A note from Blake

Hello fountain pen friends,

As Yagan stated in his final post, he has agreed to hand me the reins to Macchiato Man. I’d like to thank him for his excellent work over the last decade. This blog has been a wonderful resource for fountain pen users and I am thrilled to have this opportunity.

About me: I’m based in San Francisco, USA, and I’ve been using fountain pens for over 20 years. In 2013, I started a pen blog called The Unroyal Warrant, but I had to let it go as work consumed my free time. Today, my life is quite a bit different; I’m self-employed and run a stationery store called The Paper Mind. I also have a YouTube channel for fountain pen reviews called Blake’s Broadcast. While I love running my shop and making videos, I’ve missed the writing and photography of blogging.

What’s next?

While some things may change, the essence of Macchiato Man remains intact.

The blog will continue to deliver high-quality fountain pen content. I plan to post regularly, at least once a month. My goal is to expand this exceptional resource by creating useful and enjoyable content for the fountain pen community. In that respect, I’d really like to hear from you as I begin my journey at Macchiato Man.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be making minor updates and feature changes to the site.

More soon,

Blake

A new beginning for Macchiato Man

Hi everyone,

It has been a very long time since I posted anything here and the reasons are plentiful but at the core of them is a shifting of interests and other aspects of life taking away time I have to commit to this endeavour.

My first post was over 8 years ago with a rather messy review of Robert Oster’s Summer Storm. Since then there have been 66 ink reviews, 19 pen reviews, 17 ink comparisons and a few other discussions, paper reviews and stationery reviews. Over 140 articles in total.

I’m pretty proud of where things got to with this blog and a few of the articles have become rather well viewed resources for the community (mainly the Black Ink Comparison and the Sailor Ink Studio Overview).

I realised that I simply don’t have the time to maintain this site and keeping a site up (with Squarespace’s rather pricy plan costs) wasn’t that was bringing me value. But I still recognised that it was a valuable resource so I wanted to make sure it stays up at the very least.

So I reached out to the community asking for people who would like to either take over the blog and keep in running or take over and continue to make contributions. Several people did reach out and offer to take over the blog in various ways and I truly appreciate all that did.

I did eventually reach an agreement with Blake from The Paper Mind to take control of Macchiato Man and to continue its operation both in terms of keeping the site up and creating future content that I am sure will become new resources for the community. I will let Blake introduce himself below but Blake has a long history with blogging for the pen community and recently transitioned to YouTube as well.

Obviously that will mean some changes for the site (and associated social media accounts) but Blake wants to keep this site within the spirit of what I have done here.

Thank you Blake for taking over the mantle for this website and I’m confident the site is in good hands!

Thank you for all the support I have had in this place over the years from various sponsors to the pen community at large and especially the Fountain Pens Australia community!

Over to you Blake!