Stipula Calamo Sepia (?)

I don't know if this ink has a "real name" so I'm going to call it Sepia. The box it comes in is huge and red with a little smudge of the color on a white spot on the side. It's not a great convention for identifying ink, if you ask me.



Anyway, this Sepia was the bottle that they were giving away for free at the Stipula table during the DC Pen Show. That table was really hard for me to find for some reason. I don't know why, but my wife and I just kept walking right past it. Big sign and everything. I think we were distracted by the Monteverde and Conklin pens that were in the same area. When we found the Stipula rep, he was a little surprised when we asked after the free ink. Maybe there were a lot of people who missed the table.

This ink is a light brown sepia tone that is kind of a gritty, light dirt color. (It doesn't feel gritty, it just kinda looks like it.) The color is an unusual one, and it's unique among the browns that I have and that I have seen. I'm not really a huge fan of it, but it's interesting.

When I wrote the original review of it, I wrote it on Rhodia. Rhodia is great for inks to show off their shading and such, but it didn't work all that well with this ink. It was way lighter than it looks on other papers. I usually only write up one review of an ink, but this one needed two. The second one is written in the Markings notebook that I used when I first started this blog. It is much more representative of the usual color you see from this ink. This link shows smears of the Stipula ink along side several other popular browns. 

The bottle is an interesting one. It's big, but it doesn't hold nearly as much ink as the Noodler's bottles that are about the same size. It's got really thick walls, and it wasn't completely full. The picture below shows the Stipula bottle between the 90ml Noodler's bottle and the 45ml Aurora bottle. It's weird how much these companies vary in ink volumes. 

The verdict? Mixed. If you like this sort of light brown color, then grab a bottle. It's a fine ink that has good characteristics.  It doesn't feather or bleed, and it feels like it has a very pleasing viscosity. I'm just not a super-fan of the color.

I'm not sure where you can come across it, but the other Stipula colors go for about $19 a bottle at Jetpens.com. I've read that this color is exclusive to the pen show, but that doesn't mean that you can't find some on eBay or one of the fountain pen sites.

**The water test hasn't been done yet. I'll have it up soon.