I’m starting to build up a bit of collection of fountain pen ink, and I’ve not been doing my duty in telling you all about it. Time for that to change!
I admit I’d set my fountain pens aside for a little while. I hadn’t been keeping them properly clean, and I’d just been so busy that I hadn’t bothered. But I got a little Christmas money and decided to spend it on something that had been on my wish list for quite some time: Heart of Darkness by Noodler’s.
Now, I didn’t just go and buy any regular 3 ounce bottle. No, I sprung for the 4.5 ounce bottle that comes with a free pen! Yay!
The first thing I noticed when I opened the box is that this is one massive bottle of ink. I’ll go through an awful lot of character development and plot rearranging before I ever run out.
The second thing I noticed was that the pen had no cartridge converter. I looked at for a full five minutes, taking it apart and putting it back together again (thinking at first that it was missing some pieces), before I figured it out. The Charlie pen by Noodler’s does not, in fact, have a cartridge converter nor does it need one. The ink is allowed to slosh around freely in the pen tube. A small canal cut into the side of the feed lets the ink flow down to the nib. This seems very efficient to me, since no ink is wasted inside a converter. It’s also a lot of fun to tip the pen back and forth and watch the ink when you should be writing.
As for the ink itself, the name does a good job of describing it. This is a truly black ink, and one that is very satisfying to write with. There are no delicate color fluctuations to write about this time; it’s simply black. It’s a great ink for striking out your To Do list.
Ashley O'Melia, Author 