KWZ

More bottles: ink-bottles this time, four of them; all ‘iron gall’ fountain pen inks produced by KWZ in Poland. From left to right are IG Red #3, IG Green #3, IG Turquoise and IG Violet #3. The first two I’ve owned for several years: the red one is three-quarters empty, the Green a little over half-full. The other two are recent arrivals. The Turquoise is a replacement for another bottle I had that I dropped and cracked: I was lucky it didn’t make an even worse mess than the one I had to clean up. The Violet I’ve yet to open.

Currently I have some of the red in a Lamy Al-Star; and some of the Turquoise in a Faber-Castell Loom pen. Although iron gall inks are acidic and potentially corrosive over the long term, I’ve yet to see any damage in the pens I’ve used these in. If I had any very expensive pens I suppose I might hesitate to fill them with these inks. I very often use them for letter-writing and note-taking and find they work well on virtually all of the many & varied types of paper I have. I like how they hit the paper and how well they last on the page and how they keep in the bottle. KWZ employ additives which impart a particular smell to their inks: not everyone likes it but to me it’s inoffensive.

I’m unsure whether the Red #3 and Green #3 inks may have been discontinued, or if they’re just harder to get now in the UK, post-Brexit. If it’s the former then that would be too bad, as I’m very fond of them. In my first flush of fountain pen use I must have accumulated a few dozen assorted inks: I’ve since whittled that down to fewer than ten, of which these have been mainstays.