I wrote about Calligraphs back here http://wp.me/p17T6K-bM. As I said back then, Calligraph can be a bit of a misnomer because so many of them are perfectly ordinary non-calligraphy pens. However, sometimes you come across one that lives up to the name and once in a while you come across a sort of strange Wondernib that does everything. How does Oblique Italic Flexible sound?

It’s a true italic, sharp-edged enough to dig into the paper. It is tipped, unlike some other italic nibs. It’s oblique and, quite unexpectedly, it has oodles of flexibility! I managed a cursive writing sample with it but it wasn’t a comfortable thing to do. It wanted to dig into the paper on the upstrokes, as any good italic should do. Flexibility in this configuration of nib feels really odd. I can’t imagine what writing style they had in mind for this nib but any calligrapher with a creative and innovative spirit would have the time of his life with it!

The pen model number is 3170, that is, lever filler with a No1 nib, colour code 70, which is one of those that I haven’t seen defined anywhere. I’ll say teal, for the moment, though I’m not entirely pleased with it. Cobalt comes to mind, but there’s a hint of green here that cobalt doesn’t have.  This is the first – lever-filler – type of Calligraph, by far the best version

The Swan SF2 is a big pen by any standards. It’s 14.3cm capped and a magnificent 17.7cm posted! Being black hard rubber it isn’t heavy, but the addition of a very broad 18ct cap band and an accommodation clip overbalance this old fellow slightly.

As you can see, there’s no difficulty about dating this one. That’s only one of the reasons why I enjoy personalisations, especially when they’re as well engraved as this one. Sad to say I don’t know who Jonathan Hardy was. There’s the New Zealander actor, but I don’t think he’s old enough.

As you can also see, this one’s Mabie Todd through and through, with the patented Swan Clip attached. You might notice that once upon a time the clip was gold plated but there’s very little left. I think we can forgive them that, as the one bit of plating on the pen, the lever, is in good order.

Still a great writer.

I must remember not to wear a red shirt when photographing shiny pens…

It was maybe bad timing, but who knew? Mabie Todd chose 1939 to launch a whole new range of pens including the lizardskin Leverlesses and the snakeskin Self-Fillers. Due to the exigencies of war, neither reptile is especially common now, the lizards less so because some of those plastics are reported to have proved unstable leading to splitting in barrels and caps.

This one’s a blue snakeskin SM205/33 with a black hard rubber lever, black ends to cap and barrel and a black hard rubber section. Apart from a little chipping on the lever and a tiny loss of gold on the ball end of the clip, the pen’s in great condition. As is usually the way with snakeskins (I’ve had the good fortune to own quite a few, however temporarily) this pen has a exceptional nib, stubbish and flexible, conferring a lot of very easily accessed line variation.

I often try to evaluate the pens that pass through my hands on a scale of 1 – 10. Because I generally enjoy whichever pen I’m working with at the time, they mostly end up being 10s. However, being as objective as I can, being parsimonious with my admiration and allowing for its faults, on that 1 – 10 scale, this one’s a 15.

I wrote about the Swan 1500 before, back here: http://wp.me/p17T6K-1Q but this one is a little different.

This is the pen made in America for the British market during the First World War. They turn up from time to time and, if this leaky vessel I laughingly call my memory serveth me aright, there was a discussion on this subject in FPN only last week. My guess would be that the pens were imported from the American parent company because, with so many young men being sent overseas, demand for pens was at an all-time high so that correspondence could be kept with absent loved ones. It may be that, as in the Second World War, domestic effort was transferred from making pens to munitions manufacture. It does tell us, though, that in 1914 the British and American arms of Mabie Todd still worked closely together, and it may well be that the relationship remained stronger than has previously been accepted for decades thereafter.

The pen itself is a thing of beauty, slender and elegant, and in this instance, unfaded and with all its imprints and chasing fresh and crisp. Add a Swan Metal Pocket to clip into the inside pocket of your black tail-coat over your pin-striped trousers and you could be the Man From The Ministry, ready to send another few thousand soldiers over to fertilise the fields of Flanders with a single stroke of this very pen.

This pen is original in every respect with its New York nib and its over-and-under feed. Often, when 1500s arrive on my bench, they have ladder feeds. Whether, at some late stage, ladder feeds were installed at the factory, or whether they were retrofitted some time later, I cannot say. The 1500 writes splendidly in its original trim, but the ladder feed does make employing the flexibility that most of these pens offer rather easier. The ink flow keeps up better.

Note that the nib size is imprinted on the barrel. That means they made them in the factory as fines, mediums, stubs etc., rather than having the retailer fit the nib the customer wanted, as happened later.

This is the big one. Though it is said that there are No 9 nibs, and therefore one would expect that there should have been pens that would accommodate them, and there certainly are a few No 8 nibs, most of us will never see a bigger Swan than this, the Leverless 2060. It’s true that some earlier Swans were longer, but the girth of this pen together with the lump of gold that is a No 6 Eternal nib give it an unequalled presence. The 2060 had a short and constricted production run and is therefore comparatively uncommon. There’s a story to this one.

By 1939 the Swan range had undergone a redesign. They had become shorter and thicker.

They were streamlined with a flat top and they carried a form of washer clip under a black cap top dressed off with a gilded Swan logo. The barrel imprint had the Swan logo to the left of the four lines of information. This is the “Type A” imprint. The Leverless range contained, as well as the highly-esteemed plain black businessman’s pen, an array of lizard skin designs in blue, green, garnet and pearl grey. They all carried the “L” designation in the form L—/–, L212/87 being the blue lizard, as an example. Mabie Todd had a superb range of pens, and I think it can be said that this was one of the great high points of the company’s history.

In September 1940 the main production facility at Harlesden was bombed. Production stopped for a time until premises were found at Golden Lane, and enough equipment was scraped together to resume manufacturing though at a lesser rate.

These pens bear the “Type B” imprint, where the swan sits centrally, and their identification is truncated to four digits, as with my 2060. Production of these pens, and the cheerfully coloured lizards, continued throughout 1941 and 1942, in what seems like a minor but worthy act of defiance against the horrors of the Blitz and the increasing austerity of wartime. In 1943 the Board of Trade began licensing pen production and these models disappeared.

This one’s a clipless Leverless (doesn’t that just trip off the tongue?). Either V. Newby didn’t use his or her pen very much or she/he was very careful with it, because the chasing and imprints are like new, as is the gold plating on the rings.

Now there’s a thing! I haven’t seen a ring arrangement like that before, with two plain narrow bands on either side of a milled band just broad enough to be called medium. The effect is very pleasing.

It’s not only a clipless Leverless, it’s a numberless clipless Leverless. I may be reading too much into that but quite a few of the early numberless Leverless pens that I have seen seem to vary from the usual trim. Could it be that these are bespoke pens, and this is a pen assembled to V. Newby’s own specifications?

In any case, it’s a superb pen with its crisp imprint and Swan image on the top of the cap. It’s a big pen at 13.7cm capped. The nib is a No.2 and it gives quite a bit of line variation.