Lamy Safari

Lamy’s Song Dynasty Safari

Leave a Comment / Fountain pens, Lamy / / , , , , ,

When in Shanghai, I like to visit Lamy stores. Unlike Lamy stores in Europe, they tend to offer lots of special editions. My best guess is that I am not only amazed by the quantity of these special editions but also by the quality.

Originally, I was trying to find two specific items: The Lamy Safari Field Green because it looks beautiful and the Hanzi nib because I want to experience how it writes. The Hanzi nib is made for writing Chinese script. I used Google Translate to translate an explanation into English, see below.

Unfortunately, the Field Green Safari was impossible to find in Shanghai: it was neither available in the Lamy stores, nor was it available on Chinese online market places. This came as a surprise because imported pens are often available via online market places at good prices – for example, it was easy and not expensive to get the uni-ball Signo Needle in Japan-exclusive colours. I also got the Pilot Custom Heritage 91 for a really good price.

Back to Lamy: On the trip to Shanghai last year, I bought three different special editions. I will write more about the Hanzi nib another time (spoiler, I got one), but today I want to show you another special edition: The Song Dynasty edition Safari in Jade White. There is also a Sky Blue version available, also very beautiful.

The Song Dynasty edition Lamy Safari

It also came with free engraving, so I made use of this offer. Below is a short video that shows how my pen got engraved. If you look at the barrel of the pen, you can see the characters appearing.

You can also see more of the pen and its packaging in the unboxing video below.

Another special edition is the Lamy Leben set, as seen in this advertising.

Pokemon sets were also still available, but I had already seen these at previous visits.

Some more impressions from this Lamy store.

I hope you liked the look at the Song Dynasty Edition Safari. You can find an overview of other Lamy Safari editions at Stationery.wiki. Please feel free to contribute to the article.

It’s always exciting to find new and unique editions when visiting Lamy stores in Shanghai. To be fair, they are usually just the same pen in a different colour, but if that colour appeals to me I am happy to add it to my collection. In this case the colour is beautiful like the griso and the cream Safari’s colour.

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Lamy Safari in Solar Opposites

4 Comments / Lamy, Seen in the wild / /

Eagle-eyed Bleistift reader Tomasz Maped [1]I didn’t realise that Maped, the name of a French stationery company, is a surname. from Poland contacted me after he noticed a Lamy Safari in the first episode of the second season of Solar Opposites.

I must have missed that detail when I watched this episode so am especially thankful to Tomasz for pointing this out.

The screenshots in this blog post has been taken from Season 2 Episode 1 of Solar Opposites. I believe that the use of the screenshot shown in this blog post falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.

References

References
↑1 I didn’t realise that Maped, the name of a French stationery company, is a surname.

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Strawberry and cream

2 Comments / Fountain pens, Lamy / / , ,

I used to think that I have all the Safari colours I ever need, but as mentioned in February, Lamy keep bringing out wonderful (and difficult to resist) new colours and editions.

This year’s Strawberry and Cream colours are very much to my liking, so I had to go ahead and got one fountain pen in each of the two colours. They were ordered together with the Lamy xevo I discussed recently. I am currently using the strawberry-coloured one with its smooth F nib as a daily writer. These were bought from Pen Heaven in June 2022 and I paid £21.50 each.

The strawberry-red and cream-white Safaris are definitely in the Top 5 of my favourite colours, with the other colours near the top being the Savannah Green (2021), the Mango (2020) and the Griso / Grey version (which was either form 2010 or 2011, I am not sure).

If you are interested in the Lamy Safari, have a look at the Safari article at stationery.wiki. As far as I know it is the most complete overview of Lamy Safari special editions that can be found on the Internet.

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Fresher

6 Comments / Caran d'Ache, Fountain pens, Lamy, Mechanical pencils, Uni / / , , , , , , ,

For many years there hasn’t been much going on in terms of new Caran d’Ache mechanical pencils. There is a lot of choice when it comes to ballpoint pens but there wasn’t much to look at in terms of affordable (<£50) mechanical pencils (there are unusually many in the ‘above £500’ range, though).

