But they’re the flagship, the ambassador, the ones that most purely express their purpose. There are plenty of them knocking around. They’re not automatically the most expensive products in their brand’s lineup, the fanciest or the rarest. They may have pioneered a new aesthetic or defined a category. These are well-known, well-respected designs that have been available for a long time nearly unchanged: to me, they’re timeless. Into this category I put the Montblanc 149, Lamy 2000, Pilot Capless and Visconti Homo Sapiens.

So I dug in a little bit more and started to notice my ‘keepers’ falling into three clusters, with relatively little overlap and some repeatability. My collection isn’t all super-high-end pens that you have to handle with white gloves. In the past I’ve put it down to, basically, snobbery: anything ‘affordable’ and steel-nibbed goes in a second tray or gets sold.īut that’s not quite it. It’s a great pen, pretty, well built, reliable and easy to use, comfortable, and sold by a company that I think engages wonderfully with its communities (eg through its specialist nib offers, and artisan resins).īut no matter how much I like pens such as the Estie, they somehow don’t (so far) stick in my collection long term. The latest example, which is staring me in the face, is the Esterbrook Estie: a pen that I enthuse about regularly. I basically wanted to answer the question why don’t I hang on to wonderful midrange or mainstream pens? I have a new one for you today, one that has been nagging at me for a while. It’s resulted in scoring methodologies and taxonomies aplenty. Regular readers will know that I spend a lot of my collecting energy trying to spot patterns in my own behaviour, interrogating why I buy, keep and sell the pens I do.

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