The best pens worth buying, three of them from the 1960s

Muji sells this as a body with no ink in it, which tells you exactly what they think you are buying.

The aluminium knock body is 100% aluminium, including the tip, with a steel spring and screw inside. It weighs about 10 grams. There is no branding, no colour and no trim, and at five dollars there is no argument to have about any of it.

Sold empty is the interesting part. Muji treats the refill as a separate purchase from the same shelf, and any pen in their gel range fits: 0.38, 0.5 or 0.7 millimetre, in whichever colour. The chassis outlives dozens of them.

That approach makes a five dollar pen worth writing about. A disposable pen is a body you throw away when the ink stops, and the ink is most of what you paid for. This inverts it. The aluminium lasts indefinitely and the running cost is a refill roughly the price of a coffee, ordered from the same place every time.

The limits are honest ones. The knock is plastic-sounding, the clip is thin, and there is no weight to it, which some people want in a pen and others cannot stand. Ten grams is the lightest thing here by a factor of two.

The cartridge carries its own pressure, so gravity has nothing to do with whether it writes.

Every other pen on this page relies on gravity pulling ink toward the tip. The Bullet pushes instead. Nitrogen at 45 psi sits behind a thixotropic ink, a fluid that stays solid until the rolling ball shears it into liquid, so the pen writes upside down, underwater, over grease and at any angle at all.

The working range runs from -30°F to +250°F. Fisher had the design ready in 1966 and it first left the atmosphere aboard Apollo 7, and the shape has not changed since. It is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, which is not a claim many pocket tools can make.

Closed it measures 3.75 inches, which is short enough to disappear into a coin pocket. Posted, the cap goes on the back and it opens out to 5.25 inches, so it writes like a full-sized pen. Those two numbers together are the entire product.

The compromise is the ink. Pressurised ballpoint ink is thicker than gel and lays down a slightly heavier, slightly draggier line, and no amount of engineering fixes that. You are trading the way it writes for the certainty that it will.

One Goliath refill covers about 600 A4 pages, or roughly eight kilometres of line.

That figure reframes the price. Fifty dollars for a pen sounds like a lot until the refill inside it writes eight thousand metres, which is several years of ordinary use for most people and puts the running cost somewhere below negligible.

The 849 arrived in 1969 and has kept the same hexagonal aluminium barrel since. Hexagonal is a functional choice before an aesthetic one: the flats give a pencil's grip, and nothing hexagonal rolls off a sloped surface. Caran d'Ache still makes them in Geneva, and the Black Code version drops the chrome for matte black throughout.

The clicking mechanism is the other thing people mention. It is firmer and quieter than the price suggests, which matters on an object you operate several hundred times a week without thinking.

Against the Muji it is ten times the money for a similar idea, executed properly. Against the Grovemade below it is half the money and half the weight. The middle of the page in every sense, and the one most people would be glad to receive.

Three flat facets down the barrel, so it will not roll off a desk that is not quite level.

Almost no desk is level, and almost every round pen eventually finds that out. Grovemade machined the Desk Pen from one piece of solid aluminium with a trilobe profile, which solves the rolling and gives a slimmer grip than a round barrel of the same volume. An anodised finish, and the whole thing cut in the Portland area.

The refill is a Schmidt P8126 rollerball at 0.6 millimetres, a standard part and not a proprietary one. That matters more than it sounds: a pen tied to a refill only its maker sells is a pen with an expiry date attached to that company.

Weight is the point of difference. Solid metal gives it noticeably more mass than anything above it here, and a heavy pen is pleasant on a desk and tiring in a pocket. Grovemade know this, which is why it is sold with an optional walnut or maple stand and called a desk pen rather than a pen.

Buy it for a desk you sit at. It is the wrong object for a jacket, and it is the only pen on this page that is honest about being furniture as much as a tool.

Gerd A. Müller drew it in 1966 and Lamy has changed nothing, which after sixty years stops being conservatism and starts being evidence.

The 2000 is Makrolon, a polycarbonate, brushed along its length and joined to stainless steel so precisely that finding the seam takes effort. That single detail is what the money buys and what photographs never convey.

The nib is 14 carat gold with a platinum coating, and hooded, so the body shrouds all but the tip. Hooding was a practical decision: less exposed metal means less evaporation, so the pen is slower to dry out when someone leaves it uncapped on a Friday. It comes in fine or medium and nothing else, which is Lamy declining to invent a choice nobody needed.

It fills by piston. Unscrew the back, draw ink up through the nib from a bottle, and carry on: no cartridges, no proprietary consumable, and a far larger capacity than any cartridge system. Closed it is 13.8 centimetres, posted 15.2, and it weighs 25 grams.

Sixty years of continuous production is the specification that matters. Parts exist, every repairer knows it, and the design has survived every trend that arrived after it.

The refill decides the running cost, and sometimes the lifespan

Four of these five take a refill you can buy from more than one source, and the Lamy takes bottled ink, which is the cheapest of all per page. A pen locked to a proprietary refill is only as serviceable as the company that makes it. Check what goes inside before you buy the outside, because that is the part you will purchase twenty more times.

Weight is a preference, not a quality

Ten grams for the Muji, twenty-five for the Lamy, and appreciably more for the machined Grovemade. Heavier pens feel substantial on a desk and become tiring in a shirt pocket over a day. Neither end is better made. Decide where the pen lives first, then pick the mass that suits it.

Hexagonal and faceted barrels exist for a reason

The Caran d'Ache is hexagonal and the Grovemade has three flats, and both shapes stop the pen rolling off a desk. Round barrels look calmer and roll. A small thing, until the fourth time you pick a pen up off the floor.

A fountain pen is a different commitment

The Lamy needs bottled ink, an occasional flush, and a habit of capping it. In exchange it writes with less pressure than a ballpoint, which is the reason people with long writing sessions move to one. If none of that sounds appealing, the four ballpoints and rollerballs above are not a compromise, and this is the wrong page to talk you into a hobby.

The Muji, if the pen should be nearly free and completely replaceable while the body outlasts the ink. The Fisher, for a pocket, a coat or anywhere writing has to work at a bad angle. The Caran d'Ache, if one pen has to do everything and look considered doing it. The Grovemade, for a desk you sit at daily and would like to furnish. The Lamy, if you write enough for the nib to matter.

Notice how little separates the top and bottom of this list functionally. All five put ink on paper reliably for years. What the money buys is materials, mass and the sense that somebody solved a problem instead of styling a shape, and three of these five solved it before 1970 and never had to look at it again.