I’m having a very busy day, pen-testing and making writing samples.

Thankfully my assistant is helping, as you can see.

There are a few interesting pens for sale in ebay today.  There’s an eyedropper filler called “The Efficient” which the seller suggests might have been made by De La Rue but my guess would be Burge, Warren and Ridgley.  There’s also a solidly well made pen called “The Golden Cockerel” which might be by the same maker.  Finally there’s a pen described by the seller as a “Rare BHR Travelling Eyedropper”.  He suggest that it might have been made by Mabie Todd but I don’t see anything to support that.  Another Burge, Warren and Ridgley?

So a good day for rare old pens.  I’d be after these myself but this week’s purchasing budget has been committed.  So it goes.

Etymologically, a pen is just a feather, neither more nor less.  That’s not altogether surprising when you consider that for thirteen centuries the feather or quill was the main writing instrument.  Goose, swan, turkey and even eagle feathers were used.  The large wing feathers; the pinion and two or three big feathers adjacent were the only ones suitable.  Thus began an association between writing instruments and birds that persists to this day.

Mabie Todd, of course, were the manufacturers who made most use of this association, with their Swans, Blackbirds, Jackdaws and Swallows.  Other pen-makers like Parker, Stephens and Croxley came at it from another angle, using an arrow with its flight feathers as a pocket clip.

Mabie Todd’s Swan, especially, features large in their advertising, from detailed painted swans to drawings made with an evocative line or two.  In truth, though, the various swans impressed onto the barrels of their pens aren’t very swan-like.  They’re a bit chunky and short in the neck.  A long-established ebay seller whose first language is probably not English consistently refers to the barrel imprint swan as “The Swan Duck”.  Not an elegant description, perhaps, but an accurate one!

By contrast the blackbird logo is very well observed.  The blackbird is in upward flight, that moment of startled evasion when the blackbird hurtles noisily from the lawn to the safety of the hedge.  Looking at the blackbird on the barrel you can almost hear it.

Even forgetting the association with the quill which was in the distant past even at the time the first Swans were produced, the notion of flight well suits the subject, where a well-made pen glides over the paper and the concepts fly from the mind to the words on the page.  Flights of fancy, whether poesy or prose, figure in the metaphor that the Swan pen evokes.

It pleases me that a company like Mabie Todd, so go-ahead in its day, carried a historical reference throughout its own long history.

I send pens out almost every day but the orders accumulate over the weekend.  Checking which form of overseas postage to use, writing cover letters, getting the packets together – it all takes quite a bit of time and effort and then I have to haul them all to the Post Office.

I’m not a cruel person, as you know.  In fact I’m rather nice, but it does brighten my day when I go into the Post Office with fifteen packets, as today, and I see the Postmistress flinch.

I just read somewhere that the week that has just finished was stationery week.  I’m not sure why such an everyday thing as stationery needs a week, or what that week is meant to do for stationery or for us.  Nothing, I expect.  It’s meant to do something for the people who sell stationery.  Having looked at the success of Hallmark in grabbing great swathes of the calendar for their products,  the stationery sellers are doing the same.  Mind you, I don’t suppose many people noticed, or even if they did, I don’t suppose they rushed out and bought reams of writing paper, boxes of  paper clips and pencils by the gross.

It did make me think about stationery, or more specifically writing paper, though thankfully I have an adequate supply and don’t need to buy any more this week.  I get through a lot of writing paper, always did.  At one time I used it in correspondence with friends all over the world but that gradually wound down.   I still write the odd letter but comes via the keyboard and printer these days, lasered onto the ubiquitous printer paper that we all have in great quantity now.

What I use writing paper for these days is testing pens and producing writing samples.  For the former purpose almost any paper will do, so long as it’s cheap and doesn’t bleed or show through.  A4 Drawing Pads do the job well and I grab them whenever I can.  Each pen’s try-out takes up a page or more – more still if repeated adjustments have to be made – so as you can imagine, each pad doesn’t last very long.

