Mildly Relevant Reviews – Pilot Metropolitan Fountain Pen
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Mini Composition Showdown
A while back I reviewed the Dolgen Inspira mini composition book. I have quite a few books like this and instead of reviewing them all I decided to just compare them all together. So here’s the mini composition showdown. Mead vs. Inspira vs. Top Flight.
First off, covers and binding. All the covers are the standard composition marble pattern, with the Inspira being the most crowded followed by the Mead and then the Top Flight. The binding on the Top Flight is a sturdy fold stitch with eight signatures, while the Mead and Inspira are weak, simple glue binding. All notebooks lie flay fairly well, though the Top Flight takes more breaking in. Cover durability again goes to the Top Flight with the other two tied. The cover corners are straight on some of the Mead, clipped on the Top Flight, and rounded on the Inspira, meaning the Mead with the square corners will most likely tear up quickest. Other Mead notebooks have rounded corners. If you want color the Mead and the Top Flight are the way to go.
Their dimensions are about the same, with Inspira being slightly taller and Mead being slightly wider. The Mead and Top Flight both have eighty pages, while the thinner Inspira has sixty. The smoothest paper belongs to the Mead, the roughest to the Inspira, and the Top Flight is very akin to newsprint, unfortunately, not very high quality. All are not archival quality paper and fade rather quickly on the shelf, though they are bright white out of the package. None are very good at holding ink, but the Inspira is best without bleeding, followed by Mead and Top Flight.
What will really make or break these books, though, is their large price difference. The Inspira are three for one dollar (U.S.) the Top Flight are five for three dollars, and the Mead are one to two apiece.
So if you can organize all that and determine the best for you you’ll end up with a very nice pocket book. Each one is suited subtly to a different task so the main challenge is finding out what is best for you. They are certainly not the best memo books by any means, but they’ll certainly work, especially in a pinch.
On Writing Implements
Writing. I write a lot. I write quite a lot. I write for the web. I’ve written over 40,000 words of short stories, I’m halfway through a novel (and in the starting phase of several others). I write everyday in some form. Mostly in notebooks from Moleskine to Composition. And while doing all this writing I’ve come across many writing implements. Obviously you have computers (or typewriters) if you always want things to look plain and boring. But for paper there are hundreds to thousands to even hundreds of thousands of writing tools. And one is free to pick. You can pick any pen or pencil you like, very few are gated by price.
Which one you should choose is a hard question. Do you want cheap ones to have everywhere? Do you want a quality one to last a lifetime? Do you want a thin or thick line? Do you want one that writes more but less easily? Do you want ball, fountain, dip, click, mechanical, sharpened, pen or pencil? There are so many options to consider it sometimes gets overwhelming. Well… most people wouldn’t consider what to write with overwhelming. But if you’re really serious about writing it is.
Well how do you choose? Well… process of elimination is really your best bet. Try the least expensive pens first and work your way up until you get to ones that start to behave like you don’t like or you feel are too expensive to really use. Some people might say, of course, the more expensive pens are better, to which I would respond with the Paper Mate Write Bros. pen which writes better and more accurately for me than many several hundred dollar fountain pens I’ve handled (which to be fair is not many). Those are the pens I personally use for the most of my writing, though I do have several other brands of pens lying around and several fountain pens for using upon occasion.
For me what I’m doing dictates what writing tool I use. Ball points for journals, fountain pen for formal stuff, technical pen for inking et cetera. There are some “standards”, but none that can’t be broken. The really important thing to consider in choosing you writing implement is you. Only what you want matters for what you’re going to write with. No one is going to make fun of your choice and while a few may turn up their noses they don’t really matter.
Writing is an art, and just like all other arts it is personal. So choosing what you write with is important. And choosing the absolute best pen for you is one of the hardest things to really do. So I hope that if you write you have or will soon find the right pen/pencil for you. And I hope you keep on writing.