Fountain Pen Companion

Do you have a way to keep your inks organized?

Inside the world of fountain pens, there are several areas for people to focus. Some people concentrate on vintage pens, others love unique filling systems, and the list goes on. Personally, my favorite fountain pen focus is ink.

I first became interested in fountain pens when I saw the vast number of ink colors that are available. This interest soon became an obsession and I currently have too many inks (bottles, samples, cartridges) to keep track of without help. I fell back on a spreadsheet to keep track of my growing collection, but it wasn’t exactly useful other than a place I could look up ink to see if I already owned a sample before purchasing another!

Then the Fountain Pen Companion was created. Urban Hafner, a fountain pen person located in Germany, took on the challenge of ink tracking and created an online database where users can enter their inks, track them, and visualize their collections.

Over time, Urban has refined Fountain Pen Companion (or FPC) to include additional features including a friendlier ink entry screen, the ability to compare your ink collection to that of another user, an ink visualization tool, and plenty more.

The visuals don’t end with ink colors. Below is a chart of ink brands by volume.

I can’t talk about Fountain Pen Companion without also mentioning the Leader board. This is a board tracking the top 10 individuals in several areas like number of samples or total number of inks. This is a fun way to feel more in touch with fellow fountain pen people and ink collectors along with the community section and blog. Fountain pen ink reviews have recently been added to help with those new ink acquisitions.

Since this database came from the work of a single individual, I encourage people to think about supporting Urban’s work on his Patreon page. FPC lives on a server that Urban pays for, supports, and maintains.

One last feature I would like to point out – the Fountain Pen Companion has a mascot! The Fountain Pen Capybara was designed by Angela He (InkyConverters) and can be viewed on the FPC blog or on Angela’s Etsy shop (although it is temporarily closed until August).

As a side note, I am not affiliated with Fountain Pen Companion – I’m only a supporter and an avid user who thinks this is an amazing way to keep track of fountain pen ink. If you use FPC, leave a note or send a quick message of thanks to Urban!