I’ve been having quite a good week – sold a few pens, bought a few more – but you never know when disaster is about to strike. I’d sent a nice Conway Stewart 286 and a Blackbird to a customer in Chicago and I was anticipating hearing from him that he’s received his pens. And he did. In bits.

Over the last three years I’ve sent out in excess of 1500 pens. I’m careful about packing – stiff postal tube, plenty of bubble wrap, all held securely with parcel tape. I’ve never had a pen damaged before. One or two have “gone astray” as Royal Mail like to put it, but no damage. Someone has to have driven over the package to crush it like this. There’s no other explanation.

The poor customer was devastated, seeing his long-awaited pens in fragments. Of course all my packages are insured and I was able to refund him right away, but that’s not the point. The point is that these pens had survived a very long time, one around seventy years, the other more like eighty, only to be destroyed because someone was too careless to do their job properly.

My assistant is very cross about it and plans to bite the postman.

I’ve just uploaded some goodies to the website including a splendid capillary Parker 61 in its box, a fine early De La Rue Onoto with an over-and-under feed, a very fresh Swan 200 from around 1915, and an even earlier WHS/Conway Stewart syringe-filler. Perhaps the prettiest pen is a 1940s advertising National Security pen in glorious green and black. Please have a look around, there’s something new in every category!

Goodwriterspensales

Eric Wilson visited yesterday. There were many wonderful pens and much good pen talk.

It’s amazing how few ripples are left in the pond of the Web a few years after a large company has sunk.

This is the reverse of a guarantee issued in 1934 for a Waterman pen by H. P. Pope Ltd., showing their premises at Pope’s Pen Corner, at the junction of New Street and Lower Temple Street, Birmingham. My apologies for the quality of the reproduction. It’s just a quick snap taken on the bench without additional light.

They were stationers, printers, suppliers of office furniture and typewriters, among many other things. Banners in the windows show advertisements for Swan, Onoto, Eversharp, Waterman and Koh-I-Noor. There are others but they’re too small to read. The post-box near the entrance reads “Onoto The Pen”. We know from Donahaye’s list that they had Conway Stewart make pens for them, including the 100 ink pencil, the 466, the MHR 300M and the MHR 266

The pen that this came with is a black hard rubber Waterman 32 1/2. It seems rather an old pen to have been sold in 1934 but who knows? The guarantee certainly relates to a Waterman. L.G. Sloan of London remained the sole European representatives for Waterman and H. P. Pope acted as a local distributor, giving additional warranty on top of that supplied by Sloan.

The few references I was able to find to Pope’s Pen Corner online included the winding up of the company in 1975. It has been gone for quite a while but it’s still well within living memory. I wonder if anyone reading this remembers it.

If it were possible to journey back in time (and that’s bound to come soon, along with our flying cars, meals-in-a-pill, shiny all-in-one suits and laser guns) I wouldn’t mind spending an afternoon browsing the pen displays in Pope’s Pen Corner in 1934.

Just finished new uploads to the website! Interesting new pens in each section including, among others. a “Forward” and a Jewel “Oma”, a Waterman, some Parkers and a Conway Stewart as well as a handful of new additions to the Mabie Todd section, my favourite among them this week being this fabulous Calligraph with its flexible italic nib.

PLEASE NOTE: there is currently a problem with the “click to zoom” feature on the images on the website. I have informed the web developer of this and hope it will be fixed soon. For now, in order to get back to the page you were viewing, please use the ‘back’ button on your browser to navigate away from the enlarged image. I apologise for the inconvenience, I only noticed this issue Friday evening.

Edited to add:-

The Calligraph went in minutes but you can use this link now.

New pens up on the website tonight! Among others there are Swans, Watermans, a Unique and a Mentmore and a couple of Parkers including this one…

The discussion about sacs, silicone and otherwise, rumbles on. One unfortunate consequence is that some people are making a blanket condemnation of latex sacs. This is premature, at best. Those sacs that were sold as silicone previously, but are in reality a mixture of silicone and PVC, we are told, are much less flexible than latex sacs. Are the new, truly silicone versions stiff like them or fully flexible like latex? That’s not clear yet, or at least it isn’t clear to me.

Old pens were designed to be used with latex sacs. Some – Conway Stewarts and Watermans come to mind – do not well withstand the added stress of a stiff sac on aging levers and lever boxes. If we are left without a sac as flexible as latex as a consequence of this debate, I forecast great demand for Conway Stewart levers and Waterman lever boxes.

I think it needs to be said, too, that latex sacs are harmless and useful in all but a few pens. Some light-coloured pens like jade, lapis lazuli and some of the Waterman 1930s patterns like onyx do discolour badly due to the decay of latex sacs. However, if you have a celluloid or casein pen of almost any other pattern, it will be entirely unaffected.

Silicone sacs are not a universal panacea. The pattern of discolouring in many pens suggests that there is more than the sac at work. Other rubber components like inner caps and sections appear to add to the problem. It may be, of course, that after 60, 70, 80 years the material in these components has finished outgassing and they’re no longer harmful. But do we know that?

Finally, let’s not rush to too favourable a judgment on the new silicone sacs either. Surely we have learned now that in the pen world, it often takes years or decades before problems become evident. We are assured – and I have no reason to doubt it – that silicone is inert and therefore harmless. But is it adequately durable? Time will tell.

I caution against speedy decisions which we may repent at leisure, particularly with regard to the idea that we should dispense with latex sacs.

New pens on the website (which has a new more easy-to-navigate pen menu!), including this lovely Parker 51… (also a handful of Conway Stewarts, a Waterman Junior, an Eversharp Kingswood, a Stephens, one new No-Name MHR and a lovely Swan pen and pencil set)…

My first pen acquisition of 2013 arrived this morning, a nice black Canadian Duofold from the 1940s. That’s all I’ve bought this year so far because the prices have been nuts since Christmas. Pens that I would normally buy in at £30 have been going for £10 – £15 more. It must be everyone spending their Christmas present money. Next wee things will return to normal, I expect. Luckily I had quite a backlog of stock awaiting restoration. I had promised myself a month off but after about three days of bad television and overeating I was glad to get back to the workbench.

I’m working through about a dozen restored pens today in preparation for uploading to the website. I’ve write-tested them. Next is photography, followed by photo-editing and writing descriptions. With any luck I’ll get them uploaded on Monday, but I’ll announce it here in any case.