BBC: Why are fountain pen sales rising?

*goes into hipster mode* I liked fountain pens before it got cool again *end hipster mode*.

This is an interesting article, though I think that the BBC is wrong in their assertion that people are buying fountain pens as accessories rather than a working tool. To be sure, there are people buying ridiculously expensive Mont Blanc pens as accessories and status symbols rather than as tools, but a lot of people, myself included, are buying fountain pens because they’re the more pleasant workhorse of the handwriting world. For short notes, ballpoint pens are fine, but for handwriting pages of text, a fountain pen is simply nicer to hold and nicer to write with.

A lot of the people who are buying fountain pens now are also major techie gadget types who are using electronics for most of the tasks that people would have used a ballpoint pen or pencil and scrap paper for in the past. If you’re going to be writing something by hand in that environment, you want your writing instruments to be as nice as your expensive top-of-the-line gadgets and a nice fountain pen has a better form and function factor than a cheapo ballpoint. Not to mention that when people are used to spending a few hundred bucks every couple of years on a phone, it’s not that big of a deal to spend up to that much on a writing instrument that you’re intending to own for the rest of your life.