it does smell like coffee!), so it was only natural to ink up with this!

It turns out that the issue with my wife’s Lamy LX Rose Gold that I started with was with the feed/nib, seeing that I really didn’t have much to complain about with the Lamys I bought since, and a replacement nib/feed solved all my complaints about that LX, which has since been repossessed by my wife.

Now, as someone who has a Pilot Custom 823 and a Pilot Custom Urushi, it seems a bit odd that I’d be heading down a Lamy rabbit hole. I’ve been told they aren’t great, and don’t offer good value for money compared to the flood of Cheap Chinese Pens (CCP?) that are available these days.

But I can’t seem to agree — if there’s one thing that Lamy seems to get right, it’s a consistent writing experience, despite how many say that “Lamy’s stated nib sizes are more a suggestion” given the loose interpretation of “Quality Control” that Lamy seems to use.

I’ve realized that my Lamys offer good feedback, don’t dry out after a week of sitting around, and are well-balanced and great for long hours of writing. And they are relatively cheap enough to toss into my pen case and head out. And they look really nice — especially the Al-Star and LX ones.

Swapping out

One thing that drew me to the Asvine V200 and the P36 pens that I have was the interchangeable nibs. I enjoy tinkering, so I swap out nibs from time to time to see if I can get the “perfect” combination between pen, ink, and notebook, and the screw-off-screw-on convenience was hard to pass up. As it turns out, Lamy also offers an easy way to swap out nibs, though they are nowhere as cheap as the Asvine ones (a set of extra fine, fine and medium nibs cost as much as 1 Lamy replacement nib!).

On the upside, Lamy offers 1.5mm and 1.9mm stub nibs, a cursive nib, and the usual options extra fine to broad nibs (not that they are readily available where I live, but at least it’s an option), and I’ve got my eye on a cursive nib, which, given the inscription, seems to suggest that this might have been designed for people who write in Chinese, Korean, or Japanese (that’s the Chinese character for Han, not the same as the Korean character 韓 that represents its people) — this nib probably works great for Arabic as well, by the way.

So, where am I going with this rambling post?

I have 2 more Lamy Al-Stars coming in.

A Graphite with a medium nib that I plan to explore with my Kaweco Smokey Grey ink or Diamine Earl Grey (I’m unimaginative that way), and (of course) a Vibrant Pink, which I plan to ink with…. Lamy Vibrant Pink, circa 2018.

I can’t help myself when it comes to these old limited editions. I discovered a stash of New Old Stock (NOS) Petrol, Dark Lilac, Violet Blackberry, Bronze, and Vibrant Pink inks in Kinokuniya and fell in love with these inks. And what are the inks without their matching pens?

And now, like Ash Katchum from Pokemon, I need to catch them all.

My name is Ken, and I am addicted to Lamy inks and pens.