The Fountain Pen - Quink Then and Now

1936 Quink Ad

If you've read my musings on writing, you know I'm a fan of old fashioned, hands on pen and ink writing. There's something about applying ink to paper that helps my creative process and this has led me into the world of fountain pens. This past Christmas my dear wife gave me a Parker pen as a gift and I've been enjoying using it ever since. It's my weapon of choice when penning thank you letters, hammering out a story, or just journaling.
Early fountain pens were filled manually, and by that I mean using an eyedropper to top off the pen's ink reservoir. As you can imagine, that sort of process led to a lot of ruined shirts, stained desktops, and frustration and in 1901 the first self-filling fountain pens went into mass production. The years leading up to the introduction of the ball-point pen were marked by the introduction of various filling mechanisms and eventually ink cartridges like the ones I use in my pen.

Recently I decided to take another step toward becoming a Luddite and I invested in an adapter. Adapters let you to use a pen that's designed for cartridges with bottled ink. The mechanism's pretty simple, a screw plunger that draws ink from the bottle into a reservoir that fits in place of the pen's cartridge, and I'm looking forward to giving it a try when I've exhausted my supply of cartridges. Without thinking I went to my favorite pen catalog and picked out a color of ink I thought would be appropriate for my writing. The selection ranged from extremely expensive and colorful inks to every day black and blue. Without having any preference or recommendation to work with, I decided the best course would be to buy a bottle of Parker ink for my Parker pen - and that's how I came to buy an ink that's been on the market for over 80 years.

Before 1931 documents written with a fountain pen required blotting. This removed excess ink from the page and prevented smearing. Quink was Parker's answer to blotting, an ink that made use of isopropyl alcohol to speed the drying process. What Parker didn't bargain for at the time was the fact its revolutionary ink would essentially eat the barrels of the fountain pens in which it was used. It took ten years for Parker to introduce the Parker 51 pen with a barrel which resisted the corrosiveness of Quink.

My Nemesis

For the time being my bottle of Quink sits on the desktop, looking stately and important and urging me to write something of value. I'm not sure I'm up to the task. I mean if you're going to use a fountain pen and bottled ink you should write something important, right? A treatise or declaration, or maybe that next great American novel? Nothing like being intimidated by your own writing instruments...