By the late nineties, I had forgotten about fountain pens. It wasn't until around 2010 or so that I found one of my pens and my interest was rekindled. I started using them again and realized quickly that for work purposes, an ink that took too long to dry or lacked any permanence was not very useful. Handing a co-worker a sheet with notes that quickly smeared and disappeared if he spilled a few drops of coffee or water just wouldn't do. I began looking into the properties of the inks I was using.
I researched on line and found several forums that discussed fountain pens and inks, the best of them was The Fountain Pen Network (FPN). It was there I learned about inks and their properties.
I learned that there was a much greater variety of inks available than in the past. Noodler’s and DeAtramentis had many permanent inks along with the established lines from Pilot, Platinum, and Sailor. I began buying samples of inks and testing them. Over the last few years, I have identified three distinct categories of inks.
There are the traditional so-called well-behaved, non-permanent inks that have a wide variety of colors and characteristics like sheen and shading. These inks are easy to clean out of pens and wash out of clothes. They look great for artistic purposes, but I don’t like them for business use because of their weakness when wet.
Then there are the inks that have some permanent elements that bond to the paper, but much of the dye washes away. Some of these are billed as “bulletproof” or forgery-resistant because the permanent element cannot be removed. However, because so much to the ink washes away, it stains the paper surrounding the writing making the handwriting difficult to read. That still doesn’t help with business writing where a smeared, cloudy page is not acceptable. Many of Noodler’s inks and almost all iron gall inks fall into this category as they are permanent, but heavily saturated and much of the dye never gets a chance to bond to the paper.
The third category is the truly permanent, water-resistant inks. These dry completely and cannot be washed off. Little if any of the dye or pigment bleeds onto the paper. The best of these dry quickly, but many take some time to fully dry to permanence. Of these inks, I’ve found a small set that are fully permanent and dry in under ten seconds on most papers allowing them to be used in office environments where one needs to quickly turn the page without smearing.
The best of this third category are:
- Noodler’s 54th Massachusetts
- Noodler's Black
- Noodler’s Legal Blue
- Noodler’s Kung Te cheng
- Noodler's Bad Green Gator
- Noodler's #41 Brown
- DeAtramentis Document inks
- Platinum Pigment Blue
- Platinum Carbon Black
Top inks from the second category are:
- Noodler's Zhivago
- Noodler's Heart of Darkness
- Noodler’s General of the Armies
- Noodler's Bad Blue Heron
- Noodler's Luck of the Draw
- Pilot Blue
- Pilot Blue-Black
Example of the differences between truly permanent and semi-permanent.
Legal Blue, Bad Green Gator, and #41 Brown are permanent while Zhivago has a green element that bleeds and runs in water leaving behind the permanent black. The Schmidt Capless Black rollerball is a control sample to demonstrate the well-behaved, ephemeral inks with no permanence. Water was poured over the writing and then placed on a blotter to dry. [Paper is Black n' Red]
Despite the semi-permanence of Zhivago, I'm still attracted to it as a daily use ink. There is something about the hint of green in the black that makes it mysterious enough to draw attention without being strange. Zhivago also does well on cheaper paper like recycled copier stock. It doesn't bleed, but it does take some time to fully dry before you can touch it without smearing. Legal Blue, Bad Green Gator, and #41 Brown dry very fast and are great for taking quick notes in meetings without fear of smearing when flipping the page in the notebook.
