Editing The Pen Addict 400/transcript (section)

== Introduction to Types of Pens ==


'''Myke Hurley:''' I think that is absolutely perfect. All right. All right. So what we're going to do here, I'm going to fire out some phrases to you and you can help explain them to our audience. How does that sound? Sounds great. So let's start off with like your typical pens, the pens that you're going to have the most access to, the stuff that you're going to find in your local staples, your local WH Smiths. Let's start with like ballpoints and rollerballs, actually. Let's talk about these together because I think it's important because a lot of people, including me, gets these two confused all the time. What is a ballpoint? What is a rollerball? What makes them different? What makes them similar?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' To this day, these terms get interchanged. Sometimes accurately, sometimes inaccurately. The overarching issue is that nearly all standard pens have a ball in the tip of the pen, which is how the ink transfers from the ink cartridge within the pen to the page. There's a little ball on the tip. So people will refer to this type of pen as a ball point, but that doesn't mean it's a ballpoint pen. Ballpoint pen refers to an ink type. A ballpoint ink is an oil-based ink. This is your most basic, most common type of ink you find in the pens you find at the bank, at the school. The most basic, it's a very dry ink. It's usually just in blue or black. Sometimes you'll get a red in there. And sometimes if they're not a good quality ballpoint, they'll be sticky or a little bit messy when you write. But the good thing about them is that they write anywhere on all types of paper. Like paper type doesn't matter. The ballpoint pen is going to write. You know, the situation you're writing in, the ballpoint pen is going to write. Think of your standard bit crystal ballpoint or your paper mate click ballpoints or your paper mate stick ballpoints, I should say. Anyway, this is the most basic, standard, generic pen. It usually has a ballpoint ink in it.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' These days, ballpoints have improved in their ink technology. You know, back in the day, you used to be able to smell a ballpoint ink when you wrote with it. It had this weird kind of not really attractive smell. And nowadays, you don't really get that anymore. You get lines that are a little bit cleaner. You get fancier types of inks and ballpoint pens. You can get them in new colors. But that's at its most basic, the ballpoint pen. The difference between that and a rollerball is nothing physical. It's just the ink. It's still a ball tip pen. But rollerball inks are a liquid ink. It's not an oil-based ink. So rollerball inks tend to go on a little bit thicker. They are generally darker, especially colors like black and blue. They're going to be darker in color than your ballpoint ink. But being a liquid ink, they're also prone to performing worse. So take your standard office paper, whether it's your copy paper, your legal pad. This is the black ink that soaks into the page. That's what the rollerball ink does. It has to be done right. Like the most famous, the most popular rollerball, I think, is the Pilot Precise V5. It's also the Uniball Vision. It's also another good quality rollerball. And we'll get into some more specific rollerball types later as we talk about this. But that's the primary difference between ballpoint and rollerball is really just ink. And that's what you're going to find in all of these types of categories. So ballpoints are an oil-based ink. They're generally pretty dry. They can be pretty messy. They're not very dark. Rollerball inks are wet and dark. But if you find a good one and you have good paper to write on, people really enjoy writing with rollerball pens.

'''Myke Hurley:''' And there are these types of pens. We use them, right? All the time. Yep. Because they can be really great and useful. And also, sometimes fountain pens are not acceptable. Filling out forms, that kind of stuff, right? Right.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' You can't do that.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Okay. So we've established then that the rollerball's ballpoint is very similar, but just with some slight differences around ink. What is a gel pen then?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, the gel pen's the newcomer to the pen game, if you will. I think it started like in the 1980s. I think Secura was the first one to make a gel ink pen. And what it tried to do was make a better rollerball type ink. So this is a pigment. The refill is a pigment in a gel suspension. So what this does is it thickens the ink. It makes it not as liquidy. It makes it even darker than rollerball inks. And when you write with a gel pen on that same office paper, the ink generally sits on top of the page. It doesn't get into the fibers of the paper like a rollerball. So therefore, it doesn't bleed or feather or spread out on your page. It takes a little bit longer to dry because of that. But in general, it's the smoothest, most color accurate, you know, deepest, richest colors that you'll find in ink pens and probably the most variety of colors because of the way the gel ink is manufactured. They are able to process, you know, dozens and dozens of different color types, which is something that I enjoy in a pen.

'''Myke Hurley:''' You can also get sparkly ones, too.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' You can get sparkly ones. You can get a really neat white gel pen that, you know, you can use for artwork. The gel pens, I don't think, you know, worldwide they sell the most, but they're the most enjoyable pens to use. They're just more expensive than ballpoints generally. So ballpoints are always going to sell the most just because you can buy them in bulk for cheap for, you know, different office type situations and bulk situations. But the gel pen is the pen that once people discover, that's the one that usually says, oh, I like how this one writes. I will keep this one.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, I was just about to say that, like, when somebody, you know, if you use a gel pen and you really like it, like a gel pen can be a thing that helps you discover that you like pens.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, I should say, like, the great example of this is the Pilot G2. Right. That's the world's most popular gel ink pen. And if you've ever used a G2, people who have never used a good pen, when they pick up a G2, they go, oh, I get it.

