I’ve written about this before but I feel I must write about it again.
I bought four pens from the same seller and they arrived yesterday
morning. One of them was crushed. They had been packed in a soft
plastic tube, surrounded by bubble wrap and placed in a padded bag.
During the transport and handling the pens had moved around and the
most robust had crushed the weakest. It was completely
unrecoverable.

The seller recompensed me but that isn’t the point. It was an
interesting Lang’s pen in a subtle blue and black marbled pattern. I
hadn’t seen that pattern before. The nib and section had been
replaced but I have spares. It wasn’t high-value but it was a
rarity. I would have loved to have brought that pen back to some
semblance of what it once was.

I’m sure that padded bags have their uses but they are a menace to
pens. I’ve used them myself when sending out spares but I wouldn’t
use them to send a pen even if it was swathed in layers of bubble
wrap. Pens need to be protected by something rigid. I use postal
tubes. Some people use rigid plastic piping. Others use plastic
tubes that appear to have been made for the purpose. All sorts of
cardboard boxes can be reused. Some people even make up their own
boxes out of reused cardboard. They’re all good. Padded bags are
not.

 

For years I’ve seen those New Old Stock Reform pens sold in eBay for
tiny prices. I’ve often wanted one but for long I never did
anything about it. This week I bought a Reform 1745 for a fiver.
Imagine! A European-made piston-filler for £5.00. I’ve seen on the
discussion boards the suspicion voiced that some of these pens are
counterfeits. Frankly that’s taking paranoia to a new level. Who in
the world would fake a discontinued pen that requires sophisticated
tooling and can hardly be sold? On examination the build quality of
the pen is quite high. The work that has gone into the construction
of the cap assembly alone would bankrupt the counterfeiter.

 

I am using it to write this. It’s a slender little pen and that’s
not going to suit everyone. It’s on the fine side of medium and if I
had my druthers I’d rather a true fine. That said, it’s a nice
writer, adequately smooth but with enough feedback to make it easily
controllable. The ink delivery is quite generous. Being a
piston-filler it holds plenty of ink. In its green and black livery
it looks very nice. I find this much nicer to write with than the
last over-expensive new Pelikan I had. I would pay quite a bit more
for such a pen. I’m just glad I didn’t have to!