With the number of pens in my collection growing substantially over the last few years, I’ve put them all together in an Airtable database as an attempt to keep them in some sort of order. Although the database is far from complete, and will perhaps be the subject of a post in its own right — my thoughts came around to the blog and how things are organised in terms of the pens and reviews I’ve put up so far.

I’ve decided on at least creating a basic pen index list for the blog, which will hopefully provide readers with a general idea of where I’m coming from as far as my fountain pen thoughts and opinions are concerned, along with a simple index with links to the posts I’ve managed to get around to writing so far.

Looking at the list, I feel incredibly fortunate to have the pen collection I have, which was largely brought about by a very kind and generous friend downsizing his own collection at about the same time. Although I’ve thanked him many times, it is a generosity that I will never be able to fully repay.

There are certainly some pens in the list I find myself coming back to, filling, and using more often, though at the current time I’m not ready to either put them in rank order or into a best/top type list. Perhaps that might come at some point in the future.

At the current time I’ve also limited things to fountain pens, having not decided on the exact nature of how I might include other types of pens I own without the index becoming a little too all-encompassing and unwieldy. I also debated on whether to include budget pens such as the Pilot Petit1 and Platinum Preppy, however having written a post on the Petit1, the decision was made to include them as well. After all, there are some solid pens at this end of the market, particularly at the price point they sell for.

If you’d like to take a look at the index, it is sitting under the Analogue Tools category of the site’s menu, or click the following link:

Current Pen Index

As I’ve mentioned, the list contains links to posts I’ve written on some of the pens. If you are looking for other reviews around the web, the best place to start is the magnificent Pennaquod pen blog search site run and maintained by Ian Hedley, of Pens! Paper! Pencils!

And the Airtable database I mentioned in the introduction above? That’s not a database — check out the one David Brennan of Too Many Inks uses for his pen and ink rotation. Now that’s a database.

In closing, I do hope to slowly get around to transforming more of the index to links, however of course that means finding time to write the posts.

I’m sure I’ll get there — eventually.