Staedtler Initium Lignum fountain pen review

 The Staedtler Initium product range consists of the Resina, the Lignum, the Metallum, the Corium Simplex and the Corium Urbes. I already did a review on the Resina and was amazed about the outstanding writing performance of the nib.

I bought this pen in 2021 for only 50 Euro at iBood. At that time you could buy a lot of the Initium pens at a reduced price. Today you cannot buy it anymore from Staedtler, so I suppose production has been stopped.

The Lignum is very similar to the Resina. Only the Lignum is much heavier than the Resina (46.50 gr. vs. 26.7 gr.) and the overall build quality is higher. The Lignum is actually just a step above the Resina. The nibs are the same which tells me that the inner parts are also the same.

The steel cap looks really good. It has the Staedtler logo on top and the brand name aside. It has a big long cap that seems to be very functional. On the opening of the cap ‘made in Germany’ is debossed. The cap screws on the barrel in a very neat way due to the quality of the threads. You only need a little bit more of one turn to remove the cap. 

The cap posts very well on the back of the pen, tight and secure. But I would not recommend this because the heavy cap adds a lot of backweight which makes writing difficult.

The wood barrel looks clean and fresh and is an eye-catcher. They used plum wood. Only concern here is that the plum wood looks unfinished, not lacquered. I’m afraid that when you use the pen a lot, after a while some stains from your sweaty hands or from ink will soil the barrel. 

The section screws into the barrel on fine threads and stays secured. 

Until now only good news!

The nib is a fine steel nib. The nib seems to be the same nib as the Resina: it has a chromy finish with the Staedtler logo on it. The fine nib is really sharp, feels scratchy and does not give good feedback in this way that it sometimes tends to go its own way. The nib offers a lot of line variation. For me the fine nib is not spot on and it needs some fine-tuning. The lines it produces are not wet. I felt like if I wrote with my right hand (remember I'm a lefty) the nib felt better. Maybe they didn't take left-handers into account :-(.

What I always like is that you can take apart the nib and the feeder, this makes cleaning so much easier.

For refilling the pen you can use standard international cartridges or a converter. 

As a general conclusion I can say, in the mindset that the nib is perfectly tuned, that I like this pen very much, although there are some minor issues. The high quality build and the fact that I only paid 50 Euros makes it a good deal for me. When I noticed that they sold this pen in the US for $ 225, I would never buy this pen for that price.