On my desk I have a lovely 23-pen display box where I keep all my inked pens, whilst my uninked pens live in a 48-pen case in my drawer. 23 pens is a lot to have inked at once, but since the box holds that many, I set that as my arbitrary limit…

Except that it isn’t. Over time, my amount of inked pens has crept up and dispersed from the display box and started to spread, like some kind of inky virus. 

I have a pen that I keep permanently inked up with Platinum Carbon Black in my desk pen tray that I use for doodling. I have a couple of inked fountain pens in the small pen case I keep in my main bag. I even have a few lying around downstairs which are my ‘downstairs pens’, because of course, if I decide I want to use a fountain pen, it would be too much trouble just to walk upstairs to get one (you would seriously think I lived in a mansion with this logic, rather than a two-bedroom terrace house!). 

Also when I buy a new pen or ink (which is often!) I have to immediately try it out, so I’ll ink it up, and then I have yet another pen inked up and floating around. 

So to summarize, I usually have over 30 fountain pens inked at any one time, and it’s really starting to feel like too many, and like I may be a chronic over-inker!

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with having so many pens inked at once, as long as they aren’t drying out. But I will say that I find it pretty overwhelming to come to my pen box each day to try and pick a pen, and finding I have so many choices. 

It also means that I don’t change up my pen and ink combinations as much as I’d like, because a side effect of having so many pens on the go is that it takes an age to write them dry. I try to cycle through my inked pens (with a few exceptions – I use my Platinum #3776 daily!) so that I’m using them all equally, but that means that I use up the ink in each pen so slowly that I can still have the same ink in the same pen six months later. 

And as much as I like having so many pens and inks to choose from each day, I sometimes wonder if it would be more fun to have a small number of pens inked at any one time, and to write them dry sooner, and then get to try a new ink in the pen. I do sometimes envy people who can limit their inked pens to just a few, and who change them up like clockwork, so they’re constantly having new pen and ink combinations and experiences. 

I could just do this, but in a weird way the idea of having so few pens inked scares me a little? It would almost feel like the uninked pens in my collection were being neglected, and I worry I’d get bored of my limited ink choices. Which is ridiculous, because I’d be getting to change inks sooner, and ultimately using each individual pen more when it’s time to be inked came around, rather than letting it languish in the box with the same ink in it for months. 

I’m not going to lie though, I also feel a bit horrified by the thought of how many pens I’d have to clean out to experiment with only having a few pens inked… But maybe someday I’ll give it a try. 

So how many pens do you keep inked at once? Do you ever feel overwhelmed or limited by your selections? And how often are you changing up your pen and ink combos?