New pens! First sortie after lockdown

In France, we've been 'unconfined' for a while now and mid sized outdoors events are beginning to occur.

Which means sales! Hurrah! hurrah!

But Thiron-Gardais, a little village in the middle of the Perche, produced no fountain pens. It did produce a couple of nice things, but no pens.

And two hours of searching at Breval today produced an Egyptian statuette (Louvre miniature), two Burmese monks in gilded wood, some really good books and a small pestle and mortar for the kitchen.... but no pens.

I was coming up to the last alley, where the path from the forest turns round and opens up on to what used to be a field and is now a quite nice little housing development, and I saw there were a couple of professionals set up there. Okay, let's have a look.

Oh boy. Look at those Parker 45s! Such bright colours they put the little Pelikano in the shade.

I have a ton of Parker 45s. About 80% of them are in black. Some are flighters. I've never run these cute colours to ground before. Even better, the Pelikano came along for the ride.

These are not high end Viscontis or Omas. These are school pens and a bit better than school pens. But both Pelikano and Parker 45 share qualities that I love - they're well made, well designed, and incredibly usable pens. And I know I'm not going to have any trouble with them - a bit of cleaning up (the Pelikano section is black with dried ink!) and they'll be ready to go.

And then on the next stand, a Parker 75, pristine, with the French lozenge poinçon (hallmark) for 18 karat / 750 gold. It came to me for a lot less than it should have cost and I have managed not to scratch it on the way home.

The thing I love about the 75 is the very nerdy feature of a nib orientation device. It's a bit like the Eversharp flexing device, it's probably more interesting in nerd terms than it is useful in practice. And it eventually disappeared, and the thick bank with its marks, reminiscent of a gear or an indexing device, was replaced by a thin gold band. But this pen has got it. Hurrah!

Altogether I'm ridiculously happy with today. I may not have found many pens, but the ones I did find were absolutely lovely.

Needing some sun in your life?

It's grey here.

Grey every day. Sometimes, I can hardly tell dawn from a slightly less intense version of night. Grey fields, bleached stumps of colza; grey skies, with grey clouds; grey roads, grey everything.

I need some sunshine in my life.

Cue two pens that have brought it over the past few weeks, alongside some fine joyful inks like Diamine Autumn Oak, Papier Plume House of the Rising Sun, Roher & Klingner Fernambuk, and Herbin Orange Indien.

Platinum 3776 special edition 'Apricot' (tarumi) demonstrator for Nagasawa pen shop of Kobe, Japan. I managed to secure this fine implement on eBay and it came with a crisp italic nib. A real delight.  The gold plated clip, cap ring and tail ring are exactly what's needed to pick up this gorgeous colour and make it glow.

Even nicer, it has a little rooster on the nib - Nagasawa's house symbol, the weathervane, and the date 1882 instead of the usual '3776' (height of Mount Fuji, a cheeky homage to another mountain and another penmaker).

I have a mini collection of 3776s. They're adorable pens, and until recently prices were eminently affordable. Unfortunately the price points for some of the special editions are now rather ambitious... but this one I had to have.

And here is the Edison/Goulet Nouveau Premiere Tequila Sunrise, with a glass of white rum since I didn't have any tequila in the house. It's actually a bit more orange than the picture shows, with more and less intense areas of colour and incredible chatoyance. It's just a bit more summery in feeling than my Edison Collier in Persimmon Swirl, another bright and happy feeling pen from the same stable.

I really adore Edison pens - it's a pity they're not well represented in the EU. Super pens, without bling, in really gorgeous acrylics (and sometimes ebonite). Every one a great little writer. I'm primarily a user, not a collector, and these are pens that I reach for time and again when I need to ink up and get writing.

And this one brought me a lovely dose of Vitamin D just when I needed it.

Mending some Bayards

I love Bayard fountain pens - but they used some very shrinkage-prone celluloids.

Yes, they're very colourful and characterful celluloids. But they shrink.

Quite often you'll find a little bump around the lever axle. That's not a problem.

What is a problem is that the lever won't actually close any more.


There are a few things that help.

