Thomas Slim comes out swinging in the pocket fountain pen category

When Thomas Slim (the brand) reached out to me (the person) offering a review sample of their new pocket pen, I sighed, rolled my eyes, and prepared to decline.

I don’t get a lot of review offers nowadays, but I’m used to them being for low-effort steel-nibbed Aliexpress jobs, and I just don’t see it being worth my time — or yours.

But this time I said yes, and I’m glad I did.

Spoiler alert: this pocket pen is absolutely not perfect, for me at least, in a couple of very important functional ways.

But from the very first impressions, it is a tour de force in bringing a concept to life and attending to every detail. It really brought a smile to my face and there were several instances where I found myself whispering ‘oh that’s cool’ under my breath.

Let me lead you through.

Firstly: packaging. I normally don’t review packaging at all. But in this case it echoes the barley guilloche pattern that occurs across the pen. It’s also just beautifully done, and all from recyclable cardboard. Full marks. This would make a very impressive gift.

The pen itself is midsized for a pocket pen. It’s a tiny bit shorter when capped than a Kaweco Sport, a bit longer than a Schon pocket. It passes the first-impressions test with flying colours: it’s well proportioned, and honestly looks like nothing else.

In the hand, it’s weighty and solid, and well finished. This pen is made from stainless steel, and on the scales with cartridge installed it’s 37g. That’s heavy: about the same weight as the Kaweco Steel Sport, but 50% more than the Traveler’s brass pen, for example.

As we start to look over the pen, a load of impressive little details leap out. A little disc of abalone decorates the end of the pen.

The cap features a large ring for a lanyard, impressively milled and with contrasting mirror-polish and brushing.

And of course there’s the barleycorn knurling, in three different spots… so this is a pen of textures.

(It’s worth noting that there’s no clip and no rollstop, so this pen is prone to escaping from desks.)

The pen body itself has some tasteful and very nicely done engraving, just next to the acme threads (two and a half turns to uncap and again to post).

Both cap and barrel are lined with plastic, so both the cap threads and section threads run extremely smoothly with no metal-on-metal grating.

There’s also an o-ring in the section, which should help avoid accidental unscrewing. Bonus points for the tiny hidden serial number, just visible in the photo below. As you can tell, this is a cartridge-only design.

I said there were a lot of details, right?

With the cap removed, the pen itself is very small and slim — this is one of those pocket pen designs, like the Toms Studio, Montegrappa Gnomo, or even the Sport, where the cap is large, overlaps the barrel, and is intrinsic to the overall writing experience. Due to length, it’s impossible to use this pen without posting the cap (so if you do use a lanyard on the cap, make sure it’s easily removed).

The nib is a Schmidt, much like the Traveler’s pen uses. I’ve had overall good experiences with these little steel nibs, and the example here is an M, which writes well. The cap also seems to seal well with no drying out: important for this kind of pen, which may see only occasional use. My only complaint is that by the standards of ‘modern’ pocket pen designs, it’s unusual not to see a #6 nib, especially since this is a larger pen. Gravitas fits a #8 nib in a pocket pen about the same size!

The cap posts securely and turns this into a full-size writer. Unfortunately, at least for me, the ergonomics just don’t work that well.

The cap accounts for 21g of the fairly hefty 37g total weight. To put that into context, the cap of the Thomas Slim pen weighs more than an entire Schon P6.

With that beefy cap screwed on to the back of the pen, the writing experience is pretty back-heavy (the balance point is 8cm behind the nib, of a total 14.5cm length).

What’s more, the section has a very pronounced waist, down to an extremely slim 8mm, which drags your grip down low on the pen. And then the knurling on the section is so polished that it provides no meaningful grip.

The end result is slippery and pendulous, and despite having the length of a full-size fountain pen, I found the Thomas Slim tiring after just a few paragraphs of writing my journal. To get a comfortable and balanced hold for longer writing sessions, I had to grip up where the barrel peeks out from under the cap, which seems a little perverse given the deliberate section design.

And for quick notes on the go, having to screw-post the cap is annoyingly slow: I’d rather use a pen that I don’t have to post at all (like the Sport), or where uncapping and posting is much faster (like the magnetic Spoke Roadie, or push-to-post Traveler’s), or where the pen itself is truly tiny (like the Gravitas Quark).

Are the ergonomics a dealbreaker? For me personally, yes. For all the wonderful design and engineering that Thomas Slim put into this pen, I didn’t much enjoy writing with it. I actually dug out all my other pocket pens to sanity check my gut reaction, and none of them had such a tripple-whammy of slippery narrow section, heavy weight, and backweighted balance.

However, as always, your mileage may vary depending on your grip, writing angle, and other factors — so don’t take this as complete damnation.

At a projected full retail price of about £60, the Thomas Slim considerably undercuts (just for example) the Gravitas Pocket in stainless steel, and the steel Kaweco Sport. And that’s extremely impressive given the quality packaging, lined cap, lined barrel, o-ring in the section, great threads, abalone insert, variety of machined finishing, etc etc etc.

There’s a lot to like here. If the comfort works for you, I think the Thomas Slim pocket pen offers considerable bang for the buck.

To find out more, check out the listing on Kickstarter.