I don’t repair pens for other people, and what I’m going to write about today is part of the reason for that.

Perhaps the biggest threat to our hobby is that pen repairers are giving it up. Nobody’s getting rich fixing pens. Many repairers do it on a part-time basis, with the day job paying the rent and putting food on the table. It takes years of experience before one can offer the full range of repair and restoration and, frankly, there’s not much in the way of financial return for making the effort. Most repairers do it for love, love of the craft and love of the pens.

Then there’s the problem of the public. Most people who send pens for repair are reasonable in their expectations and delighted with the outcome. I repair the bulk of my own pens but there are many more complicated repairs that I just can’t do. I know my limitations! I am repeatedly astonished by having pens that I thought were beyond repair coming back to me in working order, looking good. Not everyone’s the same, though. There are those who cannot recognise that the pile of junk in their hand is beyond the capability of anyone on earth to repair. There are those who haggle and nickel and dime the repairer over every last penny. There are those who return pens time and again for imaginary failings that they accuse the repairer of not having fixed. The pen world’s a small place. We all know each other. We hear the horror stories.

I can only offer the variety of pens I do because there’s a repairer who can get any filling system, no matter how recondite or abstruse, back in working order, who can repair a delaminating barrel, make a no-longer-available replacement part or any of the other pen-fixing tasks that are beyond me. Without such people I’d be limited to lever and button fillers, aerometrics and bulb fillers, because even if I had the skills (which I don’t) I assuredly don’t have the time, given the other demands of pen selling.

I’m not making a plea for tolerance of bad work or high prices. That’s not it at all. What I’m saying is: respect your repairer. Value your repairer like the last of the Giant Pandas, because they are becoming that rare. Treat them well. Don’t demand that they do the impossible and don’t try to screw their price down to the penury level. The workman is worthy of his hire, and in this case the repairer is already selling his skills and his time pretty cheap.

Make it “Be Nice To Your Pen Repairer Week” every week.

Edited to add:  Lest  be misunderstood, this post is a general point, neither a vilification nor a defence of individuals.  The problem, as many will be aware, is a widespread one.

Back to buying pens in eBay today for the first time in quite a while. It’s one of my favourite things to do. Sitting there for the last few seconds, finger poised over the mouse button – it’s exciting in a good non-stressful way and paradoxically it’s very relaxing, as I shut the rest of the world out and concentrate on the auction.

Strangely, given how terrible the economy is, prices for unrestored pens seem to be rising. Not quite what you’d expect. You’d think that people suffering the squeeze of the wage freeze or the penury of unemployment would be spending the few pennies they have on Rice Crispies and Baked Beans to keep body and soul together, but no, they’re all in there bidding furiously on a tatty Burnham with a missing clip. Perhaps that’s how Britain will rise again from the double-dip depression, by everyone sitting at home fixing up pens and selling them to those who still have some money left, at home and abroad.

Seriously, though, everyday, ordinary old pens do seem to be enjoying a price rise, and they did at this time last year too. While it’s a little annoying to those of us looking to buy in stock, it’s good for the hobby. If old pens have a decent value they’re less likely to be thrown out or cannibalised for the value of the gold nib.

It’s been in planning since April and in development since June. That’s quite a gestation period for a simple little sales website, but it’s ready to go at last! If it ever crosses your mind that you might like a professionally-crafted website, take a look at the bottom right hand corner of mine, note the name and avoid them like the plague! As you know, I’ve had some trouble with those people, she said, using understatement for effect, and though I’ve spent hours checking the operation of the site there are some areas I can’t fully test, so if you come across any glitches drop me an email and I’ll butcher the lot of them have a word with the developers.

Yesterday was a blur of photographing, editing photos, writing descriptions and uploading but looking at the site now I think it will be worth it. There must be around seventy pens there, mostly British, all makes. But why tell you about it when you can go and look for yourself!

http://www.goodwriterspensales.com

I’m hoping to announce the sales site on Sunday. Annoyingly, I had commitments on Monday and Wednesday of this week that were unavoidable and took a whole precious day each. I’ve got some Swans loaded on to the site – I’ll probably add quite a few more – and some Conway Stewarts. There are quite a few in the Bargain Corner and some in Uncommon & Unusual. I still have to load some Watermans, Parkers, Mentmores Summits and others.

My future contains much testing, photographing, describing and uploading.

My final communication with my website builders:

Dear XXXXXXX,

I am immensely relieved that the creation of my website is finally over – or nearly over as you will see from the accompanying email. As usual, there is a foolish fault that shows once more that no-one is checking their own work, nor is there any form of quality control in place.

