Last summer I found myself in one of my favorite places: Savannah, Georgia. An amazing amount of the historic fabric of this old merchant city remains. I love to wander through the past and one of the places I made sure to visit was Bonaventure Cemetery. Made famous by the book and movie “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” the cemetery is amazingly atmospheric. With the Spanish moss, sandy lanes, and numerous impressive and disturbing memorials I could have wandered there all day. I didn’t see any ghosts but at night I’m sure memory takes foot.
I’m recycling these images for this post from a gallery I had on my Facebook account. Some recent posts by Lady Dandelion on her blog made me think of these and drag them out again.
I’ve been called a man out of his time. I’ve also been called “jerk face”, “loud mouth”, and “cheese baiter” but that’s neither here nor there (and I have no idea what the last one even means.) With my interests in things that are old and obsolete it’s no wonder I like the historic period that spans the gilded age through the roaring 20s. While my favorite watches were manufactured right around the turn of the century my favorite pens came into being over twenty years later.
The 1920s and 1930s are called the golden age of the fountain pen for good reason, some of the most beautiful pens ever made were created at that time. With colored hard rubber ushering out the age of the PBP (plain black pen) followed shortly after by the introduction of cellulose nitrate plastics fountain pens were now a fashion accessory. Also the teething pains of manufacture shown by awkward filling systems, strange patent feed designs, and clip on pocket clips were long in the past. Fountain pens wrote well, looked good, and didn’t leak all over your shirt pocket.
In the period between the reign of vulcanized rubber pens and the usurpers made of flammable plastic there was a time where you could get something utterly different than either material. I don’t mean the metal overlay designs had been around from the earliest days of internal reservoir pens as these were basically a hard rubber pen covered with a shell of decorative metal. While pretty they were structurally the same old pens with fancy wrappers.
Wahl, a company well known for its adding machines and Eversharp mechanical pencils, purchased the Boston Fountain Pen Company (or at least part of it) in 1917 so it could get a quick start in the business of making fountain pens. Wahl sold what was basically a slightly upgraded Boston hard rubber model for several years. Then something so big, so important, so game-changing happened that only the fine copywriters at Wahl’s ad agency could put this portentous event into words of the magnitude needed. I cannot improve on them so I will just reproduce them from the 1925 catalog here:
THE WAHL PEN OF PRECIOUS METAL: A new landmark in fountain pen progress
Along the highway of fountain pen progress are but a few landmarks denoting basic developments in design that have guided the manufacturing effort of the future. The self-filling pen was one of these.
The self-filling pen, however, required a soft rubber ink sac which occupied a large part of the hard rubber barrel, and thus left little space for ink. Because the tradition of long years demanded that the barrel be made of hard rubber, the next step was simply to increase the size of the pen to get a larger space for the ink sac.
Thus resulted the bulky pens that have been the vogue for several years. But this method of getting greater ink capacity was a makeshift, as Wahl craftsmen realized. Why, they asked themselves, need the barrel be built of rubber at all, since the ink is contained in a soft rubber sac? Why not build the barrel of a thin strong material which would give greater ink capacity, plus added strength, without the disadvantage of cumbersome size and weight?
The answers to these questions resulted in the development of the Wahl Precious Metal Pen—a pen which we believe is destined to set up a new landmark on the highway of fountain pen progress. Gold and silver were the materials chosen to carry out this revolutionary conception of a fountain pen. New as these metals were to the art of fountain pen manufacture, they had been for many centuries the only accepted materials for the making of other high class articles of persona equipment. Since the beginning of civilization, they have been the only metals discovered (except for a few of prohibitive cost) that in their native state will maintain their outward beauty as long as any part of the material lasts.
So it was but natural that they were selected as the basic materials for The New Wahl Pen. This pen is so strong as to be practically unbreakable; it is slender and graceful, yet its ink capacity is greater than that of rubber pens twice its size; it is light in weight, perfectly balanced, unfaltering in writing performance, and has the rich beauty which can come only from fine jewelry designs engraved in gold or silver.
Some of the features are shown in the sectional view at the left. Note the thin walls, the rolled metal threads which cannot be broken, the large ink sac, the compact filling mechanism. Then turn to the pages which follow and note the beautiful jewelry designs and the graceful proportions of these pens.
