Among my accumulation of pens is a Conway Stewart 205. I can’t date it exactly but it was made some time in the early 1920s. I prefer Conway Stewarts from this period to the even earlier ones which were bought in and re-badged as Conway Stewarts. By time this pen came along, Conway Stewart had their own factory and the designs had begun to take on a style and appearance that made the pens recognisably Conway Stewart.

This is a black hard rubber pen measuring 13.6cm capped. Originally clipless, it has had an accommodation clip fitted. The cap has no bands and the only decoration is the knurling on the clip screw. The section is distinctly convex and beautifully sculpted. The barrel tapers subtly at the end. It has Conway Stewart’s instantly recognisable ‘flange lever’, a practical and pleasing design. These pens can appear with either Warranted 14ct nibs or Conway Stewart ones. I don’t believe that the Warranted nibs are necessarily replacements – there are too many of them for that. This one has a Conway Stewart nib. It is medium and very smooth from long years of use.

Indeed, the pen is well-worn. The barrel imprint is so faint from use that it can only be read under strong light and magnification. The gold plating on the lever has held up quite well, but the chrome plating on the clip, which may have been an inexpensive one, shows considerable wear. The black hard rubber has faded slightly to a rich, pleasing chocolate brown.

I bought this pen in eBay many years ago. I’ve kept it ever since as a good writer and an example of one of Conway Stewart’s best periods. The 205 isn’t a common pen by any means but that doesn’t make it especially valuable because there isn’t any great demand for it.

The only fault so far as I’m concerned, is the accommodation clip. I like to post my pens but the weight of this clip unbalances the pen. I have tried to remove the clip though without any great determination. It has been there for a very long time and it isn’t going to part company with the cap easily. I just have to break the habit of a lifetime and set the cap aside while I write.

(Perhaps I should have given the nib a wipe, but it’s an everyday user and this is how one looks!)

Conway Stewart nibs are good but Swan and Onoto nibs are better. Nonetheless, there are Conway Stewarts from several of their periods of production that I like to have. After this one, I like the pre-war 286, in any of the pleasant patterns one can choose from. In the immediately post-war period, the 388 and 55 are great pens and pleasant writers. Among the cigar-shaped pens of the 50s and 60s, the 27 is my choice. After that the pens fell away rapidly and disastrously. When the company rose from the dead like a shambling zombie, it produced pens that were prohibitively expensive and bore little real relationship to the pens of the glory days. I don’t want any of them.

In the lore of modern pens, Sailors are said by many to have the best nibs. I’m not talking about flexibility here, just about the ability to glide across the paper in a pleasing and accurate way. I bought a Sailor Sapporo a year or so ago. It wasn’t an expensive pen by the standards of those who buy limited editions, but it was expensive for me. I don’t remember exactly what I paid for it but it was in the region of what I would normally lay out on a very high quality vintage pen.

In many ways it should be my ideal pen. I love the look of it and it sits well in my hand. It’s a small pen but I have small hands so we are in agreement there. A few days ago I saw it in its box and I wondered why I didn’t use it more. I inked it up and made use of it for a day or two. I know now why I don’t use it much. It drags unpleasantly on the paper. I’m not talking about normal feedback. The cheapo Wing Sung I’m writing this with has plenty of feedback and I love it. The Sapporo isn’t quite a paper-cutter but it’s just not right. I’ve had a look at the tines under magnification and they are perfectly aligned so there is no improvement I can make there. That means that I’m going to have to polish the tipping material, something I avoid like the plague in my everyday restoration of pens. Some highly skilled technician put the right amount of expensive tipping material on the pen, whether it’s now or back in the 1920s, and I don’t believe it’s a good idea to take it off again. Also, if you use an abrasive to polish the nib tip and make it address the paper sweetly, you may be widening the contact area. The pen is a fine which is what I want it to be. I don’t want it to be one whit wider than it is. Of course, if that were to happen, I know how to reshape it to become fine again. That means more removal of iridium.

This isn’t a great tragedy of course. I can fix the pen. I’ll use the most gentle abrasive I have and it may well be that I can improve the nib to an acceptable smoothness without affecting any of its other attributes.

