| Oooo! Happy to answer. CHEAP: Lamy Safari. They come in plastic or in slightly more expensive aluminum (the Al version may have a different name, but it's the same size & shape and uses the same nib insert). These are gonna be $20-30 US, depending on your vendor. They are undoubtedly not as smooth to write with as my nicer pens, but they punch WAY above their weight, and deserve a spot in your rota -- especially clipped into a notebook you carry with you instead of something nicer. ALSO INEXPENSIVE: Kaweco Sport. These are super compact when closed, so they fit into a pocket better than a conventional pen, and (like the Lamy) write better than their low-end price would suggest ($27 at Jet Pens; they also make them in brass for $90). STEPPING UP A LITTLE: At $50-60, you can get one of the current "hot" affordable pens from TWSBI.com. They're pretty great; I have a 580 that I keep inked. You'll feel the difference between these and the lower-end pens. Be aware these are also a larger pen diameter-wise, and are thus sometimes less popular with small-handed people. TWSBI is also traditionally bottle-fill only -- no cartridges -- which puts some folks off. Don't be one of those; buy some bottled ink! You can get more variety that way. Plus, TWSBI pens in particular have enormous ink reservoirs -- I can write 2x or 3x as long with mine than I can with any of my other pens. OK NOW YOU GET TO SERIOUS PENS: I had a good dot-com boom, and bought some spendy pens, but what replaced them ALL as my daily driver was the classic Namiki / Pilot Vanishing Point. They still make this pen, but a recently introduced variant of it has stolen my heart: the Decimo. It's the same style and mechanism, but just a little bit smaller in diameter. It makes it more comfortable to use, even for me with larger hands. Both kinds of Vanishing Point are ~$140-150, and well worth it. As a bonus, the carts for this pen are widely available in multiple colors, and the ink feels good to write with and behaves nicely on most sorts of paper (this can be an issue with some pen/ink combos). That's the reason I used ONLY the Vanishing Point for the years I traveled all the time. Cartridge use seemed to work better on planes than bottles for me. ANOTHER FINE OPTION: My sister gave me an Aurora Ipsilon a few years ago, and it's just a JOY to write with. I use the converter and bottled ink with it. It's been inked & ready to go since the Christmas Day I unwrapped it. About $120 at Amazon. Enjoy! |