Pens, of the non-fountain variety

I’m a long-time fountain pen nerd. I have a couple of dozen fountain pens from across the price spectrum, and maybe twice as many inks. Sadly, however, I can’t use them at work.

My job requires lots of writing, which would be an ideal way to use my fancy fountain pens, but for reasons too boring to elaborate on, most of my writing is in work-supplied notebooks. These notebooks use crappy paper that can’t hold up to the amounts of ink that even very fine Japanese fountain pen nibs put out. Basically it’s just not practical to use fountain pens for most of my work-related writing.

One could dwell on this tragedy, or one could use this as an excuse to dive deeply into the non-fountain pen world to find some regular pens that are tolerable. I chose the latter.

I’m not going to lead you through an exhaustive comparison of the options available, I’m just going to tell you what I settled on.

The best regular (non-fountain) pen in the world for writing with is the Uniball Eye rollerball.¹ Job done; we can all move on.

The problem with this is what I really wanted was a pen I could use a refill with, rather than throwing out the whole thing when it was empty. Environmentally conscious, and all that.

The answer to the question of what is the closest thing to a Uniball Eye but with a refill is the Pentel Energel. The great thing about the Energel is that it comes in a bunch of formats, from plastic to “metal" to really quite fancy. The refills come in (at least) 0.5 and 0.7mm, and a range of colours (for my work I can only use blue and black, but maybe you can enjoy some of the others yourself). Buy a bunch of them, and a few packs of refills, and you’ll never be short a pen.

But the best thing about the Energel isn’t the Energel at all. It’s the Zebra Sarasa Grand. The Sarasa Grand uses the same refill as the Energel, but it looks much more classy. It has a great heft and a nice finish and everyone I have ever lent one to has wanted one of their own. I have bough a bunch of them for colleagues, just because it makes me happy to see people using a good pen.

They don’t seem to be as readily available as I’m writing this, but the Sarasa Grand also had a Vintage series and the colours were just amazing. And they shipped with an ink colour-matched to the pen. I have a dark green one and it’s seriously good.

You could just buy a Sarasa Grand and be done with it, of course, but they’re significantly more expensive and it’s much harder to buy their refills (in Australia). Having a few cheap and cheerful Energels to loan to colleagues who don’t understand the concept of a boomerang², and a nice Sarasa Grand to use when you’re confident you can hold on to it, seems the perfect solution, to me.

So there you are, go out and buy an Energel (or a Sarasa Grand, if you’re made of money) and be happier with your pen than 99 per cent of the people in the world will ever be.