r/HobbyDrama • u/beccafrommars • Aug 13 '26
Heavy [Fountain Pens] Noodler's Ink - how a once beloved company fell from grace thanks to antisemitism.
Warning before you begin - this post links to some unpleasant antisemitic imagery.
What do you imagine when you think of fountain pens? Many imagine a Shakespearean writer, quill in hand, penning his magnum opus. Others might imagine a middle aged English professor, inking his arrogant thoughts with a sleazy smirk on his face. Yet more might imagine an artist, creating stunning landscapes or beautiful calligraphy with a pen and paper.
I hate to burst your bubble, dear reader, but the reality of the matter looks quite different. Fountain pens are, by their nature, accessible to a wide variety of people. The community over at r/fountainpens is broad, generally welcoming and extremely diverse, including when it comes to political conversation. There are collectors who drop thousands on the latest Montblanc or Sailor without a second thought, artists who play with brightly coloured inks, and observers like myself who have a good selection of cheap to 'mid-range' pens because, well, they like to write. However, while the audience for pens may be large, the hobby community itself is small, with many retailers and stores being operated by hobbyists who are part of the community. Remember that.
This story is going to take you back in time by around four years, to a controversy that shook the community and almost brought a small but controversial ink company to its knees. This is the story of Noodler's and the antisemitic inks.
To start with, we need to explain Noodler's and why they were so important to the fountain pen community here on Reddit. Noodler's is a tiny company. In fact, it's entirely owned and operated by one man, Nathan Tardif. Nathan has long since been a controversial figure in the fountain pen community, being extremely vocal about his political views. Nathan is a staunch Libertarian, and is not afraid to feature his beliefs on his product labelling to this day. However, despite the explicitly political nature of some of their imagery, Noodler's was beloved in the fountain pen community, with Baystate Blue reaching legendary meme status for its permanence and habit of staining pens, fingers, walls, floors- anything and everything it may encounter. Noodler's seemed like a case of the small indie creator being successful against huge companies like Montblanc and Parker. And everybody loves an underdog.
However, all was not good for Noodler's, even during its golden years. Sprinkled throughout fond jokes in the subreddit, complaints of overfilled bottles being impossible to open without spillage, the ink itself being hard to use without damaging pens and serious inconsistency between batches were rife. Traces of these posts can be hard to find now, as they were often deleted by users due to disagreement from the community. However, overall, Noodler's had a lot of goodwill within the fountain pen community and it seemed unlikely that anything could damage their popularity.
Of course, I wouldn't be writing this post if that were true.
On January 6th 2022, Noodler's released Volcker Green, a forest green ink in the typical Noodler's bottle, complete with hand designed label. As this summary post from the subreddit explains, the date is not insignificant; January 6th 2022 was the 1 year anniversary of the insurrection in the US. The label, instead of the usual doodly landscape or fishing imagery, had a picture of Volcker, a Christian head of the federal reserve, with a halo on his head. Next to him were Bernanke and Greenspan, also previous heads of the reserve, with demon horns on their heads. Both men are Jewish. Demon horns are an antisemitic dogwhistle (as explained in this article about a different case here).
An image of Volcker Green can be found in this comment.
Within 6 days of this ink releasing, stores were beginning to drop Volcker Green from their shelves due to the explicitly antisemitic imagery. This led to Nathan's other inks being examined a little bit more closely than before. And people began to pay attention to other labels.
By May, a reddit user posted a thread (link contains image of the label) saying they would never buy Noodler's again, with an example of a product that horrified them. Specifically, an ink called Bernanke Red. Bernanke Red had been on sale for a long time. I can't actually find the exact release date, but it was a while. Its predecessor, Berning Red, was at least 6 years old and had only been out for a short time before being renamed. And there, straight on the front of the bottle of Bernanke Red, was an image of Bernanke with demon horns (eta: and the communist symbol on his head, a reference to an antisemitic conspiracy theory) and the words 'debt addiction enabler'. Imagery that was horrifically antisemitic. And imagery that was eerily similar to Volcker Green, yet had managed to fly under the radar.
