I've known Howard Levy for several decades, in which time I've seen him design and manufacture a variety of fountain pens, always with a flair for classic style and with a real pride in these American-manufactured writing instruments. In recent years he focused on pens with steel nibs, which we do not sell here.

When Julian from our customer service department brought me a customer folder with a Pilot Custom Urushi Black Barrel for tuning and customization, he mentioned in passing that he really liked it. When you see dozens of pens per day, as all of us do here, that is a more than casual comment.

The ebonite urushi pens from Danitrio are often in very short supply - the artisanal approach of this unique manufacturer, with offices in Southern California, nibs from Germany, and pens lacquered in Japan, means that each hand-crafted pen often takes a year or more to be produced.

Our Friend Todd Oppenheimer, editor of the Craftsmanship Quarterly, sent us a link to "The “Future is Handmade,” a new short documentary which explores the core of human creativity and what it means in a larger cultural context. This beautifully shot video, produced by Maikel Kuijpers, encourages the viewer to a greater understanding of the place of hand work, skill, and dedication to craft in our digital world.

In the early days of fountain pens, the Teens, Twenties, and Thirties, people were curious about how fountain pens worked. The manufacturers were eager to show off their unique filling systems, clip assemblies, and special ways they had of sealing the nib inside the cap. So all of the major manufacturers provided their sales representatives with hard rubber pens that were cut away to reveal the inner workings. This was the origin of the demonstrator pen.