Seems the new Dark Lilac ink lacks the luster of the original. Honestly, is nothing sacred?
Do you hand-write thank you notes to your plumber? Do you have a “personal suite” of stationery in watermarked cream from Smythson of Bond Street? Would you get more excited about a shopping spree at Staples than Bergdorf Goodman? Do you own more than one palladium nib? Would you spend $625 on a Parker Duofold? Do you even know what a Parker Duofold is?
Then listen up, scripto-nerds, this one’s for you.
Because there is trouble brewing in that wacky, bare-fisted world of fountain pen ink.
It all started in 2016 when a German company named Lamy introduced a rich, luxurious ink called Dark Lilac. Different inks, I take it, can be introduced to a writing instrument through various delivery systems to produce a final result, and the whole process strikes me as vaping for the literate.
The fact that there is a contingent in this country that spends its days breathlessly anticipating new pen ink the way Taylor Swift fans wait for a new album to drop gives me a vague and increasingly infrequent sense of hope for our nation.
Fountain pens are also making a bit of a comeback in a digital world that has conjured up a nostalgia for components of the analog world, like vinyl phonographic albums, wind-up watches and Martha Stewart.
Dark Lilac, according to The New York Times, was “a lush purple with a golden sheen” that caused widespread swooning in the world of fountain pen users, who thought it was the most beautiful thing they had seen since the Stutz Bearcat.
But like the McRib, Dark Lilac was only here for a limited time. I don’t know how that works in the world of upscale pens. Maybe there are ink hoarders, or maybe they just write a lot more letters while the ink is still available to the deep envy of the recipients. I have Dark Lilac, what have you got?
Since you asked, I exclusively use those Bic pens with the clear shaft and blue cap that sold for 19 cents when I was a kid and don’t cost a lot more now. They’re cheap, silky smooth and throw out a river of legible ink. So of course they’ve been discontinued.
Often you can still find them on dusty shelves of low-traffic, old-fashioned grocery stores with the automatic doors that open in and aren’t wide enough to accommodate modern supermarket carts that are roughly the size of World War II battleships. I’ve squirreled away enough packs to last me until I reach the age of an average American presidential candidate.
Lovers of Dark Lilac did the same, and $12 vials of ink were going for $300 on the black market. I don’t know how you go about scoring an ounce of fountain pen ink. I guess you ooze up to some guy in a tweed jacket on Boylston Street in Boston.
“You looking for anything man?”
“I might be. Got any Dark Lilac?”
“Maybe. Cost you $300 a hit.”
“Must be good ink, man.”
But then, like the McRib, Dark Lilac was back. Except it wasn’t.
“Its reappearance a couple of weeks ago was so unexpected that the fountain pen community, which makes up a small but passionate corner of the office supplies market, was agog,” wrote The New York Times. “There was just one problem: It was not the same color.”
Well, timeout: To you and me it looks like the same color, but not to those eagle-eye ink junkies.
“The lucky few who got their hands on the new Dark Lilac were dismayed that, once they put pen to paper, the ink was not quite the same as the original,” says the Times. “The base color, according to an early YouTube review, was neither as blue nor as rich. The sheen was green instead of gold.”
Bummer.
It’s not my fight, though. A world where people take to YouTube to parse fountain pen ink is too complex for me to keep up with.
Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
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This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Psst … know where I can score some Dark Lilac fountain pen ink?
