Ink Review– Rohrer & Klingner Scabiosa

Like any other forms of shopping, my luck with ink is mostly based on serendipity.  I forgot exactly how I encountered the brand Rohrer and Klingner, but its Scabiosa caught my eyes the moment I saw it.  I have been looking for a dusky purple as an alternative to blue (I don’t remember when is the last time I use black ink).  I tried out J. Herbin’s Poussiere de lune.  It is a nice color, but it has too much black as its undertone.  At once I thought I would just acquiesce with that color, but I knew the moment I cave it I would see something better, so I decided to wait it out.
It was definitely worth the wait.  I read a review somewhere praising R&K’s Scabiosa being an easy going ink, so I start looking to see whether any online retailer carries it.  It turns out that R&K has no distributor in the US, so any vendor who is interesting in carrying the ink would need to deal with R&K directly, in addition to VAT and other goodies.  There is one US-based retailer that carries full array of R&K, but each bottle at 50ml is priced at $14 (versus 5€ in Europe).  While I was going to just save up for an European trip and carry all these bottles back myself, I found an answer to my dilemma.  There is a Swedish retailer who offers free world-wide shipping and each bottle is priced at $7.  Well, you can picture my elation.  I immediately placed an order, but found out two weeks later that it was out of stock.  Long story short, I waited nearly 1 month for the ink and it is all worth the wait at the end.  I cannot wait to try out other colors produced by this brand!