I’m a Red-Pen Enthusiast, and Pilot Makes the Best Ones (original) (raw)
By ,a Strategist writer covering décor, furniture, and garment care. They previously worked as an editor at Garage magazine.
Sometime in my 20s, someone gifted me a set of multicolored Pilot Varsity fountain pens. I couldn’t figure out how to use them, so they sat in my desk drawer for years — until, on a whim, I pulled the red one out last month in my millionth attempt to start a regular journaling habit. I’ve been doing my morning pages religiously ever since, and I attribute it to the pen.
Part of the magic is that fountain pens write fast, which reduces the lag between thinking and writing. When I journal with a rollerball, I notice myself slowing down and simplifying my thoughts to let my hand catch up, which creates a stilted feeling, like a chatty witness slowing down for a court stenographer. The Varsity pen can keep up; thoughts flow onto the page as smoothly as speaking. I also love the way red pen looks on paper — eye-catching and bright, but lighter than black or blue, dramatic but not ponderous.
Of course, I lost my beloved Pilot Varsity a few weeks after rediscovering it. I went to my neighborhood stationery shop to test every red pen it had in stock, which is how I concluded that Pilot has the best red ink in the biz. Some other red pens I tried had a blueish undertone or lacked that fire-truck vibrancy (I did buy a very good red calligraphy marker — more on that below), but when I ordered several Pilot reds from JetPens, they all had the same perfect tomato-siren shade.
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My ideal journaling combination is a Pilot Varsity fountain pen and Maruman spiral-ring grid notebook. Fountain pen can bleed through some paper, but the Maruman’s pages are so dense and smooth that they’re bleedproof. There is a trade-off — the smoothness of the paper means that some pencil marks show up faint. I have trouble getting a nice dark mark out of a mechanical pencil on these sheets, but a sharper and darker pencil like an Apsara Absolute works well.
Maruman notebook and Pilot Varsity fountain pen.Photo: Erin Schwartz
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When I lost my Pilot Varsity pen, I used this G2 gel pen, which is great for quick tasks like to-do lists and notes. It has a similarly smooth glide and the same highly pigmented red ink as the Varsity. I still prefer a fountain pen’s speediness for journaling, but the G2 is an all-rounder: It doesn’t bleed through thinner paper, and the ink is dense but dries quickly enough that it never smudges.
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At a previous workplace, blue and black Pilot V5 pens were my absolute favorite (they occasionally made their way home with me), so I was excited to see that they also make the pen in red. On the line-weight spectrum, the Varsity is the heaviest, the G2 above is medium, and the V5 is the lightest. It’s also smooth and skip-free, good for a paper that absorbs more ink.
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When I tested all the red pens at the Analog Stationer, I walked away with a set of Tombow Vermillion pencils and this bright-red calligraphy marker. The Vermillions were a bust, but this marker rocks. It’s double-sided, with a smaller and a larger chisel tip, and although I’m no calligrapher, I love using it to write in uninterrupted swoops and swirls. I’ve used it for handwritten birthday cards and special labels.
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