“Brad, why would you ever review pens made for kids?”
Well, I’m a big kid, and I love stationery. Plus, most pens that focus on helping children how to write are fun, and who doesn’t want that in their choice of writing instrument?
The LAMY ABC has been on my radar forever, but I was never compelled to try one out until the new Black Model was released. Blue and Red are the classic colors of the ABC, and are always available. I guess I needed my new kid’s fountain pen to be a special edition to buy it? No problem detected.
The ABC was released in 1980, and designed by Bernt Spiegel. From the Spiegel Institute:
The ABC was developed to be a writing utensil for writing beginners. While observing the behavior of children beginning school, important features were developed and compared with the guidelines of the association “Spiel gut” (Play well) for good toys. The product’s design featured a combination of wood and plastic, adapted ergonomically to children’s hands with a thicker and condensed body and a cube-like design to keep it from rolling away.
Given that brief, this pen checks all of the boxes. For starters, the design is begging any user to pick it up and try it out. It looks like a mini baseball bat or baton, with a wood barrel and an ABS plastic cap and end piece. It’s chunky, too.
When uncapped, the rubberized grip is molded in two spots to help kids with finger placement when first leaning to write. While grips morph and change as you get older, LAMY at least provides a good baseline to start. Later in life, this type of grip may not be comfortable for you to use.
The nib of the ABC is what LAMY calls an A nib. It writes a Medium line with its rounded tipping, specifically designed for beginners. I’m not sure that it differs all that much from their standard Medium nib, but this one does do a nice job writing at various angles.
The final kid-friendly aspect of the ABC, which I didn’t realize until I bought this pen, was that each pen comes with a sticker to write your name on and attach to the cap. There is even a clear plastic sticker designed to be applied over the color sticker, and a matching color dot for the end of the barrel so you can match up the different parts when they are inevitably lost in a sea of 3rd graders. Or on my desk.
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For my use, I’m having a lot of fun with it. It is legitimately fun to pick up and sling ink with this wet A nib. I used the stock LAMY Blue cartridge that shipped with it for the full grade school experience, and it is a perfect match. The only thing I don’t like is that the grip is wide in diameter (11.0 mm vs 10.4 mm on the LAMY Safari,) and the molded sections don’t extend up the grip as far as on the Safari, either. This is a pen designed for small hands, so I get it.
How will I use this pen going forward? Big writing with the A nib, and possible artistic destruction of the wood barrel? It seems like a perfect platform for that.
Give its start as a school pen, would I recommend it to kids as their training pen? Maybe. For starters, at $20 it is a bit expensive to take a chance with. Then again, other popular school pens (meaning pens with a molded grip for grip training, and a durable build,) like the Pelikan Pelikano are more expensive. That’s just me shopping at pen retailers. I’m sure there are many $2-$5 pens that could be sourced in bulk for classrooms.
For more experienced users, like myself, the LAMY ABC is a blast. Not everyone will enjoy it for various reasons, but I do love bringing out the inner kid in me every once in a while.
(JetPens provided this product at no charge to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)
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