[Pen/Pencil Review] New Orleans Trip
I know I missed the story blog this week – good reason, we were on vacation in New Orleans. While there we hit two places that I’ve only heard about on Pen World Magazine – Papier & Plume and Scriptura. Papier Plume is a higher end pen store with some notebooks/stationary. Scriptura is a stationary store with a smaller but nice pen selection. These are beautiful stores. Papier & Plume is in the French Quarter. The Scriptura we went to is more in the Garden District.
At Papier & Plume, I picked up this amazing Diplomat fountain pen with a fired finish and a narrow “medium” point nib. The two notebooks are souvenir notepads showing New Orleans and Papier & Plume. They opened late the day we went, so we basically stalked the store until they opened. It was a lovely place with lovely people.
The Diplomat is a brand I’ve only read about, but never bought. It was relatively affordable for a higher end pen – about $50. And the finish was truly unique. The barrel is a machined metal – likely brass maybe aluminum. I’ll have to do research. It currently has a black international cartridge in it.
On they way out of town, we hit up Scriptura as we checked out the Garden District before heading to see artist friends for dinner. Scriptura is quaint. Mostly stationary – paper, invitations, etc. But they have some pens. And a dog. The dog was sleeping in a corner, so we didn’t get to meet the dog. I did make a new purchase. The Yookers. This is a new brand/type of pen. It’s a felt/fiber tipped pen that takes fountain pen ink. I ended up buying the demo because it was a 0.8mm tip. Everything else they had was a minimum of a 1.0 mm. Then I picked up Vampire Red Private Reserve ink cartridges because we’d just done the Witches, Vampires, Zombies, and Ghosts tour AND Halloween.
I’ll be looking at these pens and the ones from the Dallas Pen Show more in depth over the next few weeks. I also need to do some other things along the way to get other stuff back in focus and moving forward – but now I have some great pens to work on those projects with.