Month: August 2011

The Conway Stewart 24

By the 1950s, Conway Stewart had overcome the postwar material shortages, and once again offered such a range of choice to buyers that selecting a pen must have been quite a task. There were prices to suit all pockets, a dazzling variety of colourful patterns and a selection of trim levels. If, for whatever reason, having two cap bands was important to the potential purchaser, there was only one choice: “The Conway Stewart” No24. Introduced around 1949, the 24 was the only model with two rings, but it came in two different forms; one had the rings narrowly spaced, in the slightly later version the rings were noticeably further apart. This example is one of those with the closely-spaced rings:

Some of the plastics used in the 24 are quite stunning. As well as burgundy, green and grey hatched, the now much sought-after tiger’s eye and cracked ice patterns were available. It was often sold together with the No18 pencil as a boxed set.

Though obliques and stubs are less common among Conway Stewarts than they are among Swans, they do turn up, and this pen has an excellent factory medium stub which imparts appreciable line variation to the writing.

Though not rare, 24s are less commonly seen than, for instance, 58s and 27s.

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The Royal City Fountain Pen

These pens turn up occasionally in eBay, usually black chased like this one, but sometimes marbled. I wouldn’t intentionally buy one, but this one came to me as part of a job lot I bought for the sake of another pen that was included in it.

The pen could date as early as the late twenties, but I suspect that it’s later. Makers of cheap pens were often conservative in their designs, and this pen is about as cheap as pens of that period get. That said, it probably worked well enough when it was new. The nib is actually tipped rather than having a doubled-over end, as you see on many very cheap nibs. It was gold plated, though most of the gold-wash has gone. It’s marked “Warranted 14k Gold”, with the additional and important word “plated” sneakily hidden under the section. This was a trick that manufacturers of low-cost pens used extensively in the USA, but I don’t think this pen’s American.

The pen has no barrel or cap imprint but the word “foreign” is stamped on the lever. In those protectionist days, such a label doubtless had tariff implications that escape me, but it does narrow the field a little. Most imports were marked with their country of origin, like “Made in Germany” or “Swiss Made” for instance. Then there was “Empire Made” or “Commonwealth Made” which implied Hong Kong or India, among others. This elimination doesn’t leave many other countries that were capable of mass production in the nineteen-thirties, so I think we may assume Japan to be the most likely source of this pen. Maybe it’s a stretch, but I think that “Royal City” sounds like the kind of appellation that would have seemed dignified and impressive in Japanese but loses something in translation and becomes meaningless in a British context.

The pen is made from, I think, chased black plastic, rather than hard rubber. It shows little signs of use, but there is swelling of the barrel and the lever cut-out gapes. Either the threads are poorly cut or there is shrinkage of the barrel, as the cap doesn’t fit well. There’s no inner cap, so the nib would have tended to dry out and there was the possibility of leakage. To top it all, the pen was made in such a way that it cannot be taken apart to replace the sac.

If you see a Royal City pen offered for sale, don’t buy it. Really.

Mabie Todd Swan 3261 (Again!)

I note that this is becoming something of a Swan blog. That’s not really my intention, but I suppose it does reflect my own preferences. Also, I think I’ve written about the Swan 3261 before but as it’s the model I restore most, I think I can risk writing about it again.

The 3261 was at the lower end of the Swan price range. It’s a close relative of the pen I wrote about last, also designed in 1948 and produced from then into the early fifties. Judging by the numbers I see, it was probably Mabie Todd’s most popular pen of the time. It was fitted with some of the most delightful nibs too; stubs, oblique stubs and flexible nibs abound among 3261s.

After a long period when Swans were made only in celluloid, the 3261 and some of its larger siblings reverted to black hard rubber. Why this should be so remains a mystery. Perhaps there were large stocks of it which needed to be used up. Maybe it was customer demand, though this seems quite unlikely. It’s unlikely too – though I suppose possible – that among the other post-war shortages was a dearth of celluloid. Whatever the reason, I think we have cause to be grateful. BHR is warm and pleasant to the touch and it makes for a light pen, which I prefer.

These pens were exceptionally well made. In a sense, they’re over-engineered, with the brass threads and screw-in section. They’re not without their faults, though. Many of these BHR torpedo-shaped Swans have cracks in the cap lip. They fade, though in most cases the fading is slight, to a pleasant chocolate brown which only serves to remind us that this is a natural substance, which weathers in a natural way. The barrel imprints wear away much more than is the case with earlier BHR or celluloid Swans, and most show some wear on the gold plating, especially on the cap rings. Though it doesn’t concern the user or collector, repairers need to be careful with this one, as the peg that the sac attaches to is fragile and will break easily if care isn’t taken with the knock-out block.

