I’m happy to announced that as of today, Parker fountain pens and inks are available to purchase from Pennonia. This means that there is one more place where you can get your fix of Parker fountain pens and related goods.

In other news I moved to Budapest, Hungary. That means that you can also pick your new shiny pen directly from me right here, or in Carei, Romania. What’s interesting about Budapest is that there’s a monthly fountain pen lovers gathering happening usually in the V. District and if everything goes according to plan I’ll be there for the August meet up.

Now some things about Parker since this post is really about that.

Parker is one of the oldest players in the fountain pen business. They offer fountain pens in a range of prices all the way from affordable to the luxuriously high end. Parker was founded in 1888 in Janesville, Wisconsin, United States by George Safford Parker and since then it has become a giant multinational company.

Today Parker is owned by a company called Newell Rubbermaid the parent company of Sharpie, Rotring and, most importantly for us fountain pen lovers, Waterman.

Parker currently features different models, these include:

• Duofold – high end premium
• Premier – high end premium
• Sonnet – premium
• Urban – enthusiast
• IM – enthusiast
• Vector – entry level
• Jotter – entry level

These different models include 80+ color combinations / trims. You can check all of them out here.

I personally think that Parker fountain pens are great and can recommend them to anyone, in fact I’ll do that right now. I’ll post ONE from each model I would personally own/would like to own.

For Parker inks, you have their “Quink” line up which is a portmanteau merging quick and ink. The logic behind this is that their inks should be fast drying inks. Currently they only produce four colors (Blue, Blue-Black, Black and Washable Blue) but in the past they included other colors such as Red or Green.

In my opinion out of these four Blue-Black is the best, then comes Blue, Washable Blue and finally Black. Black fountain pen inks are interesting because the different blacks are usually just really oversaturated browns, purples etc. so I’m always curious what the “base” color of a black is when I make a swab. Nonetheless black inks are not my color, I just don’t like writing in black, never liked it back in my ballpoint days as well. On the other hand the amount of blue inks on the market is ridiculous (case in point, 3 out of 4 is blue for Parker).

I’ll be making a follow up post about the Parker Blue-Black ink because Parker refreshed their line-up of pens and their inks as well. They tweaked the designs for the pens, dubbed the new models “Royal” and change the formulation of some of their inks. In fact maybe all have changed, but I only had Blue-Black at hand form the previous generation so I couldn’t compare their other colors.

Thanks for reading up to this point, I’ll stop my rambling right here. See you again next time!