Taiwan 2024: In-house inks and Crescent nib grind
My trip to Taiwan this year was not focused on stationery, but I’ve still ended up with some interesting finds.
First was this Tsutaya exclusive blue and yellow Pentel Smash which I got from the store at Songshan–of course I had to add a visit here onto my trip to Raohe night market. (I made a post before about places you can check for stationery while out and about in Taipei.)
With the Mogulair. I think their colours match nicely.
I said when I reviewed the Pilot Mogulair that I wouldn’t buy any more mechanical pencils without lead guard mechanisms, but I was so captivated by the quirky design and, yes, the name ‘Smash’ that I decided to risk this one. I haven’t had any issues with lead breakage so far. Maybe I have a lighter hand these days or maybe it is thanks to the Smash’s long lead sleeve. Hopefully this does not usher in a new era of me collecting mechanical pencils…
Later, I had a free day and decided to visit Juspirit and Molly Lifestyle, two of my favourite stationery focused shops in Taipei.
This time I picked out some inks produced by the stores themselves. At Molly Lifestyle it was Boshoku which is a colour changing ink whose final shade varies between brown and purple depending on paper, like some of the Sailor Yurameku inks. At Juspirit it was Ink Institute Lucky Bunny 2024 LE (a black with green undertone) and Cat at Noon (a pastel orange/pink shader). Ink Institute is sold internationally.
The label on Boshoku is handwritten and that sticker is coloured with the ink itself.
Lucky Bunny was an unplanned purchase after the shopkeeper showed me how well it performs on uncoated paper, but Cat at Noon was not. I had been wanting to try an ink from the Cats Daily line for a while, and I wanted a dramatic shader to show off my new, extremely broad and wet fountain pen.
Yes, I bought a pen! The Fine Writing International Fenestro in demonstrator silver. I had been planning to get this one for maybe two years now; I was drawn to details in the design like the combination of matte and polished transparent acrylic, the charmingly superfluous ink window, and the knurled metal in the end of the cap. I had also been wanting a pen with a swappable nib so I could try different grinds, and the Fenestro comes with a #6 Jowo nib unit.
With a Sailor PGS and Pilot Kakuno for scale. I was pleasantly surprised by how big the Fenestro is in person.
In fact, the nib on this pen has already been swapped out. This is why I chose to buy the pen now: when I visited the Juspirit store I got to try out their in-house ‘Crescent’ nib grind and they were offering a discount to swap one in when buying in person.
The Crescent nib is similar to Sailor’s Naginata, having a large triangular foot, but rounder and more forgiving of different writing angles. It reminds me of writing with a very wet and smooth felt tip marker. (Felt tip marker is also what I said about my Sailor PGS but this one does not have the same felt-tip-like feedback of a Sailor–I’m only talking about the nib shape here.)
One piece of stationery I did not buy on my trip but am still thinking about for some reason: a novelty ballpoint with a retractable ceramic craft knife on the back end, from the Yingge Ceramics Museum gift shop.
How about you? Have you bought any stationery on your travels recently?