Doom Secretary!

It writes beautifully smooth too.

Otherwise the build quality isn't that great, sadly. All the gold is gone from the trim. The clip has deformed the cap. The lever stands out from the barrel a bit, meaning it catches on things. But hey, it's the nib that matters, right?

I didn't care much for the black and white pattern at first, but it's growing on me. It reminds me of Jupiter's clouds. You know? Swirly bands with the occasional spot.

Oh, most definitely I am! Thank you so much for that!

So, these here are my babies:

They're not necessarily bad pens! My second pen was an IPG kit pen, and it wrote very well. The "8" might stand for #8 nib, which is a standard size (and quite large).

As for the one that doesn't write, it's a cartridge pen, correct? If so, unscrew the nib section from the barrel, remove any cartridge or converter, and soak the whole thing in water. Maybe a weak ammonia solution (9 parts water to 1 part household ammonia). Fountain pen ink is water soluble. Even after half a century it'll come clean if soaked long enough.

Change the water as it gets inky. You can use a bulb syringe (sold in pharmacies) to force clean water through the nib unit to speed things up. This process can take days depending on the amount of ink, so you'll need to be patient.

If it's a self-filler (that is, it has a piston or other mechanism for drawing up ink from a bottle), soak the pen nib down in water or diluted ammonia until you can get it to draw up water. Draw up water and continue soaking, expelling and refilling with clean water as the ink dissolves.

Sign up now for the next SIMS Online Lecture!

Grid as Ground: Ruled Lines and Manuscript Images

Hanna Vorholt, University of York

Friday, April 17, 2026, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EST

Open to the Public

Register at the link below

Most printed and electronic documents, like this one, show text organized along invisible horizontal and vertical lines. In medieval Europe, where the primary text technology was the manuscript, lines formed visible grids on the parchment or paper surface. Scholars have examined the resulting patterns and analysed their role in the layout of the written text. While manuscript images were frequently executed on the same ruled surfaces as the written text, their relationship to the ruling has rarely been the subject of research. Hanna Vorholt’s forthcoming book Grid as Ground provides the first sustained analysis of this topic across the wide range of image types encountered in manuscripts, from tables, maps, and diagrams, to figural imagery across different domains of learning. The lecture introduces the project and some of the opportunities this analysis presents for humanities research on lines and grids as tools for cognition, creativity, and control.

🔗: