March Sponsor Spotlight

All 15 of the Pilot Custom 912 Nibs, now at Vanness Pens.

Sponsor support is very important to me here at The Pen Addict. My sidebar advertisers put their faith in me to deliver good value for them month in and month out, and I want to shine the light on the best of the best for you. If you are shopping for pens, paper, inks, and more, please check out these great companies and see what they have to offer. Some recent highlights:

Goldspot received the new Esterbrook Botanical Gardens fountain pen, featuring another knockout material.

Vanness Pens has all 15 nibs of the Pilot Custom Heritage 912 available. That’s right, 15 nib choices!

JetPens has all three colors of the new Sailor Pro Gear Slim Mini Recontre fountain pen, featuring grey, blue, and red barrels.

Pen Chalet is also on the Sailor high seas with the release of the 1911 Pen of the Year 2023 Golden Olive fountain pen, available only in North America.

Itoya Profolio Oasis A5 Notebook Review

(Jeff Abbott is a regular contributor at The Pen Addict. You can find more from Jeff online at Draft Evolution and Twitter.)

Always on the lookout for new notebooks, I couldn't pass up the Itoya Profolio Oasis in Wintergreen and A5. It borrows some aesthetics from other Japanese paper brands, but how does it perform for the price?

The exterior of the notebook is clean and simple. The wintergreen color of mine provides a nice pop of color on an otherwise boring desk. The covers are thin and flexible, but I worry they won't provide much protection in a bag with other items. The corners are square, which are just begging to get bent over in no time, but it makes the notebook look really crispy and clean.

The notebook is stitched very cleanly and has black tape covering the spine for additional protection and strength. The notebook really resists laying flat at first, but it breaks in really quickly. Despite this, it also has no trouble staying closed when it's laying on a desk. This is somewhat unexpected for a notebook with a stiff spine and really lightweight covers, but I'll take it.

Moving inside the notebook, there's nothing extra included between the covers. There are 80 sheets of lightweight paper, and no extra pages for organization or labeling. The inside front cover has some marketing information, but it's incredibly difficult to read in my copy because the light gray ink disappears against the wintergreen cover. It provides some helpful hints on how to use the notebook and it's unique ruling system. Aside from that, the pages aren't numbered, but they do include a spot at the top for a title and date. The paper is really smooth and feels like 80gsm in weight.

Similar to the Lamy notebooks I've been using recently, the Oasis also features a unique ruling system that combines lines, grids, and even dots to create a lightweight "everything" rule that seems to work well. I'll admit, it looks busy when the page is blank, but the ink is light enough that it easily gets out of your way once you start writing. The additional structure is useful if you want to create neat sections on the page, but they easily disappear when writing. I know that this rule format won't appeal to everyone, and that's cool. It's a cool system and I'm glad to see more stationery makers try it out. As long as there are plenty of options available for everyone, I have no problem with creating notebooks with quirky, uncommon rule formats! If you happen to enjoy it or use it for a specific purpose, that's reason enough to manufacture and sell a product like this.

While the paper is smooth and lightweight, it doesn't stand up to wet fountain pens very well. The fountain pen marks easily showed through on the back of the page — making it unusable — but Waterman's Mysterious Blue bled through the back of the page and onto the front of the next page! I've never had any problems with Mysterious Blue in the past, so this definitely surprised me. In the future, I won't be using any fountain pens in this notebook without testing them out on a scrap page first.

Luckily, the paper handled other types of pens, ink, and graphite superbly. It's a smooth paper with just a slight amount of tooth to provide some feedback and friction for controlling your writing instrument, and I've really enjoyed using it.

If you're in the market to try a somewhat uncommon ruling in a sharp notebook, the Oasis is a fantastic option. At $9 for the A5 size, it's a pretty good value for what you get. It's utilitarian but still has some style and personality, but it does have some weaknesses with certain ink/nib combos you'll have to watch out for. The ruling format is interesting and well-executed. For the price, you can try one of these notebooks to see if you like the format — if it's not for you, you haven't lost much money to find out.

And if the Wintergreen cover or A5 isn't what you want, there are several other color and size options available as well. It's not for everyone, but if it's intriguing to you, don't hesitate to try it out!

(Goldspot provided this product at a discount to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)

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Meet Your Maker – Brad Owens, Mythic Pens

(Caroline Foty's first fountain pen was a 1970s Sheaffer No Nonsense that still writes perfectly. Since she discovered pens by independent makers, she wants "one of each, please" and wants to meet all the makers. Maybe you do, too. She lives in Baltimore with pens, cats, and all kinds of fiber arts supplies.)

