(Kimberly (she/her) took the express train down the fountain pen/stationery rabbit hole and doesn't want to be rescued. She can be found on Instagram @allthehobbies because there really are many, many hobbies!.)
As you may recall, I have been working on my Italian by copying/transcribing books. I started copying a pocket Italian Grammar book, which sounds exactly as fun as you think. Fortunately, I found the Italian children’s books that I bought years ago and decided I would read/copy one of them. After all, I was also copying The Little Prince (“TLP”, which is also a children’s book,) so why not an Italian one?
The book I picked is called “Un amico Internet per Valentina” (or “an Internet friend for Valentina) by Angelo Petrosino. Valentina is a 10 year old Italian girl who goes to elementary school, where she ends up getting a penpal from England and also an Internet penpal (yes, her father is nervous about this but it’s a nice kids book, not my usual murder mystery, lol).
This is the second book in the series (I’m waiting for the first book to arrive.)
With illustrations, large fonts, and even large chapter titles, the book was under 200 pages. So I picked an A5 Nebula Casual Note spiral notebook with 120 pages of their 90 gsm white paper. I was going to take a gamble and hope that would fit, but no big deal if it didn’t. (Spoiler: it fits, phew!)
This is the Nebula Casual Note. I like the minimalist starry decoration in the upper right corner.
I hadn’t used the Nebula paper in a few years so it was a nice change of pace from the usual Rhodia, Leuchtturm or Tomoe River. It has a bit of texture, almost like Midori Cotton. I used saturated inks, shimmer inks, and shading inks and had no problems with feathering or bleedthrough. Overall, I enjoyed using this paper, but I quickly discovered that I did not like side-bound spiral notebooks. As a right hander, I had no problems when writing on the right side of the page, but flip to the other side and omg, my hand would dig into the coils as soon as I got to the right half of the page.
Written with Rohrer & Klingner Solferino, which has a slight golden sheen which you can see here.
Shimmer from Diaming Kong Girls.
I wonder if it would be better or worse if it was a spiral (single) versus the double coil.
Unlike TLP, this is a physical book, which required me to use a book stand because (1) I don’t have room on my desk to lay out a book AND write in my notebook, and (2) so it’s easier to read when it’s propped up. Thankfully, I had bought a bookstand for this project - you can find it at The Gentleman Stationer. I love that it is foldable and has a low profile so it can sit flat on my desk without taking up a lot of room. You can also adjust it to a couple different angles, and use it with books/notepads/etc of varying thicknesses.
This metal book stand lays pretty flat when collapsed.
Valentina is all propped up.
You can see the 3 notches on the bottom of the stand which holds your book at different angles.
While I still prefer transcribing an eBook versus a paper book because I can change the font size and I don’t have to worry about schlepping a book around, I enjoyed the tactile sensation of flipping a paper book and eyeballing how much of the book or chapter is left (without relying on my Kindle app’s stats). It’s just a nice change of pace for me, since I do all my reading on the Kindle app.
With TLP, I (1) wrote almost all of it in cursive, (2) used a different pen/ink combination per page, and (3) only wrote on one side of the page because I was using a 52 gsm Tomoe River notebook. With Valentina, I changed it all up!
For starters, I wanted to do something a little different than the cursive writing I used in TLP, but I couldn’t decide on cursive versus print. And we know that the answer is always “both” whenever there’s a choice to be made! So I chose a style that is a slightly different style of my usual cursive as well as simple print, which I don’t usually use.
I asked IG folks which one they preferred and most of them said cursive.
Since I wasn’t planning on making IG posts for every page like I did with TLP, I decided to use that style for a whole chapter, regardless of how many pages it took. It was nice to get a few pages of practice, which really helped with improving my consistency, especially for print, which I don’t do nearly as much as cursive.
I wrote ~2-3 pages per chapter before switching styles.
This last one, it’s a doozy, at least for me. Ready for this? I wrote with one pen in this notebook until the pen was empty. I didn’t use the pen for any other purpose. Not only that, I decided to pick higher capacity pens too! No Kaweco mini-converters here! For someone who routinely has 48 inked pens in order to switch it up multiple times a day, doing this was pretty extreme! I know a lot of folks regularly write with one pen until it’s empty but not me! I left these pens at home so they wouldn’t accidentally get used while at pen meetups or in my regular day-to-day writing. I was also kind of curious how many pages it would take to empty out a pen, so it was a fun experiment!
I used the following pens to copy the book: Nahvalur Original Plus, Pilot Custom 823, TWSBI Eco-T, Pelikan M205 and Leonardo Momento Magico (which isn’t empty yet.)
I didn’t think to make this log until the third pen, which is why the first two entries are also in purple.
I had no idea how many pages it would take to write a pen dry from start to finish, but it took as few as 13 pages with the Pelikan to 34 pages with the TWSBI Eco-T. In all cases, I filled the pens to as much as they can be filled, including expelling air from the vac fillers to top them up. Thank goodness Fountain Pen Companion made it easy for me to track all of this!
Here are some stats:
- 199 physical pages (includes pictures, etc) -> 97 handwritten A5 pages
- 5 high capacity pens used (the 5th pen still has ~10 pages of ink left)
- Nahvalur Original Plus, Medium nib - 22 pages
- Pilot Custom 823, Fine Medium - 26 pages - I would have expected to get more pages due to the FM nib.
- TWSBI Eco -T, Medium - 34 pages - Wow, I am shocked I got more out of this pen than the 823!
- Pelikan M205, Medium - 13 pages - I know it’s a smaller pen than the others but I didn’t expect it to have that much less writing capacity.
- Leonardo Momento Magico, Medium nib - 11 pages so far. I’m pretty sure there’s another 10-20 pages worth of ink left.
- 4-5 months spent on this project, writing 4-5 times per week, 1-3 pages per session.
I’m no language expert or student of linguistics but I feel like transcribing a book in a foreign language has really improved my Italian. For starters, you can only really read and remember a few words at a time before writing them down. This makes it much easier to figure out what I was reading. Whereas, if I tried to read the book (and not copy it), I would naturally try to read it at the same pace as English and end up not understanding what I’m reading because my brain can’t process it at that faster rate. I’m also “speaking” the words in my head as I write them, which also engages a different part of the brain than just reading the words or writing them on paper.
When encountering unfamiliar words, I had heard and read that it is better to guess at the meaning than it is to bust out a dictionary to understand every single word. Every now and then, an unknown word or two would be so critical that I couldn’t figure out the gist without looking it up. Not gonna lie, Google Translate’s camera feature came in clutch a few times. But for the most part, I was able to follow along and understand the story even though I didn’t know every word. In the end, I would say I understood 75% or more of the text, which I think is pretty good, even if it is a book geared towards 5th graders!
Screenshot of the book (left side) and Google Translate (with Google Lens) in action on the right.
I still have another 20 or so pages left in this notebook AND the Leonardo Momento Magico is still inked up, so I’m excited to pick up another Valentina book and keep on reading, writing, and learning!
Next up, “Gli Amici di Valentina” (Valentina’s Friends)!
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