Due to severe delays and lack of ability to produce, Noodler's no longer accepts orders for custom large bottles. Sorry!
Nathan Tardif of Noodler's ink has always been willing to do custom oversized bottles of inks by request, you may or may not have seen some of them before. Noodler's regular bottles are 3 ounces, some come in 4.5 ounces, which is a LOT of pen ink! But if you think that's a lot, just think about how much 16 ounces, or even 32 ounces is! Nathan makes all of the Noodler's inks by hand, by himself, and he's easily the busiest man that I know. He likes making these large bottles, so he makes time for them. It usually takes several months for him to make the time to do them, so a few times a year we'll get a shipment of large bottles that'll come in...and this is the largest assortment of large bottles I've ever had at once! I thought it was definitely worth showing in a video.
One of the coolest things about these inks is that there is such a large amount of real estate for the ink label. Noodler's is known for having very unique custom labels (that Nathan does himself), and with the larger surface area on the big bottles, Nathan sometimes designs custom labels just for these big bottles (like Tiananmen, for example).
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| Large Noodler's Ink Bottles, 16 and 32 ounces! |
Prices for these inks vary based on the specific ink color and need to be quoted, since the cost of the dye components for each Noodler's inks can vary quite a bit. In general, 16 ounce bottles will start at a cost of $50, 32 ounce bottles will start around $90, and Nathan's even talked about his willingness to do a gallon bottle which would start around $275 (I've never seen one of these though!). There is some economy of scale here so you will get a little better cost per ounce of ink, but that's not necessarily the reason to get one of these bottles. I think the cool/brag factor is probably the biggest reason :) If you're interested, shoot Sam (our Goulet special order master) an email. Whether or not you're interested in getting a huge bottle of ink yourself, I thought it would be neat just to show an impressive array of large ink bottles!
He should get custom Noodlers Growlers made and sell the ink by the Growler!!!
ReplyDeleteIf we have another earthquake like we had in August 2011, these big bottles could make a real mess. :-)
ReplyDeleteholy cannoli, that's a lot of ink! I used Noodler's Polar Black as my exclusive ink for almost a year and I barely used a 3rd of the bottle. Can't imagine how much it'd take to go through one of those.
ReplyDeleteThat's what I was thinking-- some of those larger bottles look like Growlers.
ReplyDeleteThat is so cool! Though it'd be terrible if the labels fell off and someone mistook a bottle of ink for vinegar or something.
ReplyDeleteNow how much bubble wrap would one of these bottles eat up, I wonder? XD
When I open my pen shop, I'll just have the large gallon bottles behind the counter and sell ink by volume the old fashioned way. Because it would be cool, (and environmentally friendly) to have customers come in with their own inkwells/jars/bottles and refill them.
ReplyDeleteWouldn't it be 960 rather than 480?
ReplyDeleteAt half a ml, yes! 1000 fills! It wouldn´t work for me, I can´t stand using the same colour for that long. I get impatient halfway through a converter, I don't think I'd last a whole pistonfull...
ReplyDeleteThat would be so awesome. I'd buy from you!
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a kid I remember a local office supply store that had glass carboy with a spigot that had to held at least 3 gallons or more of ink. The store sold a 'house brand' Blue\Black ink and if you took your bottle back they would refill it for a discount. The nuns at the parochial school I went to all had at least one or two quart bottles of Blue\Black ink in their supply closet. I am pretty sure that post offices and bank up to the early to 1960's would have at the very least quart bottles of ink if not larger to keep their ink wells filled. My father said it was not uncommon for people to detour by the Post Office to fill up their fountain pen(s), up until the Post Office took out the ink wells and dip pens and replaced them with ball point pens.
ReplyDeleteWhat would you bring for me to fill? I like those jars with the rubber ring and the clip.
ReplyDeleteThat's the idea I was going for! The pen shop/museum I went to had two one litre bottles of ink (Pelikan and Waterman) that had been donated by schoolteachers who used to use them to fill the inkwells in the classroom.
ReplyDeleteHe might, I'm not sure! I know he's done 16 ounce, 32 ounce, and gallons, maybe he'd do a half-gallon. I know he told me that he does his gallons in big glass moonshine-like jugs, with the thumb ring and everything!
ReplyDeleteHaha! I think it'd be pretty hard to mistake Noodler's for vinegar! As for the bubble wrap....the answer would be a lot....can you imagine a 32 ounce bottle breaking?
