#otto-hutt

The two of you who follow me... Thanks, one of you seems to be as annoyed by Derek Landys choices for the SP series as I am and the other shares some of my aesthetic preferences. Neither of you probably care about long rambly posts about fountain pens tho, which this post most definitively will become.

I bought some pens since my fabulous dialog 3, which still is used regularly. I bought an Otto Hutt Design 07, an Omas Paragon and spent time with my uncles Meisterstück 149. Right out of the gate: The 07 is the prettiest, the 149 the most imposing and the Paragon manages to hold the title of unreliable bitch.

Let’s go about in the order I recieved these pens.

First, I bought the Design 07 in the brass finish with transluscent black paint. It looks sleek, modern and sinister. It’s glorious and I would take it over the Silver finish everyday. The pen has a distinct German feel to it. The cap threads feel better and smoother than some bearings, it takes barely two thirds of a turn to cap and uncap and they are triple starts. With a hefty capped weight of 63g and 39 uncapped this pen doesn’t feel like the work of modern art it very much is but more like it was designed to be a melee weapon for the nuclear apocalypse. The packaging, made completely in Germany, is very impressive, too, but honestly, I can’t be bothered by it. You get a pen pouch from leatherette, a polishing cloth which you will need, a branded converter and a total of 6 ink cartridges, which I haven’t tried because the only royal blue I like is Montblancs with it’s reddish sheen and proper deep blue. The Design 07 appears to come with a number 8 JoWo 18K nib with special stamping and pretty damn perfect stamping and decoration work. I luckily have one of the older models with the companys initials instead of the logo, it just seems more fitting for this pen. The hinged clip is plenty strong enough for the pens weight, even upside down clipped to a t-shirt, no complaints. The best thing tho is the way it writes. A hint of feedback, consistent ink flow with a medium wet approach, giving you a good balance between “Fuck your ink jet paper” and “Damn this ink looks good”. I really, really like it and think it can hold its own against something like a Montblanc Meisterstück 149.

Next I bought the Omas Paragon, mainly for the glorious art deco styling. If any of my pens looks as good as my crush, this one is probably the closest. Elegant, timeless styling with near perfect scrollwork. The looks are nearly as sexy, the personality wasn’t from the get go. You see, the previous owner really didn’t clean the pen and it took me the better part of five hours just to fucking clean the feed, piston and inside and a couple days later, while loaded with Pelikan Star Ruby, the ink didn’t flow as wet anymore, so I took it apart, found a beautifully bordeaux coloured glob in the one massive ink channel in the feed (unlike most fountain pens, this pen just has one truly massive channel instead of the usual two to three smaller channels)... So I loaded it up with Graf von Faber-Castell Carbon Black and now, if I ever join a mafia, I have the perfect pen ink combination for it. The black pen with its silver accents already looks like something from a villain of the early twentieth century and with an ink as black as Carbon Black (it really is light swallowing and barely shades as it is a proper black and not a dark grey)... Damn. Got more reliable to.

Now, for my uncles Meisterstück 149. He wanted to buy me my own Meisterstück 149 for my Abitur (German A-Levels) and 18th birthday (he really is far too generous but once he puts his mind to something it is next to impossible to stop him) but since my birthday now was over a month ago and we only today are getting around to making that a reality I got to spend some time with his 149 and damn... It’s 14K M nib really has slightly to slim of a line for a pen of this immense size, but it writes like a dream. It even looks better than the modern Montblanc nibs with only the outside gold and the rest plated in either rhodium or platinum. Maybe I’ll post pictures of it later comparing it to a modern 149 nib.

He also said he had Montblanc Royal Blue in it and I was like “Are you serious? Royal blue is a crime against humanity with its meager saturation” but not Montblancs. It is every bit as deep as I could have whished, really a rather nicely saturated blue with a spectacular hue and nice red sheen when applied wet enough. It and iroshizuku ajisai are my favourite blues. Both are undoubtebly blue but while ajisai seems a bit like ice, Montblancs approach appears to be a more of a welcoming blue with a warmer feel. My next love letter just has to be written in Montblanc Royal Blue and I will buy my own bottle of it, though I am not sure which Royal Blue it is. The packaging looks more like the one of my Irish Green bottle (a gorgeous green, really reminding me of my Ireland vacation and the green grasslands, woods and everything there) but its Ident- Nr is 105192. I can highly recommend it. If every royal blue was this good, I’d never have branched out my ink collection. Would have saved me around 300€.

Edit: Apparantly Montblanc just changed their ink flask packaging in the quite distant past and I recieved a bottle with older packaging. Still very sexy Irish green and Royal Blue

And lastly, my adventure with Graf von Faber-Castell Carbon Black and Cobalt Blue. I recently ordered some Carbon Black of penoblo.de, a small German online specialty retailer, which in no way shape or form know of this post and hopefully never will. I recieved a bottle of what I thought was Cobalt Blue since both packaging and bottle stated so. I called them up, was greeted very kindly and promised a replacement, then chatted for a couple minutes about fountain pens. It is so nice to speak to someone even more passionate than I am about this hobby... The replacement arrived the next day and I didn’t recieve a retourn label, so I was like “I am going to try Cobalt Blue” and was greeted by a pit of a black which would make Lord Viles amour seem gray. So, naturally, I ordered a bottle of Cobalt Blue and recieved another bottle of Carbon Black dressed as Cobalt Blue, called them again, spoke to Mr. Butul again and yeah, it seems that Graf made a mistake with labelling sometime ago and not every faulty bottle was properly sent back to Nürnberg. Really, this is the kind of transparency I want to see and this experience just proves Anthonys of ukfountainpens statement: “Customers (generally) accept that mistakes happen; if you step up and solve the problem, they can actually be happier with their overall experience than if no problem had happened in the first place.“ I am frankly flattered by the amount of service and to every German reading this I can wholeheartedly recommend penoblo. I look forward to recieving my correct Cobalt Blue now more than ever and I will be happy to send the incorrectly labelled ones back. If I don’t have to send them , I will be sure to find myself a local addict for them because I will not need 225ml of black ink in the next few years. I can highly recommend it for more sensitive fountain pens and lovers of deep and dark secrets.