Try a Wahl Pen from our stock; observe its fine balance, its light weight, and its certain performance. Compare its ink capacity, if you care to, with the largest pen in your case, and prove that it holds more ink than any other.
Wahl builds rubber pens, too, for those people who are not yet converted to this modern pen. These rubber pens are the finest that can be made, and second only to the pen of the future—the Wahl Precious Metal Pen.
A Wahl #5 Metal Pen
For those other than the luddites fighting the inevitably conversion Wahl metal pens were a very nice, if not quite earthshaking, writing instrument. They came in solid gold and sterling as well as silver and gold plate. It’s common to find the gold plated or “filled” models with a good deal of brassing from their long years of service. Dents and dings are seen more often than not since these pens are made of thin metal. If you find a nice example you’ll have a good writer with reliable lever filling and nice nibs which are sometimes flexible. Even the largest metal Wahls are compact and the smaller ones are extremely tiny. Some engraved patterns are worth more than other more common ones so you might want to check out this listing of them.
The Wahl pictured here is one of the bigger models they made. Usually you can tell the dimension of the pen by the how big the nib is as indicated by a number on it. The largest is said to be a #6 but those are very rare. A #5 like this one while not common will turn up for sale every once in a while.
Eventually Wahl stopped making all metal pens and switched to a line of plastic ones. I think the fragility of these dent collecting tubes helped speed that along. So ends the tale of a pen as important as the wheel, as much a marvel as electricity, as indispensable as the air we breathe: The Wahl Metal Pen.
Music soothes the savage beast but I’m not sure it will help if this blog post makes a certain person grumpy. I must swear you all to silence after you read this just in case and I’ll tell you why later. Now that we have convened the secret order of silent pen lovers who do not rat on Tom I think I can go on and get to the subject of this post: Music nibs!
Musical notation requires very thick and very thin strokes to form all those notes, clefs, and beams. If you were writing down the score of your operatic masterpiece by hand a pen with a lot of line variation (making a thick or thin line depending on direction of movement) would be handy. Also you’d want to make sure ink flow could keep up with those wide load lines while being distributed evenly along the flat “point” of the nib. Well, in a nutshell that’s what a music nib does.
You can see how thick and thin lines are used here.
In construction this kind of nib has a broad point which is thin in section to give the necessary line widths. Yes, it looks wide enough to use for shoveling tiny, tiny snow banks. Music nibs often cause people to think they are seeing double when first encountered due to a second unique structural characteristic. In order to get more ink to the point there are two ink-conveying slits which makes the nib have three tines (the fingers in the front of the nib divided by the slit) instead of two. What you wind up with is a bit of a mutant looking nib.
The Skyline is on the left and the Platinum on the right.
I’ve got two pens with music nibs to use as examples but I know no one who can actually write music with them. The writing samples I produced are just some doodles and those mostly shows that I’m a bad doodler. I hope you get an idea of what they write like at least.
The first pen is a Platinum celluloid series pen in the koi pattern. This is a nice medium sized cartridge/converter filled pen with a single tone gold music nib. It writes a bold line and the nib requires a bit of practice to get the hang of how to hold it. I find that obtaining a music nib on a new Japanese pen is easier than purchasing one on other country’s products.
Pen number two is a Eversharp Skyline and it isn’t my pen. This is the reason is why you all need to be quiet. As a favor to a friend (Leigh Reyes) I received a pen she purchased and will forward it to her home in that far, far away land where she lives (The Philippines). This is because some folks selling pens don’t ship want to ship to far, far away places. I’m sure she’s planning to blog about this pen when it arrives and I don’t know how happy it will make her to see that I am sticking it into a post before she can. Of course what she writes about it will be better than my stuff and her writing sample will be exquisite.
The meeting of the music nibs.
Greg Minuskin created the custom nib on this Vintage Skyline, it did not come this way originally. He makes many reworked points such as stub, italic, and the music variety seen here. From a normal two-tined Skyline nib he works metal magic re-tipping the point and making three tines seemingly out of thin air. I also assume he adjusts the feed for greater flow due to the new ink monster that sits atop it.
If you are wondering how a pen with such an unusual nib writes I can tell you it does so quite nicely. The Skyline lays down a very wet line but it starts right up, doesn’t skip, and gives good feedback while gliding across the paper. It feels like the nib belongs here and isn’t an intruder forced upon the pen by some mad pen doctor.
