Editing The Pen Addict 248/transcript (section)

== Ink Collection ==


'''Matt Armstrong:''' 230 bottles. I keep a spreadsheet that is accessible from the pen habit website. So you can see exactly what I've got in my collection at any, at any one time. Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So how many emails do you get say, Hey, I saw your video and saw your list. Will you sell me this rare bottle of Caron dash that hasn't been made for like 10 years?

'''Matt Armstrong:''' Um, usually it's more along the lines of, I can't see where on the website I can buy that your inks. Um, it's like it, it looks kind of the display I've got in my studio looks kind of like a store. It does. It's a beautiful backdrop. Yeah. People just kind of, yeah, I love that backdrop. It just, yeah, it's a pain to clean, which is why I only clean it during the hiatus every summer. I have to pull everything off the shelf and dust it down. It's like this gets dusted once a year. Um, but, uh, it, yeah, people just mistake me as owning or running a pen store, which I don't. And, uh, yeah, the thing about ink is it's so inexpensive compared to the pens that I'm buying. So I can buy 10 bottles and not freak out the way I would freak out if I bought 10 fountain pens. Right. Um, you know, yeah. I mean, it, and it's that being said.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' 230 bottles later. So give me, give me a few favorites, uh, off the shelf. If you're inking up some of your favorite pens, what's, what's kind of the top things that are going into, into your pens?

'''Matt Armstrong:''' Um, so I'm, I've become a big fan of a lot of the bung box inks. Mm-hmm. So piano mahogany is just one of my all time faves. It's just gorgeous. Brown, red color. I really, really liked the first love Sapphire as well. It's probably my favorite blue ink out there. I've, there's this limited edition or special edition Mont Blanc honoré de Balzac dandy turquoise came out a couple of years ago. Yeah. That is my favorite turquoise of all time. They, you know, as with their special editions, of course you buy it while you can. And then once it's gone, it's gone. Um, I really like Caran d'Ache Grand Canyon, which is one of the discontinued colors of the earth inks.

'''Matt Armstrong:''' Uh, Diamine Autumn Oak, Mont Blanc, Irish green and lavender purple. I mean, name a color family. I can tell you. Right. Yamadori, Sailor Yamadori is another one. Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I thought you do a cool thing on your blog, which I didn't even realize, uh, was there under your FAQ section, where you have like, do you list out the colors and here's my favorites, like in this color spectrum? It's, it's pretty cool. I like how you do that. It's, you can just send a link here. Go look at this.

'''Matt Armstrong:''' Yeah. That, that kind of falls. And I know there's a question about this, but that's one of those questions I get asked at least five to seven times a week is what's your favorite ink in this color? Yeah. And, uh, so, you know, that's useful.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Helpful. So with, so years of doing this and, you know, way, way down this most serious rabbit hole, you have all these inks and you have all these, uh, pens and you have this growing empire online. You decided, I guess, was it last year where you started making some paper products? So tell us how that, tell us how that came about and what was your idea behind starting that?

'''Matt Armstrong:''' Um, so the big thing is for me was, you know, I, and I talk about this a little bit. I hate asking for money. I hate it. It's probably the least favorite thing about being a YouTuber. Um, because YouTube for anyone who's, who's expecting to get on and make it, make it rich on YouTube. That's probably not going to happen. There are a few people who can pull it off. I am not one of them. Uh, and so I, I was trying to come up with a way and I, the thing that I did my second season was I did this big raffle. So if you, if you donated during the year, then you got raffle tickets or, you know, basically you got a ticket into the raffle. What I didn't realize is that's kind of illegal. Um, so starting with season three, I had to kill that one. Um, and then I, I was talking with Sean Newton and he was saying, well, you know, if you sell something and use those as entries to a giveaway, it's not a raffle. Um, and kind of, kind of what he does with his postcards that, you know, you, you buy these postcards, the money goes to charity and, and then, you know, he does a giveaway based on the postcards you bought, which is cool. But, um, the thought was, well, why don't I just sell something that way? I'm not asking for money. I'm letting people buy something that hopefully they'll find useful and then I can make a little extra money off of it that way. So, uh, that's kind of where I, I started the process and I kicked off, you know, paper was an obvious direction for me to go. So I kicked off this process of trying to find a good fountain pen friendly paper to make these pocket and traveler size notebooks, um, for, for my, what became the inky fingers notebook line.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Mm-hmm. Yeah. So you took the paper very seriously, which you should, like that's appreciated by the community and the people who support you and, and by these notebooks. Everyone I've used has been awesome and you've gone through a couple of different paper styles. Um, what's the current paper choice and what is going on with that current paper choice? Cause I know you've had some news and I know you have a bunch of fans of these notebooks. So tell us what's going on with that.

