Four Favorite Fountain Pens for the Road — The Gentleman Stationer

As we sit here in early May, I’ve now spent most of the past year streamlining and reducing my pen accumulation, either by selling off unused pens or consolidating via trade (i.e., trading multiple pens for a single pen that I would use more). Despite writing about pens and pen-related topics for many years, I’ve never had as large a collection as people expect. I hate the idea of unused possessions, whether pens or anything else, and if something sits dormant for too long, I will absolutely sell it off.

The Concept of “Desert Island” Pens

In an ideal world, I would reduce my pen accumulation to around a dozen pens that I cycle through regularly. Because pens is partly a business for me, that’s not realistic. At any given time, I have around at least a half-dozen pens that I’m either in the process of reviewing or testing out as potential shop stock. In addition to those pens currently “in for review,” I make a point of keeping one of each model I carry in the store for customer service purposes, and I like to generally have at least one example of each pen from most modern brands on-hand for reference so that I can easily use them for comparison in reviews and editorials.

Practicality aside, I still enjoy a good thought experiment. If all of this (T.G.S., the Shop, any sort of pen-related business) went away tomorrow, and I wound up on a “desert island” where I could only keep 12 pens, what would they be? I can usually get to seven or eight pens pretty easily – it’s those last few that are hard. Since I had to take an extended family trip this week, where I’d be required to do a fairly significant amount of work, this presented an opportunity to select what I’d call the “First Four”: my workhorses for writing.