I couldn’t help myself. I bought a new fountain pen.

I couldn’t help myself. I received an email from Fahrney’s last Saturday with an ad for the Waldmann Limited Edition Tango Imagination Fountain Pen in Dark Teal with an 18K nib. It was a bit pricey, but the photo was spectacular. I don’t usually care about limited editions, but this happens to be limited to 200 pieces. I succumbed and ordered it later that day. It arrived via UPS last Wednesday.

It is even more beautiful in person than in the catalog photographs. The photograph doesn’t show how light dances on the engraving, making the body shimmer. Its color seems to change depending on the background. As Kimberly describes in a review on The Pen Addict,¹ the body of the pen is 925 sterling silver.² She reviews a version with an aquamarine finish rather than the dark teal that I have. Like hers, mine wrote beautifully out of the box. Unlike hers, mine is a limited edition, and if you look very carefully on the cap band, you’ll find not only “Waldmann” and “Made in Germany”, but “174/200”, meaning that my pen is number 174 out of the limited edition of 200.

This is the first new fountain pen I’ve purchased in about 3 years. It’s so beautiful my initial thought was that I’d use it only for writing in my journal. But it writes so smoothly I’ve decided instead that I’m going to use it as my daily pen, but I am going to be very careful with it. Instead of putting it in a shirt or coat pocket when I leave for a meeting, I’ll carry it in a pen case that protects it from bumps or scratches. I’ve only had it a few days, but i can already tell that it’s going to be one of my favorites, along with my Namiki Falcon, my blue carbonesque Namiki Vanishing Point, and my Pelikan Souveran M400.³

1. Yes, there are blogs about pens. There are people who are even more fanatic about fountain pens than I am. In fact, in the world of fountain pens, I would be seen as uninvolved – if anyone knew about me. I’ve never been to a pen show. I use primarily Aurora Black ink, with Brilliant Red Pelican for titles in my daily notebook, and Aurora Blue for signatures. Serious pen lovers not only have many more pens than I do, they have a large collection of inks that they’ve swabbed on tester cards to keep track of what they have in their collection. ↩
2. The 925 symbol is discreetly placed against the cap, which you can see in one of the photos on The Pen Addict. ↩
3. That’s right. Those are my favorites. I have at least a dozen more, including a couple of Pelikans, an S.T. DuPont, a Cross, a Parker, a Waterman or two, a Rotring (fountain pen and mechanical pencil), and several others. ↩