The Well-Appointed Desk

Continuing the Papier Plume ink obsession, today’s review is the Streetcar Green from the New Orleans collection as well. I purchased this in the same batch with the Sazerac from yesterday. And while I had been given a big thumb’s up from Brad about the Sazerac, I bought the Streetcar Green sight unseen. Now, I love green inks and I have a soft spot for all things vintage and I love of New Orleans so I was willing to take the $8 gamble.

The color is one of the most unusual shades of green I’ve gotten. Its sort of a deep evergreen but was not like any color I had. It definitely reminded me of the color of the leather seats on an old streetcar. The one odd thing I noticed was how dingy the color looked when wet. It seemed to brighten and look cleaner as it dried. It was the strangest phenomena I’ve seen in an ink. So, don’t be fooled if you see the ink wet. It looks rather lusterless wet but it has a lovely appearance when dry.

I had very few greens in my stash that looked even close in color to Streetcar Green. Oddly, DeAtramentis Document Green and DeAtramentis Cement Grey were the closest in hue and neither I would have thought would be even close. I would think something like Diamine Evergreen might be close but I don’t actually own it so I couldn’t do a side-by-side comparison.

I found a few other comparable ink colors on the Anderson Pens Ink Comparison tool:

Pricewise, I think the Papier Plume Streetcar Green is as good a value as any of the other options and it dries fairly quickly. It shades nicely too.

After recording the Gift Guide episode of the Pen Addict podcast, I fell victim to our own enabling and bought some of the Papier Plume Sazerac ink. See? We are even dangerous to each other!

Sazerac is part of their New Orleans themed ink collection and being a cocktail connoisseur, I couldn’t resist trying a bottle.

The color is a warm, vivid orange reminiscent of the color of a Sazerac cocktail viewed in the glass. There are lots of interpretations of the recipe but all are variations of rye whiskey, Peychaud’s Bitters, a twist of lemon and the glass is coated with absinthe. Some recipes add a little simple syrup or sugar and the original recipes included cognac. No matter how you drink it, you’ll agree that Papier Plume’s Sazerac ink is a pretty close color match.

The ink shades nicely and has lovely variation. My biggest issue was that the ink was much lighter wet than dry making it a little difficult to write with in some light.

For color comparison, Sazerac is warmer, more whiskey-like than Noodler’s Summer Tanager ad Dragon Napalm. Sazerac was also a bit warmer and richer than the new Sailor Kin-Mokusei which is a very bright, sunny orange. Sazerac is more on the orange side of the spectrum than Fuyugaki and the now-discontinued Sailor Jentle Apricot which are both more red.

Overall, at a mere $8 per bottle, the Papier Plume inks are definitely worth the investment. I like the wax seal cap though it did make closing the bottle a bit more challenging. I would, however, be willing to pay a dollar or two more per bottle for a nicer label.