• First, take any rust or dirt off the sides of the lever. Micromesh or very fine (500+) sandpaper can help, but go very gently. Not recommended if you have a nice plated lever, but if it's brassed and rusty, do what it takes.
• Secondly, with a fine pair of pliers, if the lever is still not fitting properly, close down the 'ears' at the top end a little. They have bumps on them to ensure the lever stays flat once engaged, and that may be what's stopping the lever lying fully flat.
• If you still can't make the lever flatten nicely, it could be the other end that's the problem. You can generally work that out by just feeling where it's sticking, as you move it around gently. In that case, the lever slot needs to be a bit longer. Take a thin jeweller's file, or make a sanding stick by supergluing fine grit (300+) sandpaper to a cocktail stick / toothpick. Then file the 'nib end' of the lever slot till the lever fits positively.

I got all my Excelsiors working nicely. Hurrah!

Resacking and other repairs, and a lovely little Swan

I've finally managed to make some time for pen repairs, and I've been busy pulling pens apart, and in some cases, getting them back together again.

The job is complicated by the fact that so often, you think "easy, that pen looked fine, I'll just resack it" - only to find that it's missing a j-bar, missing a nib, got a crack in the barrel, a cracked nib, the lever has come adrift from its bar or c-clip, or there's some other little fault that means you'll have to put in some time on the lathe, order more components, cannibalise another pen...

So I now use the pulling-apart stage as a form of triage. I have boxes marked

"need nibs"

"CRACKS"

and

"need sections". They are filling up much too quickly for my liking.

And then I have the box marked "ready to sack". It's rewarding when more than half of the pens go into that box!

Then there are also the pens that go back into the box because they still won't come apart. I have a couple of gorgeous Parker Modernes that simply will not separate. I just give them a go every time I'm working. One day I will, I'm sure, feel that little sideslip that means they're ready to give...

This is the nice thing about restoring only your own pens. You can leave them as long as it takes. I'm really glad I don't work on other peoples' pens; I can run a batch processing system like this, and no one is going to ask me why, for instance, I haven't done their piston filler, because this is lever fill month...

Batch processing means those pens needing new sections or end tassies or blind caps will all be put away till I get the mini lathe out, and then they'll all be done at once. All the safety pens will be done at once.

It's also useful because it means I never work on a pen that's above my current level of skill. The Vacumatics can wait! By working on the easy stuff first, I've got reasonably good at taking pens apart, I've got good at resacking (only one disaster, an Edacoto where I managed to shellac the channel in the feed closed, and had to knock out the feed and nib to solve the problem), and I have got started on a few pens that needed their nibs knocked out, straightened and reinserted. (The reinsertion is the hard bit.)

Anyway, I did get a few pens all the way through the process, and I've been using one today. It's a sweet little Swan, just 12cm long, with a nice flexy nib. I think I've underestimated Swans in the past - this is a delight of a pen, in 'snakeskin' effect spiral wrapped celluloid. I did a little extra work filling in the swan engraving on the black cap top with gold pencil (yes, it probably should really be white, but I'm keeping this pen for myself, so never mind authenticity) and cleaning up the rather inky threads.

I was about to see if I could remove the scratches on the section when I realised: those aren't scratches! "SWAN" is actually engraved across the section (with the double quotation marks), just in case you had missed the swan on the cap top and the three-line barrel imprint, again with the little figure of the swan. Branding gone mad.

Apologies for the rather poor photo - my compact camera is out of action so I had to resort to the Nexus 7.

I've been trying to improve my handwriting with this nice flex nib. I think my pen restoration skills are some way ahead of my copperplate.

New Chinese pens - rekindling an old flame?

It's been a long time since I ordered a Chinese pen.

I started out with a bunch of Chinese pens - Jinhaos and Picassos. They were fun fodder for nib grinding, and they didn't cost much, but I soon found myself tiring of them. Quite literally in some cases because of the very heavy, brass-based build.

But the Chinese pen industry has been changing and a recent post on FrankUnderwater's blog got me interested again. Two wooden pens - the Moonman M5 and the Delike Redwood - made me break into the Paypal account for the first time in a while.

I don't know what they'll feel like when they arrive. They might not feel as good in the hand as they look on the screen. The nibs might not be great (I ordered a 0.6mm and an EF fude). But they do look rather stylish. They don't seem to be outright copies of another pen manufacturer's work (there's a Faber-Castell Ondoro clone out there, but then I have the Ondoro in bog oak and orange, so I don't need a clone) and they're wood, which is a material I love.

Probably neither of them is going to replace the Waterman Man 100 briar in my heart (particularly since neither of them comes with a Waterman Ideal 18 carat nib), but I'm looking forward to a pair of parcels arriving... and of course I'll write the pens up once they arrive.

