When a friend sent a link to show me a desired calligraphy pen at an online vendor I was impressed that a place with such a large stock of this specialized merchandise existed. A second surprise happened when I looked at this stores contact information and I found they were located in the city I work in. A few days later I trekked there for a look in person.
I didn’t know if they had an actual storefront so before going I checked and found reference to some clearance books being “next to the door”. That’s all I needed to see since where there’s a door there is a way in. I’ve not seen the door that can keep me out yet (unless it is locked or heavy or had a confusing latch that I couldn’t make work)!
John Neal, Bookseller does sell books on drawing, calligraphy, typography, bookbinding, and more. Beyond that they carry the things you need for binding your own books and creating lovely lettering. All this is packed into a small, funky warehouse like environment that zigzags through the first floor of an old commercial building. It’s not really a “store” so to speak but they still let customers wander around and look. I had fun pulling books off of the shelves in the narrow nooks and the staff was friendly and helpful.
It’s probably more convenient to order off their web site and you are not missing out on any memorable retail experience but seeing a small, hospitable business firsthand at least made me happy. I took a few quick snapshots to share the experience and the claustrophobia with you.
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.
When I was younger a year seemed an eternity. The summer would end and the long winter would creep along as I waited for warmth and fun to return. Now that I’m much older the moments seem to run through my fingers like sand. Yes, an overused metaphor but it’s the first thing I found at the metaphor lending library. Now I’m struck dumb by the fact that I started blogging a year ago today. I’d say, “where did the time go?” but I’m pretty sure there isn’t a temporal reservoir that holds the flow so I’ll forgo doing that.
Looking back and ruminating on the process of writing something and putting it up for people to read I find I’ve only accomplished some of what I wanted to do. Many people share a bit of their souls in blogs giving readers insight into their lives and personality. That’s the one thing I thought I might do but really never did. In the end I did what came naturally to me and wrote about things or events that I thought were interesting.
I feel that a blog is a lot like the old-fashioned vanity press publication in practice and I mean that in a good way. It’s a nice feeling to be able to get ideas out of your head and present them without obstruction. Since I’m not very vain, and when I am it’s in spurts and about silly things, that may explain the lack of more meaningful content over the year.
But there are a lot of good things that came of this endeavor. I managed to keep creating content even if it wasn’t as often as I wanted. Writing is hard for me and I thought doing it more often would make it easier. Well, it didn’t and struggling with that and mostly overcoming it has been a win. Also I think I put out some valuable and semi-interesting information for people who have the same odd interests as I do. Technically it was fun learning how to set up a blog and customize my WordPress theme a bit.
Initially I didn’t tell more than a few people I was blogging and felt odd about promoting my ramblings. I’m mostly over that now and I’m happy to see that both friends and strangers have peeked in and read a bit here. In appreciation I’m giving something away as an anniversary present of sorts: A circa 1941 green Parker Vacumatic. This is a full size double jewel model that was made in Canada. The nib is somewhere between fine and medium with a hint of flex to it and some of the original silver plating still intact. It’s in working order so all you have to do is add ink and go.
Now you are saying “this sounds too good to be true” or at least “what’s the catch?” Well, the pen isn’t perfect. There is a transverse crack in the barrel that doesn’t go all the way through but I’ve stabilized it and it’s not easy to see. The feed is missing a couple of the comb’s teeth and there is a touch of brassing. The filling unit is a plastic one from a later pen and not the aluminum speedline that should be there. Overall this is a user grade pen so don’t expect a museum piece.
Win this pen!
In order to win this pen I’m going to do the usual: count the comments and use a random number generator to choose a winner. However there is one additional requirement: In your comment tell me what the first sentence is you would write with this pen if you win it. That’s all you have to do to be eligible to win! I’ll pay postage anywhere in the world but realize if you are far away from the U.S. it’ll take a while for this to get to you via normal mail. I’ll pick a winner one week from the date of this post. You’ve got 48 hours to respond to the “you won” email or I roll the random number generator again for a new winner.
Thanks very much to all of you for reading my blog over the last year (or just looking at it and grunting). Additionally thanks to all my friends who provided support and so many great comments. Some of them have blogs (better than this one) listed to the right. This here blog certainly has not contained any deep philosophical content or life changing information but maybe I’ll steal some for posts in the second year. A few ideas never were pursued or lived beyond an initial post so perhaps I will revisit them in the upcoming months. Of course any suggestions are always gracefully accepted.
Update:
Here’s a tiny writing sample of the Vacumatic to look at.
I’ve taken up a new hobby in which I can utilize my speck of creativity and natural talent for following instructions. I am such a renaissance man! In honesty I’m more like the guy who got paid a tiny amount to grind the pigment that was mixed with others by a paint maker who the supplied some illustrious Italian master.
The hobby mentioned above is marbling paper. Marbled end-sheets are something I’ve always loved seeing when perusing an old book. The patterns always seemed to be works of ordered randomness with sweep and coloration that are most pleasing. A month or so ago I was at a hotel where an artisan conference had a room where people were selling their wares. One woman marbled not just paper but fabric and leather and I found my love for it hadn’t diminished.
After that I went home and looked up marbling on the web like any good resident of the 21st century would. The process didn’t seem to involve any skills I don’t have like drawing, painting, or imagination. That’s not to say people with those qualifications don’t make excellent marbled papers but just that I could probably put together something that didn’t offend. The next step was to get the supplies and being who I am the research took several hours. I peered at many sites and compared prices and inventory. In the end I got a starter kit from Galen Berry who is a well-known marbler in the United States. I picked out the paint colors I wanted and zipped off an email. Due to the cold weather they didn’t want to ship the stuff until the thermometer took an upward stretch so I had to wait a week or so. Despite the hesitation it arrived the day after a major snow storm which meant that my snow day could be filled with learning how to work this magic.
I’m not going to bore you too much with a history of marbled paper (and other substrates) but I will throw a few facts in here. It began with a process called suminagashi in China over 2,000 years ago but is associated with Japan since it was practiced widely there. The technique traveled the silk trade routes and eventually landed in Turkey. This brought forth the kind of patterns we most often think of when visualizing marbling but the Turkish art of Ebru is far more than that and is worth taking a look at. The video below shows an artist creating some of these works.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgg0GIfbszg
Eventually the technique migrated to Europe in the 17th century when travelers were exposed to both the process and the end result. Artisans guarded their techniques but late in the mid-19th century a book was published laying out the process for all to see.
While on the topic of the process it’s really deceptively simple. Paint or ink is floated on top of a liquid and then are manipulated using tools to make the patterns. In my case I use acrylic paints applied to a thickened pool of water. The thickening is accomplished using carrageenan which is the stuff that also is used to make foods goopy. The inks are applied in several ways with brushes made out of broom straw (actually, they are shaken and don’t touch the liquid) or eye droppers. After that there is a bevy of tools to rake, comb, curl, and speckle until you get a design you love.
Below are a few pictures from one of my sessions just to give you a rough idea of a few steps in the process. I’ve been having fun and hope to improve my skills with time.
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.