'''Matt Armstrong:''' Yeah. So, um, uh, what I use is the, it's a wheat straw paper. So it's the agriculture by-product. Ooh, try to talk today. Agricultural by-product of, of harvesting wheat. So they take the straw, they grind it, add a little bit of tree pulp and make this paper. And it is surprisingly fountain pen friendly and not very thick. And, you know, it's not Tomoe river thin, but it's not Clairefontaine thick. It's kind of a nice medium weight paper. Yeah. Little bit of tooth. I really like the way it feels. Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It's really, really excellent. It's, you don't expect what you get when you start writing on it. You're like, wow, this is really cool. It's excellent. Yeah.

'''Matt Armstrong:''' Um, so one of the problems with at least paper here in the U S is that 98% of it's garbage when it comes to fountain pens. And so it's, we went through probably 40 or 50 different papers trying to find the right one. And we absolutely stumbled across this. I was talking to my printer about, Hey, can we, maybe if I were to bring in some Tomoe river paper, it's only 52 GSM. It's really thin. Can your machines handle it? And he said, I don't think so. Yeah. A lot of printers can't handle paper like that. And so, or won't. Um, one of the things I discovered is if a paper hasn't been certified for use in specific, in the, the printer's machines, they just won't use it. Ah, interesting. Um, and so he said, but just a second, I've got something that might work if, you know, if Tomoe river is based on rice, it might be, I don't know. And then he said, let me try this. So we pulled it out and I was shocked. And I said, I love this paper. So we, we proceeded and I printed up this small batch of 500 notebooks, took it to the DC show in 2016. Uh, and basically gave a bunch away. Actually, no, I, I was giving it away even before then. Yeah. Oh, it was, I was, it was LA actually. It was the LA pen show last year. Um, is where I started giving them away and then during the summer, I had another run printed of that same wheat straw paper and the printer I was using kind of wasn't able to, to meet the quality that I wanted to with the paper and, uh, and, and the final fit and finish of the notebook. So I went to a new printer and someone who specializes in using this particular kind of paper. And he just informed me a couple of weeks ago that it has been discontinued. Oof. Wah, wah. So, um, yeah. So I am back to the drawing board in terms of finding paper. This new printer should be able to do the quality of work I like and I, I want, um, but we just have to find a paper that works and that's really hard to do with fountain pens, especially if I don't want to become an importer of some huge volume of paper from overseas, which I'm not completely against, but that's a lot of extra work. So kind of defeats the whole purpose of making a little extra money without asking for help kind of a thing.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right, right. So I want to make a point of something you said and that I, I find to be a constant theme from people in our community who have gone on to make things like you, like Anna, like myself, we're extraordinarily particular. You know, we are, it's a different type of manufacturing. Process than I think you find on just a general basis. Like we are really kind of understand what the expectations are for our community and for ourselves, right? I mean, we don't want, if we're putting our name on it, it's very important that it's right. And sometimes working with people who aren't used to our particularness, it's very difficult. And I thought that was a good point that you made. Like you really care about the paper, the performance, what the final completed output is going to look like from the printer. And that's not, that's not easy. I mean, it's a challenge and we appreciate you being that particular, like it shows in the end. Yeah.