A very simple website that should have taken less than a fortnight to create has taken three months. That was three months of miserable frustration for me, as I spent hour after hour listing the careless mistakes that first the execrable Jugoslav and later Marija constantly made and equally constantly maintained had been put right when they evidently had not. Very little was corrected the first time I pointed out errors, and most things took up to five times before they were truly put right. In what world is that good business practice? It was also three months of lost sales for me, a small fortune that has been sacrificed to the incompetence, carelessness and total indifference to the interests of the customer that is your company’s hallmark, as further evidenced by the negative and condemnatory comments that are all over the Internet.

I understand that you use foreign workers because they are cheap. In the cases of the two who worked on my site, I hope they’re very cheap indeed. They would need to be if you’re going to get value for money. Frankly, I don’t care who does the coding, but you might have provided English-speaking oversight to avoid some of the worst time-wasting linguistic errors. Zoe, apparently, was supposed to supply some form of oversight but never did. You might consider whether her salary is well spent.

I note that you have added your company’s name to my website. That’s up to you. All my customers are well aware of what has been going on, and the almost farcical level of incompetence I’ve had to deal with. I didn’t name you, but if you want to out yourselves, that’s up to you. I would suggest that you don’t use my site in your gallery of sites you have made, listed on your website. If anyone contacts me I will be scrupulously honest and comprehensive in my opinion of your work.

In the survey I had to fill in before the site would go live, I was asked for comments. These are those comments but in case you missed it over there on the survey, I will repeat that this has been the worst experience of my business life. I still cannot believe how awful your company is, and how often a supposedly finished site was presented to me, only for me to find it was laughable in its dereliction, except for that fact that there was nothing funny about it. You managed to make me hate my own website. Bravo.

It would certainly be kinder to those hoping to put their business online if you were to find other work. There are many openings commensurate with your skills; there are ditches to be dug, garbage to be collected and burgers to be flipped. Go on, pack it in and get a job you can do!

Regards,
Deborah Gibson

My website is finally online, but I’m not publishing the URL just yet, as I’m still in the process of populating it with pens. Swans, Blackbirds, Conway Stewarts, Stephens, Summits and many, many more! Bargain Corner! Uncommon and unusual pens! Low, low introductory prices! Flexible nibs!

Watch this space!

I’m easily amused. For instance, it’s a great source of chuckles for me to note the differing methods of applying discipline in Fountain Pen Network and The Fountain Pen Board. If you make a nuisance of yourself in FPN, an admin will have a severe word in your shell-like ear. If you persist in your peskiness your offending posts may be disappeared and you’ll be booted out without further ado. Seems fair to me.

The Fountain Pen Board was set up, in part at least, in protest against the perceived heavy-handedness of the moderation in FPN. Much is made by the board’s owner and moderator of the absence of interference in the dialogue. That’s a very good thing, and the discussion in FPB is of a high quality, due, to some extent, to that very freedom to say whatever you want to say without fear of censure. But what do you do about the out-and-out pest who ruins everyone else’s fun with their hidden agenda, their inanity or their general peskiness?

Brutality seems to be the answer, carefully crafted verbal brutality of a high quality. So far, I would have to say, it hasn’t been especially effective in driving away the pestilential or making them mend their ways, but it’s in there with a chance and it’s hugely entertaining. Of course, it’s only likely to work well if the pesky don’t have the wherewithal to fight back effectively. The mod, to be fair, has a good left jab of sarcasm and a mighty roundhouse right of invective, but it doesn’t matter how good a fighter you are, someone bigger and better is just around the corner. If someone like that turns up, I suspect the group will become a blood-soaked battlefield with little room or time for pen discussion, but until that time draw up a chair and pass the popcorn.

As you may imagine, the never-ending delays and the stupid errors that have held back the launch of my sales website for what seems like forever don’t lead to the most friendly of correspondence with the developer. My emails go from reasonable and helpful to tetchy to angry and mildly abusive to full-on, purple-in-the-features rage with insults and death threats.

The contemptible Jugoslav, when he was the “developer” (I use that term advisedly) never responded to my heavy sarcasm and out-and-out insults. He didn’t fix any of his schoolboy errors either, of course. Marija is a bit more feisty and she bites back when I question her honesty, ability and commitment to getting the job done. I admire that. It makes life more interesting.