You don’t need to talk to Brad Owens for long to find out how seriously he takes the humble pen, and the idea of making one. “You can take something inanimate and, with some skill and attention to detail, turn it into something that created society as we know it.” Even as a teenager he liked having good pens and good paper, although he hadn’t heard of fountain pens.

A classically trained trumpeter who set out to be a music educator, Owens experienced burnout in that field and ended up with his current demanding day job as a teacher in the legal field. “I talk for a living.” Pen making serves as his stress relief. It began when he looked around for a side business and tried woodworking, and found he had a talent for it; but selling pieces was very difficult unless they were commissioned. At about the same time, he heard of fountain pens and found Brian Goulet’s videos on YouTube. His interest was piqued, and he bought a couple of inexpensive introductory pens from Goulet Pens.

Soon after that, Owens heard of pen shows, and found out there was one in Atlanta, not far from his home. He and his wife attended, and wandered into the room where the independent makers were concentrated, ending up at Jonathon Brooks’ Carolina Pen Company table. He bought a pen from Jonathon, the first time he’d seen kitless pens, and ultimately contacted him to ask for help getting started making them. Jonathon said, “Come on up to the house and I’ll show you.” After a day or two, Owens had made a usable pen, and was smitten. A Kickstarter helped him get over the cost of entry into the craft. He sold his first pen in December 2019 – “Not the best time to start a pen business! There were few shows in 2020, and pen makers weren’t getting to the customers. It was the customers who were the ones getting the word out.”

When it came time to have company and model names, Owens thought first of gods and goddesses because of his love of mythology. A number of other makers had already gone that route, so he chose to name his early models after ancient Greek writers. “Creativity in mythology is almost like pen making – there is a mysterious feel you have to get, and it can’t be taught, you have to learn it yourself.”

Owens has slowly been evolving the diversity of his models. The Prime was first, just a straight shape, and the natural progression was to start making some more tapered silhouettes. The vintage lizard-skin cellulose acetate inspired his recently premiered Vintage Series (VS) pens, paying homage to classic fountain pen styles. These models are likely to mix contemporary handmade resins with the hard-to-find lizard skin, and have traditional style clips. The cellulose acetate is not heat-tolerant, and will begin to smell like vinegar if it gets too hot, so extra care is needed in drilling and polishing to avoid wasting it. Even with his increased interest in mixing materials, there is no temptation to make his own – “if someone has already said it so well, why try to say it again?” – but his wife is beginning to express some interest in the art.

Inspiration for Owens is an internal feedback loop. “Inspiration leads to inspiration. I continue to try to get to a level of satisfaction with what I’m making –to finish a thing and feel like it is really good, and be satisfied with it.” Of course, “There’s only so much you can do with a piece of plastic,” so there need to be small ways your “signature” is on what you make. Personally, he doesn’t like square edges, so over time his pens have evolved to have more small bevels and rounded corners.

When asked about a favorite pen he didn’t make, Owens holds up a large tray of maker pens. “I have a lot of favorite pens I didn’t make.” Standouts in his mind, for craftsmanship and detail, are those made by Eric Sands and Ryan Krusac, as well as the urushi work of Jonathon Brooks. “When I see something better than what I did, it inspires me to do better. I like my maker pens better than my Montblanc 149 because I know what goes into them.”

Owens’ other pen endeavor, the penmaking podcast As The Pen Turns, has been going on since fall of 2020 and is up to forty episodes as of this writing. Through Instagram chats with Jason Miller (they still have not met in person), the idea evolved until they just decided to jump in. “It came out of a desire to inspire the community of pen makers. Information about making pens should be available to anyone who wants to try it out. We wanted an outlet to talk about our pen making.” The first few episodes talked through the pen maker’s toolkit, and they interview a maker (of pens, blanks, or related supplies) every other episode. After a year, they were joined as hosts by Jonathon Brooks. They are closing in on a thousand downloads per episode, and are clearly the world’s most popular (maybe only?) pen making podcast.

The podcast website boasts an extensive directory of links to pen makers, material makers, and nib grinders. A community has bloomed around the podcast, through the annual “Super Most Awesome Pen of the Year (SMAPOTY)” and “Blankety-Blank” awards, voted on by the makers themselves, as well as a secret-santa pen exchange. A number of makers have found inspiration and encouragement in the podcast and related activities. “If I help another pen maker out, it helps me out.”

Despite all the hours working alone in the shop, Owens doesn’t think small when talking about what he does. “I want to think I’m contributing to something bigger than me. Preserving the written word is very important. The next great writer could get one of our pens and write something amazing.”

Brad Owens’ work can be seen at the Atlanta Pen Show, as well as at MythicPens.com and @MythicPens on Instagram.