'''Matt Armstrong:''' Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think there's this, a certain level of fastidiousness that comes with using fountain pens in today, you know, right? 60 years ago, you didn't really have much of a choice. If you're using a fountain pen today, it's because you are willing to do all the extra little fiddly stuff you have to do to use a fountain pen today. And you enjoy that extra fiddly stuff. So cleaning it out, adjusting the tines, you know, the standard pen maintenance stuff, finding paper that fits you. So there's a certain kind of personality type, I think, that really gets into fountain pens today. And I think that fastidiousness about your pens and the twiddly stuff you have to do with it is it translates very, very closely into I want the products I use around this to be as attentive to detail as I am. And so I think that's where the, that all comes from.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right. And I think that completely shows in like everything that you do. So I think that's fantastic. So we have a bunch of listener questions I want to get to. But before we kind of wrap up the, all the pen habit background and current status, what's next for you and the pen habit? You know, what's the next year look like? Are you getting out to pen shows? You have anything new coming on the blog? What's, what's on the, what's on the docket for you this year?

'''Matt Armstrong:''' For me on the blog and the YouTube channel, it's just make it to May. I'm kind of in the, just focus down and make it to May and see what happens from there. Over the summer, I'm going to be taking a pretty hard look at the type of content I create and what changes, if any, I want to make. So one of the things I'd like to really spend a little more time on is educational content as opposed to review content. I still enjoy doing reviews, but I don't think I will be able to continue doing the kinds of reviews that the audience wants me to do. Right. And, and, and to be honest about it, you know, there's just a lot of, my tastes have changed. And, and so I'm going to be taking a look at that. I'm not making any decisions yet, but the one area that I think I'd like to get into is some of the stuff that Brian Goulet did early on. And, you know, the fountain pen 101 and how to adjust your nibs and how to use an ultrasonic cleaner and that sort of thing. And focus a little bit on that going forward.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. I, for, I would eat that stuff up. I think that's awesome content that never, there's always new people coming in that need to know these things. And it's, it'd be a great resource. I'd love to see that. So you also mentioned you're going to be at the Chicago pen show.

'''Matt Armstrong:''' Is that right? I am. I'm going to the Chicago show this year and I'm probably going to go to DC as well. It's going to kind of depend on work. Gotcha. But I'm, I'm planning on going to DC. DC is such a fun show. It's just, it's fun to be there. I'm working at the Chicago show. So I'm going to help out the Van Nessas again.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Well, I will be adjacent. I will be adjacent to you. I'm stealing one of their tables for Knox. So we will be neighbors this year.

'''Matt Armstrong:''' We will get up to our regular old shenanigans.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Just like old times, right? Exactly.

'''Matt Armstrong:''' Our, our, our smart Alec approach to pen shows. It's a, I'm trying to, I'm trying to censor myself as I'm talking here because I know it's a family friendly podcast. But yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' We keep, we keep our sanity by being together.

'''Matt Armstrong:''' Exactly. Exactly. So, so that, that should be a lot of fun. And then we'll see what happens with DC. I had a great time at San Francisco last year too.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah.

'''Matt Armstrong:''' So I'd kind of like to go to San Francisco again. It's just so close on the back of DC that I don't know that I'll be able to take the time off of work again this year. So, right. So, yeah, we'll see. Cool.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Well, that sounds awesome. And I think let's hit some of these questions, Myke, after I get a clean shave.

'''Myke Hurley:''' You're going to go do that right now?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Oh, brilliant. I mean, you're kind of long winded sometimes. Oh, well, look at this. This is just not fair at all. So this show is brought to you, I would just like to point out actually that I haven't spoken for a while. So maybe I'm not as long winded, you know.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, I know. But I've been with you for 248 episodes. So I stand by this.