But I am disappointed. I feel that it should be a better pen than it is. I have other modern Japanese pens that have worked splendidly right out of the box. I hear tell that Sailor should be even better than the Pilots and Platinums. Maybe I got a Friday afternoon pen. It encourages me to believe that I need to give up buying modern pens and stick with the Swans, Watermans and Onotos that I know to be great writers and totally reliable.

Though I’ve been writing about quite modern pens recently, my heart lies with the older ones, those from the end of the 19th century up to World War II especially. Those were the years of the development of the fountain pen, and there was a point in there when, I believe, fountain pens became as good as they could be. Which of those pens became the ultimate in design and practicality will vary with your taste. It might be one of the Onotos, the Waterman Patrician, the Wahl Eversharp Doric or some other pen that spells perfection for you.

For me it’s the Swans of the 1930s. I’ve handled many of those pens and everything about them seems just right: the size, the shape, the balance, the wonderful nibs and the sheer grace of the design. Though this may seem like a bold statement it is what I believe: they are the best pens of all. You are entitled to disagree but that remains my belief.

Take that perfection of design and and some of the most beautiful celluloid patterns and you have the fountain pen exemplar.

What beautiful pens!

I wish they were mine but sadly they are not and I have to thank Paul L, collector, restorer and expert on Mabie Todd pens, for these excellent photographs

My “collection” – “accumulation” might be a better term – lives in a pretty lacquered box. They’re all pens that have impressed me in one way or another. They all write well, though in different ways. For me, there’s little sense in having a pen that I can’t write with. There are all sorts of pens in there, many that I’ve written about before, others that I’ll probably write about some day.

As pens I have been using dry up, I look in the box for the next pen, maybe one I haven’t used for a while. This pen is just such an example. It’s a Wing Sung 235, and I bought it from a Chinese seller who is no longer around. It was in 2004 or 2005 but you can still buy these pens. I’m not sure what you would pay today. I think this one cost about £1.50. I often say that there has been a huge improvement in Chinese pens in recent years and that’s true, but there were some good Chinese pens around years ago. This is a great little pen. It’s nice and shiny and looks like gold but I assure you it isn’t!

 

The incised pattern is nice to the touch. The pen is metal but it’s very light, something that the manufacturers of those pens made from plumbing materials might take note of. I write a lot in the course of a day and I really appreciate a light pen. If I had a complaint at all about this pen, it might be that the black plastic section is a little slippery. It’s not a big deal though.

The pen is a squeeze-filler with a breather tube, similar to the Parker Aerometric. It takes an adequate fill of ink. I think it’s worth mentioning that the clip is sprung, a piece of high-quality engineering in a very low-cost pen. That means it will grip your shirt pocket very firmly.

Perhaps the most eye-catching and interesting part of this pen is the nib and feed. The nib is conical and made from a yellow metal that isn’t gold and is too light for brass, so is probably some alloy. It bears some Chinese characters that are probably Wing Sung and “made in China”. The feed is multi-finned.

The most obvious resemblance of this nib is to Sheaffer’s Triumph nib. It is said that Wing Sung inherited a Sheaffer factory or Sheaffer capital equipment. I don’t know what the truth of that is. It seems to me that if one had jigs that had been made to machine Sheaffer Triumph nibs, one would be able to make a nib that resembled the original rather more closely than this one does. Whether or not the machinery that was used to make this pen once belonged to Sheaffer, a tubular nib is not an especially hard thing to design or manufacture, no more so than a traditional open nib or the slender tubular nib in a Parker 51. Let’s say it shows inspiration from the Sheaffer Triumph. Of course there are those who will gripe about the Chinese copying things, but every nation has copied at one time or another.

Leaving all that aside, how well does this pen write? The short answer is very well indeed, or it wouldn’t have been a regular user of mine for all these years. Longer answer is it’s a fine, just short of medium with splendid ink delivery laid on by that complex feed. The nib is smooth enough to write well with no pressure at all, but there is feedback. A moment or two with Micromesh would be enough to remove it and make the nib totally smooth but I like that slight resistance on the paper.

It’s a slender pen, so not for everyone. Posted, it’s an adequate length and it posts well and deeply, making it completely secure. Aesthetically, it’s perhaps a mixture of mercies, taking inspiration from several Western pens. It works for me, though, and I enjoy its appearance as well as its performance.