When everything else has been considered, the final approval of any pen lies in whether it is good to write with, and the 3261 certainly is. Light and perfectly balanced, well-shaped for the hand and equipped with superb nibs, these are fine writing instruments. These torpedo-shaped pens were just about the last of the great Swans. We’re lucky that there are so many of them around.

Mabie Todd Swan Leverless 4460

Mabie Todd’s administrative headquarters and their main factory were bombed during World War II, which led not only to the loss of capital equipment and production, but also irreplaceable records were destroyed. This makes an overview of their pre-war, wartime and immediately post-war production a little hazy, to say the least, and dating of several models from around those times remains in debate.

We do know, however, that the company re-tooled for a new product range in 1948, and went on to release their new torpedo-shaped pens soon after. The Leverless pens in this style are usually dated to 1949. The change is purely stylistic; in every other respect this remains the same Leverless Swan that had been so successful for the company since 1932. Strangely, Mabie Todd reverted to Black Hard Rubber for some of these pens, the others being in self-coloured celluloid.

This example is in the middle of the range, a 4460 which has a No4 nib. The largest pens in the range have a No 6 nib. This is a large pen at 13.7cm capped, and it’s a good handful with a girth of 1.3cm. That’s longer than a standard English Duofold of the time, and thicker too, so all in all it’s a very substantial pen.

It was the cleanliness and ease of use of the filling system that sold the Leveless in its thousands, but people often have trouble with it nowadays. It is said that it doesn’t hold as much ink as a comparable lever filler, and that’s true, but the difference is insignificant. The dissatisfaction with Leverless arises from re-saccing by repairers who don’t understand the filling system, resulting in a pen that holds very little ink, or, at worst, will draw none at all. With the right type of sac, properly fitted, the Leverless will give no cause for complaint and will hold at least as much ink as a short international cartridge, usually rather more.

This pen is the celluloid version, and I suspect that it hasn’t been used very much, as it’s immaculate. The beautiful nib with its heart-shaped breather hole and long tines hints at flexibility. As you will see from the writing sample, it’s no superflex, but a moderate amount of line variation is easily induced.

It’s always a joy to find a sixty-year-old pen that looks as if it came off the production line yesterday, and that it should be one of this high quality is an added pleasure.

The Early Adopters

The Swan 1500 was, to my mind, Mabie Todd’s first fully practical fountain pen. Despite still using an over-and-under feed, ink delivery was fully under control. You can write as well with a 1500 as with any later pen. The same is not really true of earlier Swans, nor of the early output of other companies of the time. I’ve had several Mabie Todd & Bard pre-1900 pens, of which this is one:

It was made around 1895 and it’s in excellent condition. There’s every reason to believe that it writes as well now as it did when it was new. Like others of its age that I’ve used, it’s very wet, constantly hovering on the brink of dropping a blob of ink on the paper. It can be used to write well, but it takes a very delicate and steady touch. Not especially practical or easy to write with, then, and yet these pens sold in considerable numbers, judging by how many have survived.

It’s listed in the 1895 Harrod’s catalogue with the following description: “The ‘Swan’ Fountain Pen: a Vulcanite reservoir, holding a sufficient supply of ink for many days’ use, and a Gold Iridium-tipped pen, with apparatus for ensuring an even and ample flow of ink.” It came in fine, medium and broad points, and was priced at 9/0d (9 shillings) plain or 10/6d with gold plated bands. That’s a lot of money! By comparison, a box of Gillot’s gilt nibs was 4d, and you could buy a dozen cedar penholders for 5 ½d. Writing with a dip pen is clearly very, very much cheaper. True, once you had bought your fountain pen you wouldn’t have to buy any more nibs, but their price was really quite insignificant in comparison with the outlay you would have had to make on a fountain pen. If you were a really conservative stick-in-the-mud you could still buy quills in 1895, at 2/3d for a bundle of 25 of the highest quality!

Given that it was so much cheaper to write with a dip pen than with a fountain pen, why did they take off in the way they did? I think the answer is that, despite the shortcomings of these early pens, they conferred a hugely significant advantage over the earlier technology. Though it’s true that those who wrote regularly with dip pens were very fast, the constant need to refresh the ink was a real nuisance. It slowed the writing and broke the train of thought. The ability to write continuously without interruption was worth the high cost of a fountain pen. Though the technology was not quite mature and was still a little imperfect in use, it’s such a leap forward from what has gone before that it was the “Killer App” of its day. A more modern comparison might be with the dedicated word-processors of the late nineteen-seventies: somewhat clunky and not quite right, but still an immense improvement upon the electric typewriters that preceded them.

There can be no question that the fountain pens of this date were being bought by the more affluent end of society. In a few short years ever more efficient mass production would make them available to all.