I'm completely exhausted today for some reason. I need to get to bed early tonight.

Feeling good today, because I managed to restore a favorite fountain pen of mine to full working order. My beloved Rotring Core had been skipping like crazy and kept drying out if I left it uncapped for more than a few seconds. I finally suspected that it was the ink - I hadn't had any Rotring cartridges handy when the pen last needed refilling, so I'd popped in a black Stypen cartridge. (The Rotring uses the little stubby "international standard" cartridges, which are made by many manufacturers.) Sure enough, when I finally dug up a Rotring cartridge and popped it in in place of the Stypen, I had my smooth-writing, trouble free pen again. Yay.

Color me unimpressed with Stypen ink. (Literally. Not only did the stuff not flow well in my Rotring, it was mysteriously slow-drying on paper. I smeared my fingers in it a couple of times. Bleah.)

So, I went online, and ordered a couple more packages of the Rotring cartridges, and also a couple of packs of cartridges from J. Herbin, a French ink maker whose inks have a high reputation among some fountain pen afficionados. They've been making writing inks since 1670, according to their web site, and you can buy from them inks made to the same formulas they used in making inks for Victor Hugo and Louis XIV. Those last aren't compatible with fountain pens, though. Hugo and Louis XIV would have used dipped pens, which typically use a thicker ink that would clog a fountain pen. (Fountain pens are really little marvels of engineering - you have a very thin stream of ink that's basically drawn out by capillary action.)

I'm kind of tempted to get a dip pen just so I can try out Louis XIV's blue ink. Maybe someday I will.

I'm on a bit of an ink quest. One of my very favorite ink colors is Sheaffer's Burgundy: a really lovely dark wine color. Sheaffer went and discontinued it a while back. I'm kind of on the lookout for a substitute. I suppose I could try mixing it from bottled red and blue inks. (I'd probably end up producing thirty different variants of "mud puddle brown" before I got something that worked. And it wouldn't get me any thing I could use in the pens that I fill with cartridges rather than converters or piston fill systems.)

(A brief primer on foutain pen filling for those interested: Most fountain pens made these days are designed to take ink in cartridges - little sealed plastic cylinders filled with ink. When you insert the cartridge in the fountain pen, there's a little tube that pierces one end of the cartridge and allows ink to flow out of the cartridge and towards the nib. Cartridges are popular because they're easy to carry and make it easy to fill the pen without getting ink on your fingers. The drawback is that pen manufacturers have an unfortunate tendency to make proprietary cartridge designs that only work in their own pens. If you own more than one kind of pen, this can be confusing. I own cartridges in 4 different styles.

Cartridges are, of course, a relatively recent invention (early ones, as I understand it, were actually made of glass.) Before cartridges, ink was simply contained in a reservoir in the body of the pen. You filled the pen by dunking the nib in a bottle of ink and drawing it up by some kind of suction. The simplest mechanism was a piston inside the pen that was moved by twisting a knob on the end of the pen, but there were lots of ingenious and complicated mechanisms used over the years.

Some fountain pens (usually high-end ones) still use this kind of mechanism. I own one piston-filling pen, a Pelikan. It's one of my favorite pens, and I've gotten quite good at filling it up without getting ink all over the place. I like the fact that I can put any kind of ink that comes in a bottle into it. (I generally fill it with Sheaffer blue-black.) The internal reservoir actually holds more ink than any cartridge, so I can go a fairly long time between refills. But it does have the drawback that I can't really carry a spare bottle of ink around with me in case I need a refill.

Now, cartridges are convenient, but fountain pen afficionados tend to get picky about their ink and unsatisfied with the limited palette available in cartridges for their pen of choice. So most pen manufacturers offer a compromise solution, called a converter. Basically a converter is a little doohickey that fits in a pen's cartridge slot, but has a piston mechanism built in that allows it to be filled with ink from a bottle. In theory, it ought to be the best of both worlds; in practice I find them a little kludgy.)

And, you know, all I really meant to say was that I fixed my fountain pen and bought some ink, but this kind of got long. Sorry.