General Interest

The American headquarters of the Pilot Pen company is located in a middle-sized city in the far northeast corner of Florida, called Jacksonville.

While it’s becoming more modern – it has its own NFL franchise now – Jacksonville is still very much a mix of old Deep South and Navy port town. Not exactly the kind of place you expect to find runway models and fashion shows.

But, apparently, Jacksonville hosts its very own Fashion Week, an event designed to “establish Jacksonville as (a) fashion destination in the Southeast and ultimately, by discovering talent, be a major contributor to the industry itself,” according to the JFW site.

Pilot is one of the event’s sponsors. And, at this week’s show, Pilot plans to debut a dress by designer Bobby Kelley that is made of nearly 500 red FriXion erasable pens. (There’s probably a joke about an erasable dress in there somewhere.)

Read more

Each year, Lamy releases a special limited edition Safari in a unique color…and that time has come again.

The 2012 Lamy Safari is an apple green fountain pen so bright you might just want to take a bite.

Read more

We’ve been getting a laugh at the response from people on Twitter to the start of this week’s College Basketball Invitational.

The basketball tournament – presented as an alternative for teams that didn’t make it into March Madness – is sponsored by Zebra Pen in the US, where Zebra is not as well-known a name as, say, Pilot.

The general reaction to Zebra’s sponsorship of the CBI has been like this one, from @twittsburgh: “…I seriously thought it was an animal pen.”

OK, so for those of you who are curious, Zebra Pen is exactly what it sounds like, a company that makes ink pens, and quite good ones, at that. And yes, a few, but not nearly all, of the pens are striped.

Read more