(Excuse the quality of these photos.  I’m not happy with this camera.  They say it’s a poor workman that blames his tools but I think I bought the wrong tool.  It has a lens with all the chromatic qualities of a milk bottle bottom.  And no, I won’t tell you publicly what it it is, because it was made by a huge manufacturer who might sue me to bankruptcy.)

This is a customer’s pen.  It had a slight leak which, as it turned out, was down to someone having fitted a Parker Pliglass sac which didn’t adhere too well to the section.

I’m not all that familiar with Dinkies and this little fellow puzzled me for a bit.  At first glance I took it to be a 570, then I doubted that because it is a Pressac filler.  It took a bit of digging around before I found out that there were Pressac 570s, so that’s what it is.

It’s a stunning little pen in the Lumina green.  Dinkies usually came in sets with a pencil and were extremely popular gifts.  I sometimes wonder, particularly with regard to the post-war Dinkies, whether they were more popular with the giver rather than the recipient.  I say that because so many of them come on the market in an unused state.  Perhaps they were felt to be too pretty to use and remained in their box.  Another thing that I’ve heard said is that they are too small to use, and to be honest, I sort of subscribed to that view myself.  However, write-testing this little fellow, I found it to be quite comfortable.  Perhaps I might write for a slightly longer time with a bigger pen, but it was certainly no worse to write with than the slender First World War Swans or Onotos.  I have moderately small hands which probably makes it a better fit, and it may be that those with larger hands can convince themselves that it’s impossible to write with anything other than a big pen, roughly around the size of a policeman’s baton.  Having seen joiners with hands like shovels writing perfectly comfortably with a half-inch stub of pencil, I’m inclined to regard that as another of those affectations that plague the fountain pen world.

Dinkies are the collector’s pen par excellence.  There have been so many models made over the years, in so many colours and patterns, that a comprehensive collection must be very big indeed.  Though the Dinkies are the most famous, several other firms made small pens, including even American manufacturers like Wahl Eversharp.

Like everything else, the prices of Dinkies are rising, though many of the post-war sets still sell for prices that seem a real bargain.