Here are the samples I promised and pre-apologized for:
Music nibs always remind me of one of my sadder pen events. Once I had Sheaffer Snorkel with an original factory music nib. This is where I should say something about hen’s teeth but I’ll practice restraint with overused metaphors. I sold it in one of my pen purges which I have every few years when I think I need to slim down the collection. I really should have kept that one.
I hope you enjoyed the music nib mayhem. These are fun pens to write with if you want to be big and bold. Oh, if you write music you might like them too.
Here’s an update for those who entered my one year anniversary contest a little while ago. The winner, Chervatruffle, received the pen and emailed me:
“I really like the design of the body with the green bands and I like that when light shines through it the other bands are an amber color. Very nice! Writes nice too!”
The next comment after that states that her handwriting isn’t that great. I think you can see from the image below of the first sentence written with the pen that she does just fine.
I love the way this was done. The Vac is happy too, I'm sure.
Oh, the title of this post is the sentence you see above but in Tagalog. I found a site that translates it into more languages than I knew existed.
This is a post about fountain pens that click. We’re all used to some ball pens, like Parker Jotters, having a button you push to click the writing point into place but there are not many fountain pens with this tactile fun. I happen to have two of them, one well known and the other not so.
Nibs peeking out. The Aurora on the left is a hooded nib which does not retract.
I’ll start with the famous Pilot/Namiki Capless/Vanishing Point. Wow, with that many different aliases it sounds like a fugitive pen. Anyway, with those monikers Pilot is trying to hammer into your head the fact that this pen has no cap and the nib retracts into the barrel. How does that work? It’s actually pretty simple.
There is a floating nib/feed/ink reservoir unit inside that pen which can travel fore and aft. A spring keeps it up in the retracted position where it rests when not in use. A push button on the back end gets…well…pushed driving the unit forward until it is locked in place by a ratchet mechanism. Another push and the lock is released allowing the pen to close up again. The important feature that keeps the ink from drying up is a small trap door at the point end which acts as a plug when the point is retracted. QED.
There have been numerous versions of the Vanishing Point (nee Capless) since it was introduced 1964. The currently produced models come in three variants that range in heft and size. The model I have is older and dates from the 80s. I like the faceted barrel, streamlined clip, and light weight of this Capless generation. The nib on it was reground into italic creating a very fun pen to write with. It’s easy to purchase these modified nibs of this type from folks like Richard Binder or Dannzeman.
Aurora 98 in box.
The other pen in this tale is not seen as often but certainly is almost as novel. The Aurora 98 replaced the famous model 88 in 1963 and was “period modern” with a more svelte design and a few gadgets. Think of it as the Italian Parker 51 with the additional pizazz its point of origin is known for.
One of the gadgets I referred to is why this pen fits into this post: the piston filling knob extends from and retracts into the barrel with a “click”. I can’t think of a very good reason for it operating in this manner unless people in the 60s had a tendency to accidently turn the pesky exposed knob at the end of some pens. Whatever Aurora’s thinking behind this the result is pen geek cool due to unnecessary complication.
The other peculiar contraption contained within this pen is known as “Riserva Magica” (magic reserve). When you are in the dread condition of having run out of ink with this pen you can, through use of a small supplied sparkly wand, squeeze a few more lines out. Yes, I am joking about the wand. Running the piston all the way down into the barrel (like prior to filling) pushes a few trapped drops of ink into the feed. Viola! You can write a bit more.
My 98 is almost NOS and is the attractive gold filled model. It writes a lot like a Parker 51 with a firm, fine nib. The hood has an odd flat bit over the nib’s centerline which I imagine was found to be pleasing by the designer. Other foibles include a slip on cap that really needs to travel a long way down before seating and tiny, tiny ink windows which make me squint when trying to appraise the remaining fluid.
So, that’s all the pens I have with clickability. Below are a couple comparison photos of them so you can see the chic click contrivances.
Wow! So many people entered this contest I’m shocked. 46 threw their hats into the ring and I wish all of you could have won. I was excited since so many people I knew and so many I didn’t showed up. I’m very happy to meet you new folks and grateful for the old friends.
So who won? Number 15 did in my enumeration of comments from the contest post.
I’ve included my scrawled list below:
Yep, Chervatruffle was the winner of the Parker Vacumatic! It’s someone I don’t know which is very cool. Congratulations and I’ll be emailing you for details soon.
