The gift guide for the dad who still carries a real pen
What actually earns a permanent spot in someone's daily carry.
There’s a version of Father’s Day gift-giving that most people default to: something from Amazon’s trending list, something that seemed like a good idea in a browser tab at midnight, something forgettable by July.
The problem isn’t the intention. It’s the framework. Most people pick gifts based on what they’d want, or what looks impressive at the price point, rather than asking the harder question: what would this person actually reach for, six months from now, when it’s cold out and their day is already too long?
I think about this as an engineer.
On job sites, you carry what earns its spot. There’s no room in a vest pocket for things that might come in handy. Every tool you bring makes an argument for itself every time you use it. Or it gets left behind. That standard, applied to gifts, changes what you buy.
The Rhodia No. 16 is a $10 A5 notepad. It sounds unimpressive until you use it with any decent pen. The 80gsm paper is the reason fountain pen ink doesn’t bleed through, and the dot grid keeps handwriting honest without the rigidity of lines. I’ve been through a dozen notebooks across a decade of engineering work. This one I keep buying.
The Fisher Space Pen is for the person who doesn’t own a fountain pen and probably won’t, but writes every day and deserves something better than the free pen they picked up from a conference table. It writes upside down, in the cold, on greasy paper. It clips to anything. It’s small enough that it’s always on you.
When someone’s ready to try a fountain pen for the first time, I point them to the Kaweco Sport. It fits in a pocket. You don’t have to think about nib geometry to enjoy it. Fill it, cap it, write.
The TWSBI Eco is the next step: the pen for someone who already knows they like writing with a fountain pen and wants to open up bottled ink. It’s a demonstrator, meaning you can see exactly how much ink is left, which is more useful than it sounds. I’ve been pairing mine with Lamy Azurite, a saturated blue-violet with a gold-green sheen that photographs well and is the kind of color that makes you want to write more just to see it on the page.
The Alpaka Tech Case is where all of it lives. I’ve had mine for two years. It holds the pens, ink samples, a spare notebook, chargers. The whole analog and digital carry in one place. The thing that makes a daily carry a system instead of a pile is usually the container.
None of this is the gift I’m most proud of giving.
My family has two coffee farms in Caldas, Colombia. The region produces some of the best single-origin beans in the world. The coffee I brew before every shoot, the cup that’s in my hand before the camera turns on, comes from there. It’s what I give when I want to give something with a real story behind it.
Ríos de Oro. Single-origin Colombian coffee, from our farms in Caldas.
For the full breakdown, including which variants to buy, what to avoid, and how each fits together as a kit, I put it all into a video this week: Gifts for Dads Who Actually Plan
Until next week,
Luis
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