Stationery enthusiasts with a decanting problem.

Which is a polite way of saying we kept buying whole bottles of ink to find out whether we liked them, and kept being wrong. This shop is the fix we wanted to exist.

The trial is the product.

A shop that sells you a full bottle is selling a commitment. We sell the bit that comes before it, the part where you find out. Being wrong about a colour should cost almost nothing, and in a sample it does.

The decanting bench

Every sample is filled by hand from a full bottle, into a clean vial, and labelled before it goes anywhere. The label carries the ink's name and reference number, because one dark blue looks much like another once it is in the vial. We have made that mistake so you do not have to.

The bench is kept clear of anything we would mind staining permanently. Ink finds a way.

There is no photograph of the bench here yet. The one that goes in this space is of our bench, with our vials on it. Until it has been taken, a stock desk would be doing the arguing for us.

Three things we say a lot

Get inky
Nobody has ever ordered three and stopped at three.
See what sticks
A colour that looked right on a screen can be wrong in your own hand.
An inkling
The suspicion that the grey you dismissed is the one.

What we will not do

  • No reviews we wrote ourselves.

    Every review on the site was written by someone whose order reached them, and carries their name and the date they wrote it. We read each one before it goes up.

  • No claiming a maker backs us.

    We name the makers whose bottles we decant, so you know exactly what is going into the vial. Naming them is not a claim that they supply us, endorse us or have ever heard of us.

  • No price you have not agreed to.

    Every price is on the ink's own page, delivery is added in the tray before you reach checkout, and the total you pay is the total you saw. Nothing is added after.

  • No borrowed photograph without the credit.

    Every photograph of an ink here is somebody else's, because ours are not written yet. Most are the makers' own. Where a maker publishes nothing — Noodler's does not — they belong to the shop that stocks it or the distributor that imports it, and each ink's page says which. When each colour has been written out here (same nib, same paper, same light), those are the pictures that replace them.

Six drawers, one pull each

The makers' own swatches, borrowed until ours are dry.

Enough about us.

The swatch book is where the actual decision happens.

Start swatching