Gerd A. Müller – The Designer who got forgottenSaved as draft
A quick look at the book about Gerd A. Müller, mentioned in my recent blog post about the 55th anniversary Lamy 2000 brown edititon.
Lamy 2000
The Lamy exact – older than the Lamy 2000
Unfortunately work didn’t leave me much spare time so I didn’t get round to finishing the Cento3 graphene pencil blog post yet, but with the previous blog post here being four weeks old I thought it’s time for a quick ‘Bleistift is still alive’ post.
Today I want to show you a fifty year old advert for the Lamy exact and some other Lamy pens, including the Lamy 2000. At the time the Lamy 2000 was about five years old.
This advert is currently being sold on eBay and is listed as being from 1971.
I have translated the text for you:
You may be able to afford illegible handwriting, but not an unclean one.
Leave the cleanliness of your handwriting to LAMY exact. The ballpoint pen with the perfect technology and functional design.
Its large capacity refill with a stainless steel tip guarantees a problem-free 10,000 m writing line. With a single
refill you will write evenly and cleanly for at least a year.
Every time you click this refill ready for writing, it turns by 120 degrees. Like this it cannot be worn down on one side only, cannot blot, cannot smudge. Additionally, the ‘signal marker’ indicates whether the refill is extended.
In short, any advantage that is imaginable for a ballpoint pen – the LAMY exact has it. For an always clean and
exact handwriting.
You can find the LAMY exact range with large capacity refill in leading stationery stores.
In the price list the Lamy 2000 range is being referred to as ‘The manly range’. The more affordable Lamy design 20 range is being referred to as “The young range’.
For reference: In 1971 10 DM were equivalent to 3 US Dollars or £1.20.
According to Lamy’s history page the Lamy exact came out in 1964 and was Germany’s first ballpoint pen with a large capacity refill.
I plan to add information from this advert to Stationery.wiki’s Lamy page.
D1 ≠ D1
Not everyone shares this opinion, not even everyone in my household, but I think gel refills are so much nicer than ballpoint refills. My holbein x Rotring 600 3 in 1 came with ballpoint refills, so it was a prime candidate for an upgrade: replacing the ballpoint refills with gel or hybrid refills. I had the idea after A.J. talked about the D1 refills in a comment on my video about this pen.
I started by consulting Ana’s refill guide to look for some nice refills.
It didn’t take long to pick some cool stuff for my order, not only refills, also a new pen (the Jetstream Edge in white). To get free postage with my order I also picked a few more refills with the intention of improving my wife’s Lamy 2000 multipen (the original Lamy ballpoint refills often skip when you start writing).
What did I order? Jetstream refills, I like them based on my positive experience with them from the Hobonichi pens and from my Jetstream 4 in 1. I also got some Zebra refills. I haven’t used them myself but bought them before to go with a pen I gave someone as a gift.
When trying to fit the Zebra refills into the Lamy 2000 there was big disappointment. They didn’t fit. A quick look at the end revealed that the Lamy refills are slightly slimmer. Maybe D1 isn’t quite as standardised as I thought. I have to admit though that I don’t have much D1 experience as I generally prefer pencils and fountain pens.
A quick check with the callipers revealed that there are minute differences in the diameter. The Lamy M21 diameter is 2.32 mm, the Zebra JSB 0.5 diameter is 2.36 mm. 0.04 mm (0.0016 inches) difference. I also measured the Uni SXR-200-07 which turned out to have a diameter of 2.33 mm. Even though the Zebra didn’t fit the Lamy 2000 I managed to squeeze it into the Rotring 600. That left me with the uni for the Lamy 2000. The refill is only 0.01 mm wider but that was enough the turn a relaxing Sunday drive refill with butterflies (and the Loving You song in the background) into a heavy metal squeeze fest (with some Rammstein song playing from a broken stereo) with thoughts in my head that the Lamy 2000 will crumble under all the pressure. In the end it did, luckily, work. According to my own refill guide the D1 diameter is 2.35 mm. Who would have thought a fraction of a millimetre makes such a difference…
Since I talked about Holbein: Radio 4’s book of the week happens to be about him: The King’s Painter: The Life and Times and Hans Holbein.
