It’s been two and a half months since I last cleaned and refilled some pens, so now it was well overdue now. Some of the pens I filled back then have lasted a long time! It was early February, and I took inspiration from the songs on Sleep Token’s album Take Me Back to Eden in my choice of pens and inks. This time I‘ve made it significantly easier for myself.

The pen case I usually bring to work holds six pens, so to keep it controlled, I decided to limit myself to that this time. I didn’t have any particular strategy, or anything that I used as inspiration for my choices. I tried to pick some pens and inks I haven’t used in a while (with a couple exceptions). I also decided that one brand should only be represented once, so each of the pens and inks are from different brands.

I didn’t spend much time pondering either pens or inks this time, but I am quite satisfied with the selection I ended up with.

I discovered something strange along the way. I found Noodler’s Air-Corps Blue-Black to be very light and turquoise when I first filled the pen with it. When I examined the matter more closely, I discovered that the ink in the bottle was much darker at the bottom than at the top. It would seem that some of the color pigments had sunk into the bottom of the bottle. With shimmer ink, you usually have to shake the bottle before filling because the shimmer particles collects at the bottom, but I can’t say I’ve come across this happening with normal inks before. Anyway: I shook the bottle well and refilled the pen and it was a completely different color!

Here are a few more pictures. The quotes are from This Side of Paradise, which was the debut novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I have read The Great Gatsby by the same author several times, and have thought for a few years that I should read his other books as well. Unfortunately, he didn’t get to write a lot of them, so I’ll probably spread them out over a longer period, so as not to devour everything at once, but I read This Side of Paradise earlier this spring.

The book was published in 1920, when the author was 23 years old, and was one of the first literary works to deal with the youth rebellion of the 1920s and the Jazz Age generation.