Your Fountain Pen and Notebook Oasis. Stationary story in Chicago.

Multi pens and mini pens are the curiosities of the pen world—how do you make a pen that holds five different inks inside, or a pen the size of a sticky note?

Many of these pens have the same secret: the D1 refill. This standard refill size is incredibly short and slim and is able to fit into a variety of small pens. Pens that use D1 refills are compatible with D1 refills from any brand, giving you a greater variety of colors and inks to choose from.

Mike Rohde of Sketchnoting fame hacked a Pentel Energel refill (normally a Pilot G-2 sized refill) to fit into his Retro 51 by trimming the end of the refill to be the right size. If you’re willing to experiment, other refills might also survive this sort of hack. I’ve hacked the end off a few refills in my time to make them fit as well. Just grab a craft or utility knife or a sturdy pair of scissors, line up the old refill and the new refill and snip. Voila.

The 'Parker-style' ballpoint refill is actually a standard pattern refill known as the G2, and is used by many manufacturers for their ballpoint pens. It was originally created by Parker, and is best known as their refill, but it is now an ISO standard (ISO 12757-2), and is used by many different pen brands.

For more than 40 years, standard black pens have cluttered the desks of thousands of federal employees, hung on a chain at post offices across the country and slipped into the pockets of countless military personnel. Yet few have realized that this government-issue pen has a history to rival that of any monument.

I won!

Unique office supplies that make work fun

After a few requests from my review earlier this week of the Varsity, I decided to post a presto- chango ink change how to of sorts. It was just about dead anyway so let's breathe some new life into the patient.