The Well-Appointed Desk

Oh, what could be inside this glossy black box?

None other than the Pilot Prera fountain pen with F nib and in the most lovely shade of lime green, of course. I’m hoping this will satisfy my lust for a lime green pen and that I won’t feel the need to buy the apple green Lamy as well. I’ve been itching to try this pen ever since Brad and Myke started waxing romantic about it on the Pen Addict podcast. So, I finally gave in and bought one. This is just a quick overview. I plan to do a longer, more detailed review next week but I just had to share.

The packaging is unremarkable. Just a plexi box with a beige flocked insert and a fabric elastic band to hold the pen in place. The ink cartridge was just stuffed into the box on top of the pen. For a $50 pen, I wasn’t expecting much. It did come with one black ink cartridge. Somewhere in my pen mess, I believe I have a Pilot converter that I hope will work with it as I prefer to use cartridges only as emergency back-up ink supplies and not as my primary option.

The cap snaps into place, its not a screw closure like some of my other pens. I would compare it to the Lamy Safari/Studio capping mechanism. The Prera snaps fairly tightly but might be an issue if you tuck your pen in your shirt pocket and pull it out from the cap. It’s not an issue for me but I thought I’d mention it.

I loaded it with the stock Pilot cartridge that shipped with the pen and started writing with what I had on hand — a budget composition notebook from a big box office supply store. It is a supremely fine nib. On first touch to the paper it performed so smoothly I wanted to compare it to a gel roller ball which is fairly impressive for a fountain pen at this price point. I wrote a few letters with it last night and discovered that the nib is so fine it is not a good option for more textured, toothy paper stocks. This is a pen that may perform admirably well on Moleskines and other lightweight stocks (with the right inks).

The Prera is only about an inch longer than the Kaweco Classic so its still a good portable pen. Its a big weightier but for a lot of people, the Kaweco is just too lightweight for doing a lot of writing so this may be an appropriate step up.

Expect a more detailed review next week!