For writing samples I need paper that doesn’t alter the line that the pen lays down.  Lots of otherwise decent writing paper is useless for this purpose because it allows a slight expansion of the line as the ink sinks into the paper.  Fine for writing billets doux to your favourite auntie, no good for exemplary writing samples.  It also has to photograph well and for that reason it’s best if it isn’t glaring white.  After much trial and error I settled on Basildon Bond Ivory.  It does the job, and it pleases me that they’re a company with a long and honourable history, who once upon a distant time produced the estimable Croxley pens.

I do, occasionally, allow myself the luxury of using other papers.  If you dig deep in ebay, you can sometimes find writing paper of yesteryear, when it was all made to be suitable for writing with fountain pens.  There are some wonderful old papers around that cast modern offerings into the shade.

There have been some pretty disturbing things going on in Fountain Pen Network over the last few days.  Sweeping rule changes have been introduced which, of themselves, will affect most members little if at all.  It’s the implication and consequences of these rule changes that are at the heart of the unpleasantness.

Which is the worst thing that’s been happening?

The admins asked for feedback.  In the thread that followed some members made measured and polite criticisms.  Wim replied with what appears to me to be an explosion of arrogance.  We’ve seen this before in the “private” communications to individuals who were being rebuked or expelled, but up to now it has been kept out of the forum.  He then withdrew posting privileges from those involved.  Is that the worst thing?

Unsurprisingly, the new rules gave rise to a number of threads where members questioned the rules (some of which were not very clear) or made suggestions for better ways of raising money.  Several of these threads have been deleted.  Is this censorship (which, truth be told, we should be used to by now) the worst thing?

The rule changes are about making money.  To conduct trading at anything less than the lowest level, a premium account costing $90, $180 or $360 must be purchased.  This is serious money.  It has been asserted (no evidence was forthcoming) that FPN costs $25,000 p.a. to run.  David Isaacson has said that FPB costs around $200 to run.  Admittedly, FPN is huge in comparison with FPB but the comparison does make the figure of $25,000 look suspect.  It has been suggested that they’re doing it wrong but they can hardly be doing it that wrong.  I don’t believe that figure.  I think we’re seeing a community being turned into a meal ticket, perhaps with a sale looming on the horizon.  Is that the worst thing?

FPN has always treated members with contempt, even the most knowledgeable.  Long a bone of contention, the Conway Stewart forum has been the most evident example of this.  It has always seemed strange that there should be a Conway Stewart forum rather than a British Pens forum.  The appointment of an employee of the resuscitated Conway Stewart company as a moderator clarified what was going on there.  It has been shamelessly used as a marketing tool for the company ever since.  Those who complained were unceremoniously booted out, with the result that FPN lacks expertise on British pens now.  Is that the worst thing?

I don’t know.  It all leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

For myself, I was never particularly fond of FPN.  Too much Montblanc and ink for my taste, and the bulk of the discussion rarely rose above the “What ink should I use in my purple Monteverde?” level.  Whereas groups like Lion & Pen and the Fountain Pen Board gradually move forward as shared information is absorbed by the membership, FPN’s huge size and very poor search facility ensures that it remains static and the same questions are asked over and over again.  I took part because I could help a little with repair and history questions, and because it enabled me to push awareness of the excellent qualities of British pens, which is my primary purpose in all of my involvement in the world of fountain pens.

It all reminds me of nothing so much as England’s (things were a little different in Scotland) long and bloody struggle towards democracy against monarchs who believed in their divine right to rule.  I don’t say the outcome will be the same, sadly.  In fact, I suspect that the tyrant will triumph, in this Lilliputian rerun of history.  Still, the LiveJournal example suggests that even tyrants may need to move with caution if they don’t want to see their investment drop like a stone.  In the end, for all forms of internet social networking it holds true that their only value is the members’ input.  Lose that, or lose the best of that, and you’re finished.

An anonymous benefactor sent me these pens which arrived yesterday.  I can’t even guess at who it was  who gave me these pens.  One will provide useful parts and the other two can be restored to working condition.

Thank you very much, unknown donor!