'''Myke Hurley:''' They know something's different. And, like, you go back far enough in this show and you will find, like, our conversations about the Pilot G2 because it was my pen that I was using when we started this show. Because it was like, oh, I love this pen. It's a great pen. And it is a great pen. It's one of my favorites of all time. I don't use it anymore, but I love it. But the refill as well is fantastic. And people use these refills in pens that are made of, like, different materials. So you can swap the refill out and put it in something that maybe has a fancier-looking body. Right. Exactly. But there are other refills, right, that are very frequently used and referred to on this show. Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. So we use one of the ones we refer to as a Parker-type refill. And that's from the Parker Pen Company. They made a very popular pen called the Parker Jotter, which was their retractable ballpoint pen. And the refill had a particular shape. And they just made, you know, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of these pens since, like, the 50s, 60s. I don't know, they might have even been before then. And that refill just became kind of the refill you used. And therefore, a lot of other companies built products around that shape of refill. The Pilot G2 became the modern version of that Parker refill. It's a different shape. It's a different size. And it's a different ink type. But it was so good and so popular that people started making things for just that refill. Those two refills are not the same shape. And to confuse things, the international refill market refers to the Parker-sized refill as the G2. So we'll see. We'll save that conversation for another day. But those are two completely different refills. But those are probably the two most popular refills on the market. The third one, at least in our world, the one that we talk about a lot is a rollerball refill. So this is interesting. These three refill types. The Parker refill is generally a ballpoint. They do make gel, but it's generally a ballpoint refill. The Pilot G2 refill is a gel. And then the Schmidt P8127 and the P8126 is a rollerball. It's a liquid ink refill. But it has become famous, at least in our world, because it's a quality ink that does not bleed like most lower-end rollerball types of pens do.

'''Myke Hurley:''' But these are basically the three best in their class. And that's why you will see these pens, these refills, I should say, used a lot in Kickstarter campaigns. So people that are creating a fancy pen body that they want people to buy, they will typically gravitate around one of these three. Yes. As kind of like, this is what we're going to base our pen on. Because then we know people are going to be able to easily get their hands on the refill. We don't have to go straight back to the drawing board. And then they also are basing it around some kind of standard which people can get their hands on.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yes. And also, these are the types of refills that other companies will make and mimic and copy. And so there's just tons of options in these three refill types.

'''Myke Hurley:''' But once you've got your pen sorted out, you need something to write on. And that's paper.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So you've got a few different things around paper. One is the type of paper that you're using. And then you also have the size or the format. Format can be, you know, like, do you want ring bound? Do you want it to be... My favorite is stitched, which means stapled, which is one of the funniest things to me. Uh-huh. Because stitches and staples. But then you can actually get books that are stitched together with thread. And that's like a whole different thing. It's very funny. But the sizes are also really important. So you've got A4, A5, A3, that kind of thing. What's the deal there, Brad?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Out of all the things we discuss, and as technical as something like a fountain pen can be, I think paper is the single hardest thing to discuss clearly and give people a great idea of what we're talking about because there's so much variance. One of the things that I have talked about in these past 399 episodes is I believe in paper standards. I want to know what size paper I'm getting based on international standards. And we'll have a link in the show notes. And the best thing I can tell you for paper is go look at some of the links we put in the show notes. The A size paper is based on a one gigantic sheet of paper from the printing world that is 1189 millimeters by 841 millimeters. That's A0. That's the big piece of paper that comes shipped into a printing factory on a pallet, right? It's a big, huge piece of paper. Every A size after A0 is exactly half of the previous size before it. So you take an A0 sheet, you fold it in half, you now have an A1 dimension. You take an A1 dimension, fold it in half, you now have A2. So this gets down into the reasonable usage size, which for most people who would listen to a podcast about pens, the biggest size they generally will go with is called A4. That's, if you're not familiar with paper sizes, this is going to be ballpark around your copy paper size, like the 8.5 by 11 inch.

'''Myke Hurley:''' A4 is the type of paper that most people have had the most experience with. Yes. Because it's also incredibly close to, not exactly to, but close to both letter and legal. Yes. Pretty much they look the same when you look at them, even if there are some slight differences. But those are kind of, that is like your standard paper format size.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. So I think everything, well, I won't say everything. The majority of things that most people use in the stationary world revolve around the A4 size and then half of that, which is the A5 size, right? So the A4 is your full pad size and the A5 is kind of your half pad size that you see. A5 is basically the sweet spot. Yes. I think. A spot, A5, A spot. That's a new, that's a new term. That's not in the glossary. A5, A5 is kind of your desk pad, but it's not too big to where you just can't throw it in your bag or backpack to have on the go. It's a great note size.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Journals, diaries, typically around this size.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Your hardback journals that you see, like if you see a Leuchtturm at Barnes & Noble, that's an A5 size. Or a Moleskine. Or a Moleskine. Which is probably better. Well.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So this is the problem.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, this is where we fight.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Then it becomes, A5 and A4, we've already mentioned letter and legal. At a certain point, they become referred to as just like a rough format size. Like, Moleskines are about A5 size. They're not exact, but they're about A5 size. Yeah.