In recent years this changed to some extent with the 849 mechanical pencil being available in a few new colours and editions, e.g. Black Code. There are, however, not many shops here in the UK that actually stock these.

Image © Caran d’Ache

Today a new pencil joined the Caran d’Ache offering, available in a set with a ballpoint pen as a limited edition, the Set Fresher.

Image © Caran d’Ache

I am happy to see more mechanical pencils from Caran d’Ache, even though it is basically just the same pencil in different colours. I wish they’d do something else, e.g. offering a 0.5 mm version, but for now, just seeing more colours are a nice change.

Caran d’Ache seems to be starting the different colour limited editions game for their mechanical pencils and lead holders, or maybe not starting it but taking it up a notch, while Lamy is by now really good at the ‘new colour game’. Every time I think I won’t buy another Safari they come up with more good colours: last year the re-release of the original colours, this year the beautiful strawberry and cream colours, with matching clip etc.

Kaweco is also really good at this, with a mix of happy affordable colours and more posh looking ones that are slightly more expensive.

Images © Kaweco

In terms of new innovation there have also been some news.

The new Kurutoga Dive is not only rotating the lead like previous versions, but is also advancing it. It is a capped and a limited edition. I wonder if the cap is there to protect the mechanism when not in use. Maybe the front is not as sturdy (in the current version) as previous Kurutogas with less complicated mechanisms. If that’s the case there might be a regular version without a cap in the future. This thought might explain why this is a limited edition: maybe they want to see first how this mechanism fares in the real world, or the manufacturing process isn’t automated enough for mass market production and some manual labour is currently involved in assembly which doesn’t make it quite mass market ready yet….

I believe that the use of the images in this blog post falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.

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Savannah green and terra red

11 Comments / Lamy / / ,

Today: a very exciting arrival: My Lamy Safari collection got company.

The savannah green Safari next to a similarly coloured Caran d’Ache

For several years I was hoping that Lamy would re-release their original Safari colours. I think this idea started to grow in me when Lamy re-released their Lime Green special edition from 2008 in 2011 (with some small differences).

My thought were along the lines of “If they can re-release lime green, why not savannah green, one of the two original colours…”

By the way, if you want to have a look at what is probably the most comprehensive list of special Safari editions on the web, head over to the Lamy Safari article on stationery.wiki.

There are many differences that make it easy to distinguish the original versions from the 2021 versions, so there isn’t much danger of this re-release causing too much confusion – instead it represents a homage to Lamy’s original colours.
I have been a Lamy Safari user since the mid-1980s, but I have to admit that I don’t remember at all what my first Safari colour was. I am however quite sure that in came in a box like the one pictured below (linked to from Flickr). The box looked very cool, so I kept model figures in it for many years.

Safari Box 1
This is an embedded Flickr image. Click to go to this image on Flickr.
Safari Box 2
This is an embedded Flickr image. Click to go to this image on Flickr.

The Pen Company, where I got the engraved Caran d’Ache from, is just about the get new stock of the 2021 Lamy Safari colours in. I bought the savannah green and terra red fountain pens from Write Here and the savannah green ballpoint pen and rollerball from CultPens. Somehow Write Here’s search function seems to have a problem, so I didn’t even realise they also carry the non-fountain pens as they didn’t show up in a search. When I checked again today some of them did now show up.

The Write Here Logo that they managed to emboss on the official Lamy packaging came as a surprise – a great idea and looks fantastic.

Savannah green is certainly one of my favourite colours in terms of look, but it’s not quite my absolute favourite Safari – that is the grey version (sometimes referred to as griso). I had two and sent one to Sean of Contrapuntalism fame, but unfortunately the postal service managed to damage it in transport. The one I kept is still in it’s packaging. Maybe I should unpack it one of these days. It’s just too good looking to stay unused.

What are your favourite colours and do you prefer the ‘matt’ or the glossy’ pens?

For Sale: Vintage Lamy Safari Griso fountainpen and rollerball set. NOS. selling for 100€ including ww tracked shipping! rare set! Email me at miss.thundercat (at) gmail.com if your're interested. #forsale #pensforsale #selling #fountainpen #fpn #fountain
This is an embedded Flickr image. Click to go to this image on Flickr.

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