Once upon a time, children, in the long, long ago, there was an inspired inventor called Duncan Cameron.  In those days of horseless carriages and ridiculous hats, people wrote with either a goose feather or a pointy steel dip nib.  The feather was OK but the nib had a tendency to dig into the paper, sending a spray of ink, together with the occasional blot across your penmanship.  Duncan addressed this problem by creating the Waverley nib, characterised by a narrow waist and and an upturned nib.  Some say the nib was patented in 1850 and others say it was 1864.  Either way, ’twas ages ago and I don’t have the energy to hunt down the truth of the matter (bad, bad historian; slaphand).  Anyways, it was an immense success and the nib was taken up by almost everyone except schools where they liked to continue to torture the children with paper-slasher nibs.

The Waverley nib became Macniven & Cameron’s best-selling product, and when they later decided to branch out into fountain pens like this splendid example:

they retained their well-known narrow-waisted, leaf-shaped nib as a selling point.  What they didn’t do, of course, was tilt the tip of the fountain nib, for the simple reason that fountain pen nibs have smooth, long-lasting tipping material and have no tendency to dig into the paper.  Such a thing would be redundant, so they didn’t do it.  Here’s the fountain pen version of the Waverley nib, as straight and untilted as any other:

Probably independently, Sheaffer took up the idea of tilting the tips of nibs, particularly their tubular nibs, in the belief that this made them smoother writers.  They were wrong, of course.  Those tip-tilted Sheaffers don’t write any more smoothly – or indeed any different – than any competently-made nib.

Mr. Richard Binder took up the idea of the Waverley nib some time back, though for some reason he transferred the idea to fountain pen nibs, rather than dip nibs where it actually has some benefit.  Now, I see in FPN, he has acquired the commercial rights to the term and is getting a little snappy about others using it.

Considering how much the term has been bandied about in the last few years, it seems unlikely that it could be legally limited in this way.  It’s amusing, though, how these things come around.

They come as a Boon and a Blessing to men
The Pickwick, the Owl and the Waverley Pen  

When Duncan Cameron named his improved nib after Sir Walter Scott’s novels and the area of Edinburgh where the main railway station is, he couldn’t have foreseen that the concept would give rise to litigious grumblings on the other side of the Atlantic a century and a half later.  However, as we know, the history of the fountain pen is one of homages and copies.  Truly, there’s nothing new under the sun!

At the end of December and into the beginning of January I took a break from buying in ebay.  When I returned to it, I found that prices for unrestored pens were generally higher than they had been.  I took it that it was a temporary blip and didn’t think much more about it.

Now it’s March and prices haven’t leveled out again.  If anything, they seem to have taken another price hike.  Mid-range Swans and Conway Stewarts that I would have bought for under thirty pounds last year now regularly get bid up to the high thirties and even into the forties.  Considering that there has been no commensurate rise in the prices reached by restored pens, it’s kind of insane.

I don’t know why this has happened.  I could speculate, but that’s all it would be – speculation.  One guess is that with the troubled times we’re in and the rise in unemployment, more people are trying to make a living from ebay, and in this specific area, from pen restoration.  I do see more and different sellers of restored pens in ebay.

Unfortunately for them, it’s not going to work.  If you’re paying £40.00 for a Conway Stewart 27 and selling it for £45 (or less) you’re not making a fiver, you’re losing money.  The cost of delivering the pen to you – usually around £3.00 – is part of the buying price.  You don’t recover it.  Then there may be a sac, use of cleaning materials and polishes and at least some notional figure for your time.  It’s a kind of bubble that must burst sooner or later.

It’s inconveniencing me but it isn’t any kind of a disaster, at least in the short term.  I always have a quite large stock of pens by me, and ebay’s not the only place to buy pens if it comes to it.  I won’t pay those prices, though.  Yes, if the general restored pens/vintage retail market is forced into an upward lurch in price I would have to accept that this is where prices are and will be.  We’re not there yet, though.  I prefer to believe that this inflation in unrestored pen prices will pass and we can go back to something like business as usual.  I see no advantage to anyone in a rise in price for restored vintage pens.  They’re dear enough already.

New uploads on the website today!  There’s something new in each category including a Parker Super 17 (still chalk-marked!) and a lovely iridescent blue striated Waterman W5. One pen sold before I even had a chance to finish the uploads 🙂  My prices are very affordable, please have a wander through my virtual aisles and see for yourself.