The 1920s were the formative period for modern advertising with copy like “somewhere west of Laramie”, slogans like “the pause that refreshes”, and catchy Burma-Shave verse on sequential signs along roads to take advantage of the new mobility. The decade that followed is more exciting to me because it heralded the idea that if products were flashy and futuristic they would be easier to market. Parker didn’t let this slip by them and started a trend in fountain pens where the job done by a few simple parts was replaced by an amalgam of complexity.
Billed as being “like a pen from another world” the Parker Vacumatic was introduced in 1933 sporting a new filling system to replace the old button filler associated with their famous Duofolds. The filling system (usually also called Vacumatic) was a marvel of modern design. Instead of a bladder to hold the ink the barrel itself was a reservoir and even had clear sections to let you keep tabs on your ink supply. Some might complain that it really offered no functional benefit over existing lever and button fillers and they have a point. It actually requires more effort to fill a Vac then the single push or pull of the other systems. Also the pen as mentioned is complex and a lot harder to repair then the old standards. None-the-less this filling system was in use into the late 1940s on the Parker 51.
Let’s take a quick look how the filler works on these pens. The idea is that a rubber diaphragm is flexed up and down by a spring loaded plunger. When released the upward motion of the mechanism creates a vacuum in the barrel which draws ink up through a breather tube attached to the feed of the pen. The downward stroke pushes the air out of the pen hopefully not expelling as much ink as it sucked in. You need to do this 5 to 10 times to fill the pen so it’s a bit like winding a watch. The up side to your work is that the pen can hold quite a bit of ink.
After the Snorkel this is my favorite filling system mainly because I like crazy contraptions. I have a few Vacs and really wanted the Bexley owner’s club pen of a few years back because it actually used recycled filling systems salvaged from broken Vacumatics. However, I really never thought anyone would take the time and effort to design a new pen using this 70 year old filling principle. You probably guessed right away I was wrong.
Tibaldi was the name of an old, defunct Italian pen manufacturer. In the go-go premium pen environment near the end of the 20th century a company formed to resuscitate the brand (as was the trend) and designed a new range of writing instruments. Before this version of Tibaldi (the name has been reused yet again) went under they created a number of interesting and sought after pens. One of them is the beautiful Iride pictured here. This pen is made from red marbled celluloid and like pens of yore has transparent areas in the front of the barrel to let you see your ink. It also apes the Vacumatic in the odd decision to use the same filling system. Yes, it’s been redesigned with an integrated blind cap and a plunger larger in girth but it works the very same way and it holds a lot of ink.
Tibaldi Iride. If you click to expand this image and look closely you can see the barrel translucence.
I find it a bit of a mystery why Tibaldi emulated the very first Parker Vacumatic filling unit and not the later ones. Those early “lock-down” units had the pen’s owner retract the plunger into the pen and twist it to lock. The downside is that this last push makes some ink comes out of the pen meaning some lost capacity and that you’d better have it over the ink bottle. Parker introduced the improved “speedline” filler a few years into production, which stayed in the extended position when not being used.
No matter what the Iride is a gorgeous pen with red islands floating in the barrel glinting back at you when the light hits them. I like the simple monochrome nib and the fact the section is of the same material as the barrel. It works and writes well and is really reminiscent of an older pen.
Just to illustrate the similarities between my Iride and an early Vacumatic filler I’ve take some side-by-side images. Both plungers store in the down position via a detent on the Vac and threads on the Tibaldi.
When Tibaldi went out of business a lot of pens were assembled from left over parts and sold. Mine is one of those and I was lucky to find it. The rubber diaphragm in these fillers eventually wears out in time and I hope there’s a lot of life left in my Iride since it’ll be rather hard to find a replacement.
It is good that Sheaffer Snorkels came in colors. I find just having the choice of a pen in one hue to be rather boringly monochromatic. In the wacky world of collecting there are always some items that stand out in rarity due to such things as size, material, pattern and other differentiating characteristics. With Snorkels color is an important variable (along with nib type and build material) in determining value.
