The Staedtler Triplus Blackbox

I like a good pen as much as the next penophile. I bought my first fountain pen in high school with 3 weeks of gas station cleaning. It was a gorgeous silver plated heavy instrument from Yafa and it died a sad death on a busy street.

I’ve become more practical as I’ve gotten older. I typically just want something comfortable to write with that gets a sketch or sentence down on paper. I also want something that isn’t a small financial disaster if I lose it or someone “borrows” it. So, I carry around cheap pens that work well.

The Staedtler Triplus Blackbox is a great collection of cheap, but excellent, writing tools.1 For $12 you get six different pens.

  1. Yellow Highlighter
  2. Blue FineLiner
  3. Black FineLiner
  4. 0.5mm mechanical pencil
  5. Medium black ballpoint pen
  6. Black rollerball pen

The six pens come in a plastic case with a built-in folding stand. This is a perfect combination of pens to throw in a bag on the way to a conference or ludicrously long meeting. None of the implements are top-notch, but all of them are good enough for daily use.


  1. Affiliate link. ↩︎