Almost never. Tomoe River 68gsm is the gold standard for fountain pen — the surface is dense enough to resist feathering on most nibs and wet inks. The one exception we've seen is very wet broad italics with Diamine Shimmer inks, which puddle. Standard EF–M nibs with normal Iroshizuku, Sailor, Pelikan, etc. are clean.

Spanish — yes, including accented characters (Ñ, Á). Japanese — we can press kana and basic kanji using our Newsreader-paired Noto Serif JP matrix, up to 3 characters or 4 kana. Cyrillic and Greek are supported by email request. Arabic and Hebrew aren't in production yet; we hope to add them in 2027.

The Tärnsjö hides are a by-product of the Nordic dairy industry, processed by a tannery that's been operating since 1873 and is independently audited by the Leather Working Group at Gold rating. Not "cruelty-free" in the sense of no animal — we're a leather company — but verifiably by-product and not driving slaughter. We publish the COC document on each batch's product page.

We make a pocket size (A6, 128 pages, $74) and a desk size (B5, 320 pages, $138) as quarterly drops. A4 is too large to hand-stitch in a single signature on Tomoe River paper; we'd have to use multiple signatures and the stack gets unwieldy. We've prototyped, we haven't loved it. If we ship it, it'll be in 2027.