During all the years that Mabie Todd made pens there must have been a succession of employees entrusted with the job of stamping a model number on the barrel of each pen. So many operatives and yet they all had the same failing: lots of pens got past them without being stamped. Several explanations have been put forward for this omission – a factory romance, perhaps, or a tendency to overindulge in lunchtime pints of a Friday. We’ll never know.

Had this pen been stamped as it should have been if the fellow’s mind had been on his job it would have been with the number 6160. It isn’t an outstanding pen. It’s at the bottom end of the Swan range of the time with it’s chrome plating, just a workmanlike instrument of the late thirties, one of the best sellers of the time.

The only notable thing about it is that the nib is a sweet semiflex. Looking back through my blog I see that these pens are often flexible. As we have discussed recently Mabie Todd offered quite a range of nibs for their Swans and it may be that these flexible nibs were a matter of customer choice.