Edson

After all the writ­ing I did about the pens I do have, how about a lit­tle voy­age into fantasy?

This is the Water­man Edson Black Dia­mond. It has an 18 karat gold nib, which means it’s the sort of pen you don’t lend to a friend. Not because your friends are untrust­wor­thy, but because the gold is soft and over time will be shaped to match the way you hold your pen. Every­one holds their pen a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent­ly, uses dif­fer­ent kinds of strokes to write let­ters and words. So some­one else hold­ing your pen with their angles and their moves is just gonna mess up your well-worn mojo.

The cap is plat­inum-accent­ed sol­id sil­ver. Usu­al­ly I’m not so impressed by rare met­als on the out­side of a pen where they don’t serve a func­tion, but hey: plat­inum! I like plat­inum. Who does­n’t like plat­inum? I’ve got a few U.S. Sil­ver Eagles in my coin col­lec­tion, and I like the idea of adding some Plat­inum Eagles to the col­lec­tion. That’s a real invest­ment and one I can’t afford, but I’m just say­ing. I like platinum.

The Edson is designed with an ink flow reg­u­la­tor which deliv­ers a steady amount of ink, even in envi­ron­ments with var­ied pres­sure. It’s impor­tant not to get ink all over the place, and more­over not to have the ink­flow stop in the mid­dle of a sentence.

The design is stun­ning. I real­ly like the sym­me­try cre­at­ed by the clip and the nib. I’ve seen the «Sap­phire Blue» mod­el and am not as impressed. Of course, I’d want to hold it in my hand and prefer­ably have a half hour or so to get a feel for it before shelling out mon­ey for a pen like this. Frankly, from a mar­ket­ing per­spec­tive it’s the sort of pen that peo­ple col­lect, not write with. Water­man makes great pens though — every pen I’ve giv­en as a gift has been a Water­man. I won’t go near the Mont­blancs and their ilk. I hate to see gold slapped on to the same old flawed design. I should­n’t crit­i­cize too much, of course. All foun­tain pens are basi­cal­ly of archa­ic design. Nev­er­the­less, some man­u­fac­tur­ers actu­al­ly design pens, while some rely on name recog­ni­tion and pre­cious met­als to sell. Water­man is owned by the same huge con­glom­er­ate that owns Park­er and Rotring. Both of those oth­ers expe­ri­enced some loss of qual­i­ty after being absorbed, but both have recov­ered to a lev­el of excel­lence and auton­o­my that seems to say com­pli­men­ta­ry things about their cor­po­rate overlords.

The Edson line is named after the Water­man com­pa­ny’s founder, Lewis Edson Water­man. The guy did­n’t exact­ly invent the foun­tain pen, but he did sig­nif­i­cant­ly improve the design.

It’s (heh heh) only a thou­sand bucks. Sev­en hun­dred from dis­count resellers. Accord­ing to the announce­ment it’s being released on Sunday.