Just a month ago I could satisfy a need that I had fostered for a long time: to take a close look at the Cervantes Limited Edition fountain pen that is. I have always admired the Cervantes in pictures and now I wanted to see if the high price is justified and if I might fall for this pen. A friend of mine purchased the pen, mainly for his collection, and I jumped at the chance to try out a new pen when he offered (and who would refuse, uh?).

I have to say that I am very skeptical of Montblanc pricing policy and their advertising. However, I am a lover of celluloid pens and – having this obsession with iridescent colors – I expected the Cervantes to be as rich in colors as my favorite celluloid pens (Omas, to name one). Of course, Mont Blanc Cervantes is not made of celluloid but mainly of some metal. It has a pleasant heft and the design of the pen tapering off in little subsections that are narrowing down is just ingenious.

However, there are points about this pen that I dislike. The color of the Cervantes rather seems cheap and industrial to me when turning it under bright light. Not even close to any spectral scintillation of e.g. celluloid or beautiful acrylic resins. Speaking of metal pens, not even close to having a nice lacquer polished look (like Dupont’s Chinese lacquer). Lacquer I can accommodate but the smoky variations seem out of place. On real life inspection I thought there was not much “depth” to the lacquer, it looked more like a painted finish.

That is something I guess I could go along with. Yet the grip section with the ink window just doesn’t match the rest of the pen. It is a simple brown plastic that really looks like your run-of-the-mill industrial plastic. Why does a pen that costs close to $750 expose such a flaw?

I was really enticed by the pen in pictures and I am by no means a Mont Blanc penmanship hater. So please don’t get me wrong here. I don’t want to rekindle the fire of hatred between Mont Blanc lovers and Mont Blanc haters.

I would just be curious how people who know the pen as well or even possess it, account for the shortcomings.

It seems that this wonderful pen design would have needed a manufacturer who works with more high-quality materials. Mont Blanc has some of the most innovative pen designs out there but in my view they really fail to make good for their inferior plastic. Even the Pelikan plastic in the M800s and newer (which is not fancy but really durable) has a much nicer design.

So the Cervantes is not one of my favorites. The idea is nice, but poor implementation isn’t worth the price tag. A nice celluloid would have been spectacular, but then thinking that an Omas celluloid Paragon costs about $900 so this pen is a couple hundred less.

I like the piston fill though, the clip, do like the oversized cap top with star they used much like the Schiller. The strong point of the pen – like most of the writers’ edition pens – is the nib, that tells the whole story and reveals the donation of it’s name.

Unfortunately there are many pens out there that seem like designed by committee when there was someone doing the body and another group doing the cap.

However, whether you like the Cervantes or not, from the collector’s point of view the Cervantes is a great piece to own. Cervantes is a famous author, Don Quixote is one of the world’s greatest literature classics, and the pen’s design is likened to bamboo, a sure thing that’ll make the Asian clients happy and makes it a highly collectible due to the interest received from the Asian market (which accounts for a large percentage of the world’s largest pen collectors).