I believe it’s a remarkable pen for its price. I can’t really point to anything that indicates a reduction in quality to save money. The squeeze-filler looks a little flimsy but that’s deceptive. This pen has had a lot of use for 12 years or so, and it has stood up well. Those who believe that weight equals quality and like pens made out of brass tubing will not like such a light pen, perhaps the lightest I’ve ever had, but that’s because it’s made from some aluminium alloy, light but strong. If I’m still around in another ten years’ time, I’m quite confident I’ll still be using this pen.

Here’s a gold-plated Mabie Todd & Bard Swan eyedropper. It’s not mine, I’m sorry to say. I’ve had one or two of these in the past but in nowhere near as good condition as this one. We know that it is before 1907 because that’s when Bard left Mabie Todd.

From what I can see of it – and I understand that the photographs were taken under difficult circumstances – is in very good condition with just some plating loss on the section.

What’s the date and what’s it worth?

What can I write about for your delectation today? I don’t happen to have to hand some unusual pen that you’ve never heard of, though I’m sure I will, shortly. Today I want to talk about ink, but not as someone in Fountain Pen Network would. You know the sort of thing, he’s verging on a nervous breakdown because among his 400 bottles of ink there isn’t one that will suit his new limited edition fluorescent pink Montblanc that contains the DNA of Liberace.

No, I’m more inclined to talk about ink getting into the wrong places. For many years I only used fountain pens to write with and I was very careful filling them. I might get the occasional spot of ink on my fingers but by the time I’d washed the dishes it had faded to near-invisible.

I began restoring and selling pens. In the early days when I was selling in eBay, I might be write testing as many as 20 at a time. Doing as many as that and flushing them too, it was impossible to keep the ink off my little paws. And not just the occasional spot, either. Even washing the dishes and doing the housecleaning was not enough to remove it. I know that some of you wear it as a badge of honor but I think it’s quite unsightly on my ladylike pinkies.

I ordered a box of black latex gloves, the ones that some tattoo artists use. They were great. Not only did they keep the tide of ink at bay, they improved my grip when I was taking pens apart. A few weeks later, though, I began to feel itchy and uncomfortable wearing them. I know that latex allergy is common and I began buying nitrile gloves instead. It’s equally grippy and not at all allergenic. I believe it’s what most of the other tattoo artists use.

Problem solved, no more ink-staining of the digits unless I got impatient and started messing with pens without putting on the gloves. But that wasn’t the end of my concerns with ink. I’ve never had one of those horrible major accidents (touch wood) where an entire bottle of ink gets tipped over and you need to make an insurance claim for everything in the room, but ink, like blood, when escaped, leaves traces of its presence all around.

When the pens are ready for testing, I set out my necessaries – two grades of paper, several grades of micromesh, kitchen towel and the all-important ink bottle. I don’t do as many pens as I used to but thoroughly testing ten pens will take most of an afternoon. A few spots of ink will escape unnoticed until later, when I’m tidying up. As I’m working on our gorgeous oak dining table, it becomes a matter of some anxiety and concern to remove every last trace or shadow of ink. I use Diamine Sargasso Sea which wipes up very well but I don’t like taking risks with our lovely table. I found a plastic table cover which relieves my mind immensely.

To finish up this rambling discourse on ink, I know I was a smidgen sarcastic about those people who become a little obsessed with ink. Each to his own. Many inks are absolutely lovely. I often read those beautifully and scientifically constructed reviews of inks that Chrissy does in Fountain Pen Geeks. She is undoubtedly a great asset to the fountain pen world.

There are a couple of reasons why I don’t have more inks. First of all, many of them are very expensive. I spend a lot of money on pens and there isn’t much left over for inks. Also, as well as the Diamine ink I usually use, I have several vintage inks, Swan, Colliers and the original Webster’s Diamine among them, and I like to use those sometimes. Finally, and I hope I don’t cause too much offense saying this, my love is for pens, not ink.

