Parker Penman ink is one of my all time favorite inks. The intense saturation is unlike any other ink I've ever experienced. Since Penman hasn't been made for a while and my last bottle of Sapphire is running low I decided to attempt to find as close of a replacement as possible. My hope and desire was that somebody had finally filled the niche left for all of the Penman fans out there. Omas had issues a limited edition color that a number of folks raved about as being similar to Sapphire but I never got around to trying any of it. Perhaps, I held out a small bit of hope that the new owners of Parker would see the light and re-issue Penman. With these two opportunities not in the realm of the realistic I was left with only one choice – go find a new ink as close to Penman Sapphire as possible. What I didn't know was that my hunt would take me so far beyond the mall pen store.

Now some of you might be reading this and thinking why on earth would anyone want to use anything like Penman let along actually use that stuff. There's a whole different group who just love the stuff. Frankly, I have always felt that Penman gets a bad wrap in the area of clogging. It is a very intense color which means that it has a higher saturation of dyes which if left to dry or used in a pen that allows a lot of air to get to the nib the pen will be hard to start or it may just “clog”. The bottom line is that some pens simply cannot use Penman ink unless you are committed to a higher level of maintenance. In my experience, I have found that certain pens perform at their best with certain inks. A lot of it comes down to the pen and the magical interaction between the feed, the nib, and user.

My first stop was at the largest indoor mall in the Chicago land area and the pen shop within. The women who assisted me has worked at the shop for quite some time and is generally quite helpful. I told her what I was looking for and she said "oh you need to try some Aurora Blue - you'll love it". While Aurora blue is a nice enough color it is not at all similar to Penman Sapphire. I took out a Lamy Safari loaded up with it and showed her the color I was wanting to get close to and asked if she had another suggestion. She then said that I should try the Visconti blue but I found it too purple and it didn't have the brilliant color I wanted. At this point, I decided that maybe I had better do some research myself and see if there were any better suggestions out there.

The next logical step (it seemed logical at the time) was to look for color samples from the popular ink companies and compare them to my personal sample of Penman Sapphire. There ended up being a few issues with this idea. The first was that as many of the sites state – the colors on the monitor might not accurately reflect the color of the ink. Printing these ink samples brought a compounded issue - not only were the colors on the monitor potentially different than those used on the monitor that created and reviewed the color swatches but additionally my color printer was probably calibrated differently. It quickly became obvious that while the color swatches were nice from the standpoint of comparing color families they were not useful for truly accurate color matching. Before I threw up my hands in disgust and gave up on my quest and attempted to find the last bottle of Parker Penman Sapphire on the planet via e-bay, I decided maybe I should let my fingers do the walking.

After looking over the ink swatches I figured I would try and give the folks at Private Reserve a ring. I was able to get a hold of Terry for a quick conversation about what I was looking for and we had a nice conversation about his products and ink. He recommended their Lake Placid Blue. I asked him about the American Blue and he said that his customers seemed to think the Lake Placid Blue was a better alternative for a Penman Sapphire like color without some of the potential Penman issues of clogging. Terry was extremely helpful and I have been a long time user of a number of the green colors that they make. I thanked Terry for his advice and told him I would check out Lake Placid Blue as well as some other colors.

Living in the Chicago area I am very fortunate to have a variety of nice pen shops and retail stores to shop for ink, paper, and even the occasional modern pen. One of the truly friendly stores in the area is located in a wonderful town called Elmhurst. West Suburban Office Products has a pen lover who carries a nice supply of ink by the Sheaffer's, Parker's, Waterman's, Pelikan's, and other major manufacturer's as well boutique brands such as Private Reserve and Noodler's. He echoed Terry's comment that the closest ink he had seen to Parker Penman Sapphire was the Private Reserve Lake Placid Blue. As fate would have it, I had been in the shop a couple of weekends before and picked a blister pack of Midnight Blue cartridges, a bottle of Lake Placid Blue, American Blue, and a couple of bottles of the 2004 DC Super show Blue. Maybe the answer to my quest was already in my house. Why hadn't I tried the new inks yet? If you collect pens you already know the answer to that!

One of the advantages of collecting pens is that once in a while people unload some wonderful items (and sometimes a lot of worthless junk) on you. Thankfully, my in-laws fall into the former category rather than the later. The dip pen hadn't actually been used in at least 30 years and it needed a little cleaning before it was ready for duty. I figured the best way to compare colors would be to use the dip pen for each color with a thorough cleaning between colors. This gave me a nice set of baseline results and put me on the road to closing the case on my quest.

After finishing up with the dip pen, I figured it was time for some real world tests. My modern Sheaffer Balance stepped in for the dip pen and I created the samples included.

Parker Penman Sapphire has a certain tint at the edges of it that is quite noticeable in the right light. It is a dark blue with a hint of purple to my eyes. Waterman Florida Blue on the other hand is almost washed out looking in comparison. I also looked at a couple of vintage inks but both of them seem to have faded noticeably in the 40 or 50 years since they were made. I also tried out one of the all time great cheap pens – a Pilot with blue ink and another modern cheap – the Parker Reflex with permanent blue. The Parker permanent blue was actually a little nicer than the Waterman Florida. The Pilot ink had a noticeable violet cast to it and wasn't very interesting.