Mark One: Apollo Edition

I’m a big fan of Studio Neat, the two-man design studio of Tom Gerhardt and Dan Provost. Their Glif is an amazing iPhone tripod mount (works with any size iPhone, or any other phone for that matter), and their Canopy turns Apple’s Magic Keyboard into my favorite portable iPad keyboard.

One of their most recent products is a pen: the Mark One. I’m using one as my daily carry right now (with a custom 3D-printed converter that lets me use my beloved Zebra Sarasa 0.5mm ink cartridges*). It’s a very nice pen and a beautiful, functional object. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, they’ve created a limited edition version, on sale in an 8-day Kickstarter campaign that coincides with the dates of the Apollo 11 mission. The project is already funded three times over — most likely, I suppose, from fans of the standard Mark One — and this is the only opportunity to buy this edition. I’m in.

See also: Gerhardt and Provost talk about the Apollo Edition on the latest edition of their podcast, Thoroughly Considered.

* For years, I swore by 0.4mm Sarasas. But now that I’m older and my eyesight is deteriorating, I can’t print as small as I used to, so I switched to 0.5mm a while back and now I can’t believe I ever used the 0.4mm pens for so long. A tenth of a millimeter sounds like a negligible difference, but in practice, it’s the difference between “very fine” and “fine”.

★ Friday, 19 July 2019