When I came back to fountain pens it wasn’t long before I found flex and I loved it.  It made my handwriting look good and it gave an extra dimension to writing.  For years I wouldn’t use anything else and I was one of those who sneered at inflexible nibs and called them nails.  Of course I didn’t know what I was talking about, a situation I have often found myself in.  The reality was that I didn’t write much in those days.  Some correspondence, over which I could take my time and make the most of the line variation and the shading.  The word got out that I could write moderately well and I did invitations and place settings.  Then I took a couple of university courses.  I found that my usual flexible pen just wouldn’t allow me to write at the pace I needed for note-taking.  I refused to invest in a ‘nail’, of course, but I had a Conway Stewart 388 that was semi-flexible and I persevered with that.  It worked but it was far from perfect for the purpose.  Someone gave me a Rotring pen, a heavy ugly thing with a rigid nib.  We had an end-of-year exam and I stuck a few pens in my pocket as an insurance policy.  I had a lot of writing to do and very limited time to do it in.  For some reason I tried the Rotring and it flew.  With the right pen – which in this case was the Rotring – I’m a fast writer.  I got all my ideas down in the examination booklet.  I came away very pleased with this pen that I had hardly considered before.

I write a lot now.  All the posts that appear here are first hand-written.  I write an equal amount in another blog that I do.  I have better tools than the Rotring pen now and I enjoy the challenge of writing well, or at least legibly, at speed with a fine nib.  I still have flexible pens and I still enjoy writing with them but they are not my everyday  writers.  Prove me wrong if you will but I don’t think that it’s possible to write at high speed with a very flexible nib.

Of course that doesn’t mean that I like all firm nibs.  Many are utterly characterless.  Those ball-shaped lumps of tipping material make for an unpleasant writing experience.  They appear on many modern pens but strangely enough some Mentmores as far back as the forties had that lump of iridium, too.  Very rigid nibs with tips polished so smooth that it feels like writing on glass don’t suit me either.  I like a little feedback.  I have one or two modern pens that work well for me and some older ones, too.  There’s a Swan with a fine Eternal nib that I love and use a lot.  I have a 1950s English Duofold with a fine, springy nib that I enjoy.

For the simple practicality of getting my work done, those fine firm pens are always in my pen pouch.  There’s another incidental benefit:  They’re cheaper than similar pens with flexible nibs.  The fountain pen world has gone slightly mad over flexibility.  If a pen has a nib that shows line variation, it’s suddenly worth much more.  I see sales sites online with flexible pens at very high prices.  At times it seems that that is the only thing people want from vintage pens and they ignore all the other aspects that make them so attractive to me.

Though they have a long way to go before they will equal the flexibility of the old Swans, Watermans or Wahl Eversharps, some manufacturers are making a real effort to produce flexible nibs.  More power to their elbow!  I look forward to a time – and I’m sure it will come – when those who want flexibility can buy a new pen at a reasonable price that will fulfill that requirement.  Then, perhaps, will end the ridiculously inflated prices that flexible vintage pens are fetching today, and we may return to a situation where people buy vintage pens for their beauty, age, historical significance and technical wizardry, not just because the nibs bend.

 

I have here a Jinhao 992. It’s a great little pen. It measures 13.5 cm capped and the cap is screw fit. It’s a cartridge converter and it is transparent and amber coloured. I’ve been writing with it and I would describe it as faultless. As I say in the writing sample it’s a firm fine and it has good ink flow.

The thing about this pen is that it’s going to belong to one of you. All you have to do is tell me why you’re the one who gets the pen.

There’s a discussion going on in one of the pen boards on the subject of, “which is the best pen?”  In a way it’s a silly subject because there is no best pen.  There’s a multitude of really good pens and it depends on what you want from a pen.  In another way, though, it opens up an interesting discussion where unexpected pens are brought forward.

For myself, most of the pens I would consider as best come from the earlier decades.  Heading my list, I think, would be an Onoto, one of the slender ones from the teens or twenties.  Splended flexible nibs, the best filling mechanism and black hard rubber.  What more could one ask for?  Another possible is the Waterman 52 in red ripple with a flexible nib.  Any one of a number of 1920s Swans would be a winner as well.  Superb nibs and style in spades.  I often think that no subsequent pen has been better than those 1920s Swans.  They, too, would be a contender for the best pen.  I have to admit that there are one or two modern pens that are in with a shout as well.  My Vanishing Point is so convenient, has a great nib and has a style all of its own.  I have a Platinum 3776 in burgundy.  It’s a nice pen to look at and it has a superb soft fine nib.  It’s not at all flexible – not a requirement for me for  everyday note-taking and blog-writing – but the softness makes it very comfortable to write with.

