Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.
—-Mark Twain

During the pandemic I was on a zoom call with my “Difficult Book Reading Club” (I was never able to work from home, my home Zoom calls were all personal) discussing… The Brothers Karamazov I think, when one of the participants, looking out through my camera said, “Bill, what the Hell is that thing on the wall behind you.” I had to think for a bit, and then realized it was my ink shelf.

I have been a fountain pen enthusiast for a long time. I have a modest collection of user-grade pens… I may write about some of them (you are forewarned). But pens are only one-third of the equation. Equally important is the paper – even something as famed as a Moleskine notebook is actually bad for fountain pen writing. Bleed-through to the opposite page and feathering are the two biggest faults.

The third part is, of course, the ink. It’s fascinating how some pens work better with some inks and the combinations may require a certain paper for optimal scribbling.

Over the last few years I have been accumulating ink with even more fervor than I have been acquiring writing instruments. Trying to think of a way to store and display my favorite go-to inks I came up with a shelf near my writing desk. The ink looked surprisingly bland there on the simple wooden shelf, so I drilled two holes in the wall, ran a USB cable behind the drywall to a power brick and stuck up an LED string behind the bottles of ink.

It came with a remote – but I have it on a permanent RGB color cycling pattern. It serves as a great nightlight too. It’s been there so long, I don’t even notice it until my pen runs dry – but I guess the constant pulsing and color-changing looks odd in the background of a Zoom call.