ReplyDeleteYeah, you're right....960ish fills in a 16 ounce bottle, close to 2,000 with the 32 ounce! I was doing my math on the fly :P That's a lot of fills!
ReplyDeleteI'm kind of the same way, most of my 'ink bottles' come 2ml at a time ;)
ReplyDeleteDon't worry, they're stored safely around here : )
ReplyDeleteThat's wild! I've never seen anything like that in my lifetime. Fountain pens are such a novelty now, it's hard for young folks to imagine a world where the fountain pen was the 'norm'! Heck, these days you can pretty much get by without any kind of pen, what with all the gadgets and gizmos we all have.
ReplyDeletechug chug chug!!
ReplyDeleteOh they look great - but the freight costs would kill me. I might just one when I am feeling very extravagant. A HOD label in a large size would look fabulous!
ReplyDeleteBuy a growler of ink and get a growler of shine free!!!!
ReplyDeleteI'm in!
Hi Brian,
ReplyDeleteThis was indeed great review, and i am looking forward to a 16 oz Noodler Blue Eel headed my way. I love these blues, piston filled pens and lubricated inks.
Two reviews i would love to see are Noodler Blue compared to Blue Eel and a review of the Waterman Blue, as these are my top 3 blue ink favorites.
Paper is getting to be as big an issue as ink or even pens and nibs in my relative newbie experience. Rhodia is my favorite, but having another standard like HP 32# Laser or Inkjet or presentation might add to the fun! After a work day of copier grade paper coming home to a Rhodia pad is pure joy.
I was in Paris last June and went into a shop called Georges and Co. They had a house brand of ink and sold a rainbow of colors. The inks were mounted on the walls in inverted glass dispensers (similar to how some bars invert bottles of liquor) with push up mechanisms that released the ink. A family came in with two school age children to refill and stock up their ink for school. I was impressed.
ReplyDeleteYeah, they're not really the lightest bottles around...I've seen a 32 HOD label before, it was the same as the 3 ounce bottle, but much more impressive in the larger size!
ReplyDeletehaha, barf barf barf!
ReplyDeleteI have a Noodler's Blue review, but not a Blue Eel one. http://www.inknouveau.com/2011/08/noodlers-blue.html
ReplyDeleteRhodia is great, HP 32 is also great! I used to love the HP 28 as well, that's what we used at Goulet for our invoices for a long time. But they discontinued the paper, unfortunately! Their 24lb Laserjet isn't quite the same, but it's still very good, and it's about half the price of the 32lb. For volume like we use that makes a huge difference. But the 32 lb. is pretty much awesome.
Very cool! Yeah, there's definitely nothing like that here in the US, that I'm aware.
ReplyDeleteWell, if you use a converter of ink every day (which is a pretty good amount, but not unreasonable), a 16 ounce bottle would last you roughly 3 years. But that's writing a converter full every day, non-stop! It is definitely a lot of ink.
ReplyDeleteCould I get that in a 55 gallon drum? Thanks! *smirk*
ReplyDeleteHere we have the possibility of earthquakes, tornados and floods! I am curious as to what would be on the larger version of the Dark Matter label. A black hole? Possibly a mushroom cloud? Just so Brian can see a gallon of ink, someone (not me) needs to order one.
ReplyDeleteNathan doesn't always do a different label for the larger bottles, so I don't know. Nathan tends to work by his inspiration! I would love to see a gallon of ink....it would be quite impractical unless you were supplying ink for an entire school or office, but it would certainly be a sight to behold!
ReplyDeleteHaha....if you really wanted to, I'm sure Nathan could make it happen! Let's see....if a gallon starts at $275, that would put a 55 gallon drum at just over $15,000....yowza! How would one even ship that? :P
ReplyDeleteYou should look up Pelikan 4001 fountain pen ink - $64 per liter. I went through gallons of the stuff in college; it's not only good for fountain pens, but works equally well in air brushes. I plan on buying a big bottle of Noodler's in the near future.
ReplyDeleteOh yeah, Pelikan does go up to a liter, but only in their black and royal blue colors. And the bottles are, to be frank, ugly. Noodler's makes an art form out of large bottles :)
ReplyDeleteDoes Noodler take custom oversized bottles order now?
ReplyDeleteNot anymore. He's so stinkin' busy it's not even funny, so he had to stop making them. It was getting to the point where it was taking 6 months for him to make them, and it just wasn't practical anymore.
ReplyDelete