Is that it?  Are those all my contenders for the best pen?  Well, no.  I used to have an early Sheaffer Flat Top in black hard rubber.  The nib was an absolute nail as many Sheaffers are, but it was a delight to write with.  I wish I still had it.  I also had a Conklin Crescent filler – one of the real ones – not those recent copies – and it was a superflex.  That was my pen for correspondence for a while.  It enhanced my writing enormously.

Looking back over my list there are obvious gaps, large pen manufacturers that don’t appear.  There are no Parkers, for instance.  I’ve had many Parkers that I’ve enjoyed, both English and American, but none of them have had that mixture of characteristics which would qualify them as best.  Perhaps if I got my hands on one of those open-nib Parker 17s it might qualify.  I had one some time ago, but it sold quickly and I didn’t have time to really enjoy it as much as I would have liked.  No Conway Stewarts feature, either.  They include many beautiful pens and an immense variety of styles and nibs.  I have quite a few in my “collection” but none of them inspire me in day-to-day use.  The pre-war 286 comes close, but Conway Stewart nibs don’t really compete with some of those I have chosen.

Wahl Eversharps, Mentmores, Croxleys, Summits and many others are all great pens that fall short of best for me for one reason or another but may work well for you.  I would like to hear which pens you consider best.  Surprise me.

I’m not a collector. When I buy pens for myself, it’s to use them. I’m allowed to make an exception, though. Just once.

 

I love blue and white porcelain, and I’m quite attracted to Chinese dragons, too. Some years ago, this ridiculously cheap pen that fulfilled both of those requirements caught my eye. I paid whatever the paltry sum was, waited a few weeks for it to travel from China by mule-train and it eventually arrived. I wasn’t disappointed. Viewed purely as a porcelain blue and white object, like my dinner service or the little ornaments I have, it was beautiful. Not a work of fine art, you understand, but an eye-catching little item, worth every penny of the £1.50 or whatever it was I’d paid for it.

Viewed as a writing instrument it had rather less appeal. It was an awkward shape and it was quite heavy. That didn’t matter, though. I had no intention of writing with it. For years it adorned my desk, the top of the bookcase or my chest of drawers. It was always in sight and I was glad to see it. It didn’t fade. The blue remained blue and the white kept its purity.

I don’t know why – goodness knows I had plenty of work to be getting on with – but I picked up the dragon pen and decided I would see how well it wrote. I unscrewed the barrel and was gratified to discover that the pen was fitted with a converter. I opened the bottle of Diamine Sargasso Sea on my desk – I’m not one of those who must suit the pen with an appropriate ink from my collection of hundreds – I just have one blue ink, one green one and one red one. I never use the red one. Anyway, I plunged the nib into the ink and twisted the end of the converter. It sucked up enough ink to be going on with and I set the pen aside, closed the bottle and prepared to write. I applied nib to paper and was pleased to find that it was unexpectedly smooth and there was good ink flow. Unfortunately some of the ink flow was all over my hands! I couldn’t quite tell where the leakage was coming from but it was copious. I gathered up the whole mess and dumped it in the kitchen sink.

Ten minutes later, having scrubbed most of the peskily persistent ink off my hands and equipped myself with nitrile gloves, I disassembled the pen under the running tap. (That’s a faucet, by the way.) The converter fell apart. I gathered up its remains and threw them in the trash. I washed the ink off the pen and dried it carefully. I dug around and found one of those short international cartridges. It inserted into the pen with no problems and there were no leaks. I tried writing with the pen again and there were no disasters. The pen wrote beautifully, somewhere between a European fine and a medium. It’s not ideal, I would have to say. It’s heavy. I usually post my pens and this one will post adequately well but then it becomes very heavy indeed. The shape is peculiar. I think it was designed to show off the dragon rather than to fit the hand well. Nonetheless, it graces my desk and I’ll use it for note-taking and signing until the cartridge runs out.

These pens are still available from various Chinese pen sales sites. If you succumb to its beauty and find yourself with a dragon pen and wish to write with it, the first thing to do is to take that miserable converter out and throw it away. It might be a good idea to stamp on the converter and smash it to smithereens in memory of the mess it made of my hands which are still faintly blue.

Chinese pens have come a long way in the dozen or so years since I bought the dragon pen. Their design is generally more ergonomically satisfying, and though some of them are still ridiculously heavy, they have lost the pernicious habit of spewing ink all over your hands.