Comment by Pinus
2 days ago
Handwriting seems to be becoming more and more of a niche phenomenon, actually paying attention to what one writes with even more so, and actually using fountain pens yet more so. Still, there seems to be an absurd number of ink makers around, producing an absurd number of inks. I suppose dyes and water are relatively cheap, and can be mixed in buckets...
A good number of the inks are because of artists, hence the wide variety of colors including colors which are not particularly useful for writing. The water based inks used in fountain pens are the primary inks for pen and ink drawing because they allow all of the classic techniques like washes and water brushes which do not work with other sorts of inks. Many of the makers of these inks have started to exploit the fountain pen fad to expand their market.
> A good number of the inks are because of artists
I actually think you have it backwards. Hobbyists drive the economics of almost all gear used for creative pursuits. For every artist making meaningful objects and sharing them with the world, there are a 100 dabblers who fantasize about being that, buy a bunch of stuff, but never really use it.
This is a strange but ultimately harmonious economic arrangement. Hobbyists increase scale, which helps gear producers lower costs, which benefit actual artists.
I did not say "professional artists," I said "artists" which includes the dabblers with the dreams of becoming professional artists but does not include pen collectors with a cabinet full of ink whose lifetime of ink purchases might reach the yearly ink purchase of anyone remotely serious about their art.
As a person who writes a lot, "seems" is the important word here.
In IT circles, computers and tablets are the most coveted tools for note taking due to processing flexibility it provides, but while less visible, writing is there, evolving.
From personal experience, writing with pen and paper unlocks a different mode in brain. Personally, I can concentrate better, think deeper and clearer, hence I work with pen and paper a lot, incl. software/architecture/algorithm design, free-form thinking while working on other things. I keep "lab notebooks" for software I develop. I also keep a hand-written diary, which again feels and affects very differently when compared to writing to a text document on screen.
There's another sub-culture who writes for the sake of writing (people generally transcribe books by hand). I don't judge them, but that's not my taste.
Some writing inks are very cheap (Pelikan 4001 / Lamy Standard / Parker / Waterman comes to my mind), but some pigments and dyes are very expensive and inks are produced in limited quantities. Companies like Noodler's produce very interesting chemistries and try to keep their costs low to provide the most ink for the buck, but they also make some exotic inks. It's not uncommon to ask a producer why an ink is not produced anymore, and getting "they don't make the dyes anymore, we got their all stock they produced for the last couple of years" as an answer.
So, tl;dr: Writing has evolved, but it's not going anywhere soon. Some of us are writing a ton, with purpose and intent. And no, some inks are not cheap, but "standard issue" inks are optimized for cost and performance, and they are very good inks, indeed.
If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer.
I think hand-writing is gone already, save a few hipsters who like it more for the calm and repetitiveness than because they actually need to write what they are writing.
I can write 20x faster with a keyboard and I won't have cramps after a few minutes. And I don't think painful hands are a prerequisite for deep thought.
I'll kindly disagree here, because I both type and write a lot. Yes, typing is faster than writing, but that's not the point of writing.
Writing's speed and correction limits makes me think and filter before I actually write. This allows me to form clearer thoughts in less time. I arrive to a better place, faster.
Also, neither writing nor typing cramps my hands, and I do both of them for hours if I need to. That's interesting.
I'm slowly collecting research focusing on differences on typing and writing, but the landscape is barren. I'll publish a list when I have sufficient resources at hand.
How would you know?
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