The Lamy Horror Picture Show
Think of a random number between 1 and 1000.
No, really. Please do.
Ok, now multiply this number by 3 and remember it.
Well, imagine the shock I got when I recently had a closer look at my Lamy 2000.
On a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is ‘Not shocked at all’ and ’10’ is censored because of the expletives uttered, the number representing my shock was slightly higher than the number I just asked you to remember.
It all started with me happily going about my daily business and cleaning my Lamy 2000 (with an EF nib) in expectance of a Robert Oster ink from Kirit Dal, one of Robert Oster’s UK resellers.
When an ink ‘stain’ at the front of the Lamy’s grip section didn’t want to disappear I had a closer look and after moving the end of my fingernail over the ‘stain’ I started to have an ominous suspicion. Not much later the aforementioned shock happened [1]Well, where are the smelling salts and the defibrillator when you need them..
You’d think I’m a broken man now, looking back at the excitement and fun I once experienced when using fountain pens, but not able to have any joy anymore going forward from now on. The reality is different. I’ve come to stoically accept that mark on the grip section as something that makes this Lamy 2000 different to all its anonymous siblings that left Lamy’s conveyor belt since 1966. It is something, together with a dent on its body, that makes this Lamy mine. Who knows, maybe deep down, in some illogical part of the brain, I might even be a tiny bit ‘proud’ that I have my own unique Lamy 2000 now…
I am sorry for showing you all these gory details, especially after just showing you horrific pencil mutilations in the previous blog post. I guess you might be more careful form now on, avoiding to look at my blog anymore while eating food.
In case you’ve been sick over your pen collection while looking at these gory photos: I’ve heard that baking soda might eliminate the odour, but I haven’t tried it myself yet.
I thought of combining this blog post with a look at the ink I was expecting, but I didn’t do it because I thought someone who doesn’t read carefully and only looks at the pictures might that the ink I was expecting caused the issue. To avoid this the Oster ink I was expecting (cleaning the pen to be ready for this ink) will be covered in a separate blog post.
I have a suspicion which previously used ink might have caused the issue, but as I am not sure it was really that ink I don’t want to mention the brand in this blog post.
References
| ↑1 | Well, where are the smelling salts and the defibrillator when you need them. |
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The surface of Staedtler’s Pigment Liner 308
I usually do nearly all my writing with pencil or fountain pen (actually, most is pencil, I don’t use fountain pens that often anymore), but this week I had a situation where neither pencil nor fountain pen was good enough.
I tried to label a blue Atoma notebook, like the one seen here, but because the blue is quite dark graphite is too light and even my Tactile Turn Gist with black ink was too light, so I wrote with my Staedtler Pigment Liner in 0.5mm over the black ink from the Fountain Pen – this made the lines much darker. Off-topic: the finest pen I have is a Faber-Castell Ecco Pigment 0.1mm, which is pretty fine, but Staedtler’s Pigment Liner is even available in 0.05mm!
Why do I mention this? ..because of the surface of the Pigment Liner.
Lamy 2000
Many people, me included, love the Lamy 2000, which is not only because of its shape, but also because of the material used and its surface. I think many people put the good feel of the pen down to the material, Makrolon, but I think it is also down to the surface of the pen. The surface is not just smooth, but is made up of tiny lines that run along the body of the pen. As the lines are so fine the material is also worn down fairly soon which, I think, explains the ageing process where the Lamy 2000’s surface becomes more smooth – something we are all used to seeing from the often used keys on our keyboards.
Staedtler Pigment Liner 308
Staedtler’s Pigment Liner has a very similar surface, made up of little lines. I guess the main difference between this pen’s surface and the surface of the Lamy 2000 is down to the material used and the shape. I don’t know how difficult it it so make this surface, but it looks fantastic and this is certainly the only single use, i.e. non-refillable, pen I know that has a surface like that.
