Raleigh Pen Show and a Soak Test

Hi Folks,
My wife is home from Cambodia, and she brought back the camera, so I can get back to more regular posting about inks and such. I have a number of them read to go.

If you are on the FPN, then you've seen the controversy over the new Goulet's exclusive ink: Liberty's Elysium. It is (was?) billed as a bulletproof and water resistant ink, and some people are not satisfied with its performance. I was curious, so I put some various inks on paper and then soaked them for about 5 hours last night. Here are the images for you.

I let the writing dry while I was at the pen show, so several hours.

Here's the sheet after it has been underwater for  5 hours.

Here it is after drying out.

 As you can see, I wrote with LE in three different pens. The Ahab puts down a significant amount of ink, and that one fared the best of the three LE lines. The Lamy medium is a dryer writer, but even that is perfectly legible. The Hero is medium-wet, and that one looks just fine to me as well. Of course, LE didn't fare as well as the Hunter Green (bulletproof) and Zhivago (which hardly changed at all, to my surprise).

I think the controversy is overblown. Some of the ink is washed away, but it's certainly still legible.

I was at the Raleigh Pen show yesterday, and I met some interesting people, and I brought a couple of things home with me. I ended up getting a bottle of Noodler's Air Corps Blue Black and a TWSBI Vac 700 from Anderson Pens. It's a great pen, so far, and I've been meaning to pick up some of that ink for a while. The Andersons were very helpful, and friendly.