(I've also been interested by the PenBBS pens I've seen featured; there are some really quite amazing acrylics available. But then Bexley and Edison feed that lust quite nicely, and if I really want to go premium acrylic it'll be a Kanilea or Carolina Pen Company, probably, or maybe a Fred Faggionato...)

A ***B-I-G*** bottle of ink!

The problem with loving fountain pens is that you not only end up collecting pens - you end up collecting ink. It starts with your noticing that the local stationery store has an alternative to Parker blue-black. You can buy Waterman blue or turquoise. Then you get into purple. Then you get on the internet and you find out about Diamine, Iroshizuku, Sailor Jentle... and even vintage inks.

Then one day you're looking for fountain pens at a car boot sale and this catches your eye.

Oh. My. Goodness.

An absolutely monster bottle of Waterman ink. About half of it has been used - but there's still loads sloshing around there. And it comes with the funnel that you can screw on to the top of the bottle when you want to fill inkwells, or smaller ink bottles.

I absolutely love the form of the bottle - like a well muscled wrestler, with its broad shoulders and its ribbed waist. The packaging is rather wonderful, too, and I particularly like the typographical contrast between the solid modern style letters of 'Waterman' and the delightful handwritten effect of 'Bleu-Noir' (blue-black).

Dating pens I can do. Dating inks... is difficult. But I managed to find one site that suggests this is a 1940s logo.

Best thing of all? This bottle cost me slightly less than the local maison de la presse has 5cl bottles of modern Waterman ink selling for!

My top pens of 2017

I have had a little luck finding pens in the wild this year, as well as having spent a bit of money on new pens. Some real love affairs happened.

I should make it clear that these are not my all-time best pen selections: they're the pens which entered my collection this year and that I've really loved. Added to which I should give honorary mention to two Bexleys (Poseidon Magnum and 20th Anniversary 'lemon') and two Pelikans (m200 blue marbled with an m400 gold nib, and 950 Toledo) which have delivered real enjoyment over the year.

Pelikan Brown Tortoise m400 with broad italic nib

Because tortoise. Slightly more orangey and less varied than my vintage 400s, but still the most amazing colours; twirl the pen in your fingers and watch the highlights shimmer.

And because that nib is so juicy. I love a good stub or italic, and this nib is delightful - bouncy, wet, fat, and still gives good line variation, though it's not quite crisp enough for calligraphy. Thank you very much, Pelikan, for giving us the chance to buy a nib that's not F, M or B, and please do it again on other pens!


Pilot Custom Heritage 92 demonstrator

My first upscale Pilot, with an FM nib. In some ways this is quite a clunky looking pen, with two steps down to the piston turning knob, and a very visible inner cap. But I've grown to love it, particularly filled up with a nice wet ink. The piston works wonderfully smoothly, and the nib is juicy, and the clear plastic has the sparkle and brightness of diamonds, and it's just the most comfortable pen ever to write with. For a couple of weeks I've had it paired with another of my favourite Japanese pens, the Platinum 3776 Sai, giving me a double dose of beautiful transparency.


Aurora desk pens

Two generations of writing implements

An unexpected entry for an unexpected find - four desk pens, probably an accounting set (the inlay rings in red and blue show the colour of ink so you could have pens ready for doing double entry bookkeeping), found in an old watermill turned antique shop in the Eure valley. Beautiful matt ebonite, the 'Aurora' badge impressed on each section, fantastic nibs (though one, sadly, is broken, and it won't even work as a stub). The flared edge on the section is beautifully sharp. I really love the desk pen shape - Lamy Joy and Rotring Artpen are two of my favourites - and these little pens have delighted me.

Edacoto and unidentified red mottled hard rubber pens - French 1930s

I found the  'Mory et Cie' pen at a vide-grenier, and couldn't resist the character of the imprint, which I found out later belonged to a French shipping company. Late in the year I saw the gorgeous Edacoto at Vanves flea market, and negotiated a good discount as it was getting towards lunchtime (it's strictly a mornings-only market).

There should be a photo to come when I can actually find the Mory pen!

Since I've been living in France I have found that the Brits and Americans never really understood what red hard rubber can do. The French have wonderfully extrovert ways with this material - there are tiger stripes, Rorschach blots, vivid stormscapes, as well as ripple and bark effects.



And they do it in celluloid too! This Stylomine (fourth from top), also found at a vide-grenier, would make it into my top pens of the year... if only it had a section. I have some work on my Unimat lathe to do.

Not a bad haul for a handful of euros