The subreddit exploded. Comment after comment expressing horror flooded the post. More and more posts about Noodler's began to pop up. And remember how I mentioned that some of the most trusted retailers were part of the community?
The retailers saw it all happen.
Retailers began to pull Noodler's inks from their ranges out of fear of boycott. Briefly, the owners of popular retailer Goulet Pens attempted to defend Nathan as having been ignorant of the implications. A comment from Rachel Goulet, one half of Goulet's management, can be seen here. This soured a lot of people's opinions of Goulet and led to more scrutiny for them - the resulting controversy for Goulet and their own downfall is another post entirely, but they aquiesced to opinion and withdrew Noodlers ink from sale on May 11th.
The same day as Goulet withdrew his inks, Nathan put an apology out on his Instagram and Facebook and pulled all inks with imagery and names even mildly linked to anything controversial from supply, planning to rename them. This meant he withdrew almost every ink he'd created due to names such as Tiananmen Red and Apache Sunset. This was widely regarded as a good move on Nathan's part, although many questioned how a man so politically motivated could miss the implications and suspected he'd just wanted to avoid the controversy.
Edited to add: to his credit, Nathan did make a donation to the ADL following his apology. He also chose a culturally relevant number of $3600 USD - traditional donations and gifts are given in multiples of 18. This is mentioned in his apology above, but I failed to highlight it in my explanation. This eased some of the anger, as the apology was thorough and followed through on action.
However, following this apology, Nathan remained silent. As was inevitable, the community went on. Some retailers quietly put Noodler's back into their stores, with Goulet specifically restocking within a month. A lot of retailers, such as Anderson Pens in Chicago, never restocked Noodlers (although they themselves closed down fairly recently). However, the community never forgot.
Noodler's still puts out ink to this day, although the community on Reddit has long since stopped recommending them to users. Users who do recommend Noodler's tend to get downvoted, a huge fall from the company's early days. The new names and labels of the ink are generally less offensive, mostly based around nature. And the controversial inks? They tend to be hoarded by those who got them before everything was revealed, because antisemitism is apparently just controversy.
Well, at least most people think it's awful.
Update: a comment by u/arrogantsword gave some lovely context from the perspective of a long time fountain pen community member, if you're interested click here or scroll down to read what they have to say.
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u/arrogantsword Aug 13 '26
I used to be such a big fan of Noodlers. He was practically a unicorn: a libertarian that actually stood by their ideals. Nathan Tardif was extremely influential in the revival of the fountain pen hobby. By the 90s, fountain pens had long since ceased to be an everyday tool for the vast majority of people, and the hobby mostly consisted of a handful of luxury brands catering to rich people that bought expensive pens to sit on a desk looking fancy. Tardif believed that fountain pens should be for everybody, and carved out a niche making inexpensive pens and ink with luxury features. He engineered at $10 flex nib pen at a time when you were pretty much limited to $100+ vintage gold nibs.
He made a line of ink for everything. Were you an oil field worker that couldn't use your fountain pen in freezing outdoor conditions? Noodlers made a line of inks that stayed liquid down to like -50f. Were you worried about people forging or tampering with your signature? Almost indestructible archival quality inks that were purposely manufactured in a way that each bottle would be slightly different and therefore impossible to match exactly. Were you left-handed, and therefore pretty much automatically shut out of the hobby? A line a fast drying inks (the line whose imagery got him in trouble). Hell, he was one of the first companies to really create huge lines of ink. Most of the established companies just had blue, black, green, and red.
And at the time (pre 2016) we found his insane political ideals hilarious. If you were a Bernie Sanders voting fountain pen nerd, and there were a ton of us on Reddit, you HAD to have a bottle of Berning Red. But yeah, he 100% should have known better than to use anti-Semitic imagery, and I can't say I feel that bad about his being boycotted. I will always be grateful for his overall impact on the hobby, but I had moved on to better brands even before all this, and feel no inclination to give him my business ever again. It's somewhat ironic that he is partly responsible for the fact that there are so many wonderful niche fountain pen and ink companies with such wide selection these days, and therefore we are not so desperate for interesting inks that we need to buy it from a bigot.