It doesn’t alter the fact that if she’d been working for me she’d be begging on a street corner by now…

You may say, of course, in your reasonable way, that baiting and insulting the developers is counter-productive. They have no incentive to work well if all they can look forward to are insults and slurs on their paternity. I say in response that I tried reasonable. It was a long while ago but I remember that it was just as ineffective as my present policy but I enjoy this one more. So long as I’m raining curses and invective down on their miserable heads I feel I’m getting some entertainment for my money. It’s not much, but it’s something.

All that having been said the site pretty much works now. A wee bit of adjustment in some minor areas and I should be selling pens.

There was a Great Leap Forward, as Mao Zedung used to say back in the day, in my e-commerce site.

My firm of developers – who shall remain nameless for the moment – appear to farm all the coding out to our erstwhile comrades in the former Soviet Union. The execrable, incompetent buffoon Jugoslav has finally been booted off the job and he’s been replaced by the rather more able and sensible Marija. Suddenly, things on the site begin to work as I have pleaded for them to do, yea these many, many days. About eight weeks of them, in fact. One can amble through the site in a logical sequence without once being shunted off into HTML limbo and graphics appear as they are meant to! I can upload stuff! It works!

I profoundly hope that Jugoslav has been exiled to the steppes, where he shivers over a reluctantly smouldering fire of yak dung as he guards the herd with his trusty dog, which has at least a 30-point lead in IQ over him. I fear for the yak herd, though, if Jugoslav is as good at defending them against the wily and rapacious wolf of the steppe as he was at slinging code.

Too early to crow, though, as the shopping basket and checkout softwares still have to be integrated into the site. Will Marija the Muscovite Coding Maiden get it all together by next week or will she follow in Jugo’s footsteps and make a total bollox of it?

For further thrilling instalments, tune in to your favourite pen blog!

It isn’t often that Bic, that colossus that bestrides the ball-pen market, gets the spirit of the times radically wrong, but I think they managed it here rather well!

It’s good to see sarcasm used so effectively as a cutting-edged weapon. I think Bic may quietly withdraw “Bic For Her” quite soon.

In casting an eye back over historical periods, it’s generally regarded as essential to avoid the anachronistic temptation to apply one’s modern beliefs and biases to yesteryear. On the other hand, that’s no fun so we’ll just ignore that principle for the moment.

The earliest commonly-produced “Pen For Her” was the chatelaine, and it was probably the least objectionable of the pens produced especially for women. Edwardian women’s wear for the middle and upper classes didn’t have pockets, so a pen that hung around the neck was practical. Of course many were decorative, though at that period many men’s pens were too, so it can’t be said that women were singled out as being especially attracted to pretty baubles, in that time at least. In fact, in recognising that the head of a medium or large household was a manager who ran the house with a pen rather than a skillet or a mop (we have people for that, dear), it may even have gone so far as to suggest that some women, at least, were not empty-headed ornaments, but were capable and competent within their carefully delineated sphere. Most, though not all, chatelaine pens were not tiny. They were slender as were all pens in that time, but as people were making the transition from the dip pen to the fountain pen, they were used to writing with slender instruments. As eyedropper-fillers they held a good charge of ink. Chatelaine pens, it could be said, didn’t demean their user or label them in a derogatory way.

Things were about to change…

Take, as one example among many, the Lady Duofold of the late 1920s and 1930s. It’s the same size as the Duofold Junior, which was intended as a school pen. Is this intended to imply, perhaps, that the average woman has hands like those of a school child? A little observation would have shown that this is not so, but never mind. What’s the effect of shortening a pen? It holds less ink. Are we to understand that unlike her businessman mate who needed a big pen to write reams every day, the little woman only wrote the odd shopping list or note to her giggly friends and didn’t need a pen with much capacity?

By contrast, we might discuss the gender message of the Pen For Men or the Waterman Man Pen but we won’t because that inevitably gets phallic and rude, and this is a family blog.

The last hugely successful pen made mostly for women was the Conway Stewart Dinkie 550, sold between 1952 and 1962. Though I believe you could buy one on its own, these were usually sold in a presentation case with a matching pencil. They were usually bought as presents, and the fact that they were not all that well appreciated by their (usually female) recipients is illustrated by the perfect, unused condition that they appear in on eBay today in their hundreds. I have small hands and I can’t write with a Dinkie 550. It’s just too small and fiddly. Dinkies are, in fact, delicate, beautiful and useless, and perhaps that’s what the ladies of the fifties took their beaus to be saying about them, as they slung the pretty presentation case in the drawer, never to be looked at again.

Get the message, Bic. We women don’t want to go down that road again.