The Nib & Ledger

A slow-living guide to the art of the inked line.

Recent Posts

• The Maintenance Paradox: Why Your "No-Buy Year" Requires You to Become a Technician — The "No-Buy Year" movement is spreading, but nobody talks about the real cost: you're about to become a technician. Here's what that actually means.
• The Secondary Market Inversion: Why Your Grandfather's Pen Is Now Worth More Than the New One Next to It — Tariffs have inverted the fountain pen market. New pens are now expensive and risky. Secondary market pens are cheaper and lower-risk. Here's what that means for your buying strategy—and the future of repair.
• The Tariff Tax: Why Your $30 "Entry-Level" Pen Just Became $45 — The average U.S. tariff rate on imports jumped from 2.6% to 13% in 2025. For fountain pens, that means a $30 entry-level pen now costs $45. Here's what changed, and why the repair-over-replacement ethos just became mandatory.
• The QC Lie: Why Your $500 Pen Arrives Broken and Your $30 Metropolitan Doesn't — Why your $500 pen arrives broken and your $30 Pilot Metropolitan doesn't. A technical breakdown of manufacturer QC, the inspection protocol every pen buyer needs, and why price is not a proxy for quality.
• When Smooth Becomes Silent: The Baby's Bottom Problem and the Lost Art of Feedback — An over-polished nib isn't luxury—it's a defect. Julian Vance explains "baby's bottom," why smoothness has become a manufacturing failure, and how to identify (and fix) a nib that skips when it should sing.
• The Weight of the First Bottle: Why Your 'No-Buy Year' Might Be the Most Expensive Thing You Do — The 'No-Buy Year' movement and the 'First Iroshizuku' posts aren't opposing forces—they're the same impulse of readiness, observed at different stages of the journey.
• The Noble Scratch: Why I Tune My Nibs to Sing, Not Whisper — In a world obsessed with glass-smooth nibs, I'm here to make a heretical claim: feedback is not a flaw. It's the heartbeat of the instrument. A deep dive into the physics of the "baby's bottom" problem and why I intentionally tune my nibs to sing, not whisper.