There are two separate periods when Sheaffer messed with color choices for these pens. The early pocket pens were made in what I’ll call (not that it’s unique to me) the “pastel” colors. These were Black, Pastel Blue, Pastel Green, Burgundy, and Pastel Grey. All pleasant colors but as 1956 dawned the U.S. was awash with fancy named choices for the finishes on the cars, appliances, and furniture people wanted. When a Cadillac could be had in bahama blue why not your pen? It was with thinking like that a new range of crazy colors was added to the Snorkel lineup: Fiesta Red, Vermilion, Mandarin Orange, Sage Green, Fern Green, Peacock Blue, Periwinkle Blue, and Buckskin Tan.
I’ve got most of the colors above and keep my eyes peeled for when rarer examples like Mandarin Orange appear. Another one that’s hard to get one’s hands on is Peacock Blue. The problem is that pictures of blue Snorkels tend be hard to interpret as pastel blue and peacock blue could look alike depending on exposure, lighting, camera quality, etc. I’ve seen many a pen for sale that looked “Peacocky” and just turned out to be over exposed. In order to help the two or maybe even three people who care about this I will provide the number of a good therapist. Actually, I’ll just show a photo I took of two side by side so you can see the difference. It probably won’t help too much but you never know.
Paste Blue set on the left and to the right is a Peacock Blue set.
I’m finally getting back to writing about pens, a topic I find interesting even if that may indicate a psychological abnormality. A number of things have been sitting around waiting to be introduced here but without a common theme to link them. If pressed I can say all the pens do happen to have good points, and I mean that literally.
First up is something cool due to its obscurity. The doo-dad maker Levenger sells a lot of fountain pens and sometimes contracts with manufacturers to make special editions for them. Somewhere around 10 years ago they had the Italian firm Omas make a nice medium sized piston filling fountain pen called the Articula. Not a big deal in itself but the hook with this pen was that it had a flexible nib. Of course a modern flexible nib is only semi-flexible in comparison to those from the days of yore and this is no exception. Nonetheless the nib is comfy to use and can be coaxed into an expressive mood. I’m not sure why this wasn’t a more popular pen considering all this.
Nibs in a row: Sheaffer, Parker, and Omas.
It’s hard to find a Parker Vacumatic with a nib that isn’t narrow but they exist and I had such in the form of disembodied Canadian made stub. Never wanting such a nifty nib to go to waste I put it on a circa 1940 standard size Vac I had recently purchased as part of a lot. Even more frightening was this Frankenpen was already equipped with the wrong filling unit in the form of an earlier lock down version instead of the proper aluminum speedline. The result is actually not scary but a nice writing mish-mash with lots of character.
The final pen is a Sheaffer’s Thin Model also equipped with a stub. A damaged barrel on the original required a replacement which turned out to be green creating an overall effect is a bit like a classic Pelikan (one of my favorite color combinations.) The modest stub nib writes smoothly and like the Parker discussed previously isn’t something you see every day.
Pens and Pooper. Thanks to Hazel for the pen wrap underneath. (click for closeup)
You have to have some paper to use a pen with and I got lucky enough to find something a few weeks ago both fun and environmentally sound. On a visit to Office Max I saw a few boxes of Terracycle recycled paper on closeout. What makes this cool is that we’re not talking paper made from post-consumer waste but made from some out of the ordinary items. The sample pack I have uses grass, banana peels and pachyderm excrement to make the sheets. Yes, you heard me: elephant poop.
All three papers are moderately rough in texture but very attractive with some unbleached elements appearing randomy. They are also very fountain pen friendly exhibiting no bleed or feathering. Sadly the reason I saw this was because it is no longer made and can’t be found at the chain anymore. However, if you search the web you will find other places that still market papers like this, even the poopy one.
And on that note I think it is a good time to end this post.
I just got back from several days near St. Petersburg, Florida. Escaping the bitter cold gripping us here was a joy and I dearly miss the moderate temperatures as I bundle up to face the cold winds. It was lovely to relax and during the stay I had a tweetup with Julie to spend some time talking about pens, people, and trying out each other’s selected specimens of inks and the tubes that you fill with such. The culmination was a lovely display of fireworks viewed after some Spanish tapas.
Florida is a bit foreign to me with its sand, surf, palm trees and retired folks in flowered shirts. One thing that I noticed was the different patterns and textures formed by what I saw around me. Sun shining through the slats of a beach chair or the rough surface of paths paved with crushed shells was unfamiliar but pleasant. I’m going to save you from reading a boring travelogue and share some of the many pictures I took while there. These are of the textures and surfaces I saw around me while being warm for once.
