Hard rubber is still in one fountain pen in five
You rarely stop to think what the pen in your hand is made of. Classify everything with a recorded material and the answer is not quite what you would guess.
The breakdown
- Resin and acrylic — 39.4%
- Other (composite or individually described) — 24.0%
- Ebonite — 19.1%
- Metal (brass, aluminium, stainless) — 11.7%
- Wood — 5.8%
Resin at just under 40 percent is unsurprising.
The runner-up is the surprise.
One pen in five is ebonite
Ebonite is natural rubber hardened with sulphur. It was invented in the mid-nineteenth century — it became a fountain pen material before plastics were widespread.
And it still accounts for roughly 20 percent. A material over 150 years old is doing active duty in one pen out of five.
Resin never displaced it, presumably because it turns beautifully, warms to the hand, and ages into a browned patina that people actively want. That is a guess, and it is written here as one.
Why "other" is 24 percent
The 24 percent that would not classify may be the most interesting part of all.
- "Barrel: resin. Grip: silicone rubber" — different materials by section
- "Ebonite, urushi lacquer, raden shell"
- "Ebonite, urushi lacquer, gold leaf, maki-e"
No single material name will do. Japanese craft fountain pens in particular are built up in layers over a substrate. It is the demand to pick one material that has failed to keep up with the objects.
Why wood is only 5.8 percent
Wooden barrels come to 5.8 percent — which does not mean wooden pens are scarce.
Workshops that turn wood run dozens of timbers through a single shape: Nohara Kogei offers 244 combinations across five shapes. Few product names, enormous choice. Change the denominator and the impression changes with it.
The limits of this count
Only about a quarter of the records carry a material at all. The rest simply has not been researched yet. This is a count of what is known, and that should be stated plainly.
(Compiled from records in PencilDB that carry a material, August 2026.)