Ink Bottle

Wonder ink, works well in vintage pens. Best bottle IMHO. Regular price quite steep, but rare sales make it very competitive.

The Mont Blanc inks are very good to write with and their colours are exquisite. I used to prefer purple, or violet colours over blue. But the royal blue of Mont Blanc has become my favourite because it has ever so slight purple hue. Hence, the amethyst purple and the royal blue are my current favourite inks. Both are amazingly water resistant too, even though they are not sold as 'permanent'. (I tried the permanent blue of Mont Blanc, but it tends to dry in the feeder when not used daily.)

The best ink out there

Talk about getting what you pay for!In need of blue fountain pen ink I deliberated for a bit, and considered this and two other permanent blue inks. Montblanc Permanent Blue does cost about twice what the other inks I was considering do, but I have had my eye on it for some time, and really the unique bottle shape sold me on getting it (I will never throw away that bottle, no matter what I have in it down the road).Suffice it to say that I am glad I did get this ink, it is excellent. It writes very smoothly, dries reasonably quickly, is subtly shading on the right papers, and shades very slightly on even cheap paper. The hue is just a touch warmer than what I would consider a "pure blue," but it is very close. It doesn't bleed or feather much at all. I compared it to a Platinum Pigment Ink, sepia tone, and to a Noodler's Bulletproof Black. Both of these other two inks appeared to feather and bleed through the page more so than the Montblanc Permanent Blue; albeit none to any considerable degree, and to be fair the Montblanc is also the lightest in value of the three, but in the end it did out perform the others.I almost exclusively use permanent inks and therefore was curious to see just how permanent this one was. Writing and sketching a little, and then leaving it to dry about half an hour I then saturated the page and let it sit in stagnant water. The ink remained entirely legible and there was no appreciable degree of additional bleeding. There was only a slight amount of run when agitated while wet, less so than I have seen in the Noodler's waterproof inks... So this is definitely permanent under wet conditions (I have not tried solvents on this ink).The one place that it does under-perform compared to the Noodler's and Platinum inks is that it can be easily and significantly faded using an eraser, the others are much more permanent in this.This ranks among the best inks that I have used and is worth the price if you want a premium quality ink to write with... and a gorgeous bottle.

Even if I choose a different ink later, I would still pay the higher price for the Mont Blanc bottle. The ink is great, but the bottle design will make sure you can use more of it. Most bottles are round and tall. You must have a certain depth of ink to refill your fountain pen. If your want to get the most of your ink, you need to have a spare bottle at all times. When you can no longer get the ink into your fountain pen, you start using your new bottle but keep the old. when you've refilled your pen a few times, you can pour the remainder of your old bottle into the new. There is always a risk of spillage and drips down the bottle. The Mont Blanc bottle uses a smaller reservoir directly under the cap. When you've used the ink there, put on the lid and tip the bottle toward the lid to refill the reservoir. Even when the pen gets very low, you can refill the reservoir. The structure also gives the bottle a larger base which is more stable and less likely to tip. And this ink works very well with my extra fine nib.

The color is very nice. It's saturated and almost looks like a blue ballpoint. However, be aware that it's a dry writer. I have a pen with moderate but mostly adequate flow that started to railroad with this ink. If you have an excessively wet nib, this will definitely be the ticket for that pen. As for price... it's Montblanc so I guess you know what that means. Is it worthwhile? You can probably get something just as good or better for much less $$$, but a bottle of ink lasts forever so saving a few bucks per bottle isn't going to be the one thing to do in order to keep your children fed.

It works

Excellent ink!