Pensane

It’s Pen Chalet’s fault. I wasn’t going to buy another fountain pen for a while, but then Pen Chalet showed the new Monteverde Innova Formula M. After gathering my jaw up off the floor, I knew I had to have it.

The majority of the barrel is covered in a metallic weave. The weave is made up of bands of a series of metal (?) threads. This is most apparent on the ends of the weave. As these bands are seemingly tucked into the barrel, the individual strands separate a little more than they ideally would. This makes it sound like a defect, but honestly, I don’t see a way around it. So we’ll just call it the character of this particular design.

The trim is gunmetal, which Monteverde seems to prefer for a lot of their pens. And it’s the perfect choice for this design. As it should be, the nib matches the trim.

Speaking of the nib, I have the broad nib, and I must say, it just might be the smoothest broad nib in my collection. While it didn’t seem overly wet, at first, in writing with it more extensively, I found the feed was just barely keeping up with the ink flow.

As a lover of heavy pens, this one is to my liking. But if you don’t like heavy pens, you’ll probably hate this one. It’s one of the heavier pens in my collection. Posted, it’s almost beastly. Unposted, it’s extremely comfortable.

This brings me to my only real complaint of the pen. Uncapping, capping, unposting, and posting, require excessive effort. In my video, I struggled to post the cap. With a lot of effort, it made a loud snap. Think twice before using this in a meeting.

But there is so much more to love about this pen. It’s unique. It’s beautiful. It’s not outrageously expensive.

In addition to the blue one, it also comes in black and bronze. I would have thought that I would have bought the bronze version—I love bronze, and I love brown pens—but it was the blue one that called out to me. And I couldn’t be happier.

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