Mabie Todd flourished between the 1890s and the mid 50s, when it was taken over by Biro and began turning out ever-more poor quality pens until Biro closed the company down. That’s the story, isn’t it? Or is it?

This pen turned up a few weeks ago and changed the story, for most of us at least. It’s a button filler of the traditional kind, as you would see on older Parkers or Mentmores. The quality of the workmanship is outstanding. The plastic, probably celluloid, is beautiful and the pattern continues on into the section.

The barrel imprint identifies the pen as a Blackbird and the clip bears a Swan image.

How does it come about that such a beautiful pen is produced in about 1960, when the last pens we saw from Mabie Todd were such poor specimens? The story, so far as I know, is that this pen was made in the Netherlands. Whether it was done under licence or perhaps a company had bought out the rights to the Swan and Blackbird names and images I don’t know, but the Swan barrel imprint on the pen was made by the same stamp that was used on the mid 50s Calligraph.

Stephen Hull has other Blackbird pens, some of them button fillers like this one, others piston fillers that look as if they were made in Germany. Much mystery surrounds these pens. Perhaps when Stephen Hull’s eagerly awaited book on the English branch of Mabie Todd appears, all will be explained!

 

Edit to add:

Excuse the quality of the photos – done in a hurry!

 

 

Well now, that’s a big beast of a pen!

I wish it was mine but it isn’t. It belongs to a very good friend of mine and that’s the next best thing. Swans with No 8 nibs are rare – I can use that word here with certainty – and very impressive indeed. The pen’s owner calls him “Fatty” and I think that’s bang on.

This pen belonged to S T Nash of Cubley, Derby. He was an artist in wood, not especially well known but doing well enough to buy this pen, or perhaps sufficiently well-thought-of to be gifted it. He was responsible for the carving of the Rood Screen at St Andrews Church, Cubley, Derby. That’s all we know. I can find no picture of the Rood Screen.  Unfortunately the present incumbent of St Andrews Church has not replied to an inquiry. It surrounds the pen with a faint aura of mystery.

Going back to the pen itself, it measures 14.7 cm capped and is an eyedropper filler. I don’t know whether the wonderful decorated sterling silver cap band was supplied by the Swan factory or if it was added by a jeweller. Broad bands like this were often added to conceal and stabilise a crack in the hard rubber, but that isn’t the case here.

This is a very impressive pen, enhanced by the silver band and the connection with the artist S T Nash. Such things do not often appear in the lifetime of an enthusiast. I am very grateful to my friend for showing it to me and enabling me to share it with you.

My assistant says I can play with that Swan all I want, there’s a more interesting bird out here – one of the feathery, tweeting kind!

This is not a collector’s pen, or even an everyday user. It’s one of the later Osmiroids, the ones that use a different version of the interchangeable nib. This one is a squeeze-filler; the later ones use cartridges.

It’s a calligrapher’s pen. This one has a nib I haven’t seen before. It’s called a shadow italic or something like that. I don’t know what it’s for but it draws splendid lines! It makes a thick broad, italic line and a more slender line shadowing it.

In your 20s or 30s it seems like there’s all the time in the world. There was a guy in the office where I worked who was a calligrapher. To say I admired his work is an understatement; I thought it was amazing. I planned to learn calligraphy myself. I didn’t have time to do it right then, but there would be a time when I would learn to make those beautiful marks on paper.

Except that time never came. There was always something more pressing and urgent. About ten years ago I even bought a couple of books on the subject. I glanced through them. There were instructions on the formation of all the letters and examples of the fine writing I was sure I would learn one day soon.

When we moved house earlier this year, I reduced the hundreds of books we had amassed, getting rid of those we no longer needed or would never consult again. I looked at the calligraphy guides. I made a sensible decision, but not without regret. There was never going to be a time when I would sit down with those examples and devote myself to it for the years it takes to become a really good calligrapher. The books went into the pile for the charity shop. I hope that someone bought them and is practicing their penmanship right now.

A recurrent theme in the fountain pen discussion groups is the expensive pen that needs work before it will write properly.  Often it is something as simple as a flush with soapy water that is required but other times it is more serious work that is needed to improve the behaviour of the nib or to achieve the proper level of ink flow.  Why should that be?  Do the manufacturers of some expensive pens (no names no pack drill) believe that they are bought only to be looked at?

It has been suggested that the producers of some of those pens that fail so annoyingly have to keep costs down and one of the areas that suffers is quality control.  I can’t say whether that’s right or wrong but I would have thought that a pen that cost £300.00 or more would give at least a little profit margin.

What surprises and heartens me is how well cheap pens work – cheap pens, in my book, being pens that cost less than £30.00.  Though they’re not my cup of tea, the low-priced Lamy pens have a deservedly good reputation for working out of the box or blister pack.  Even many Chinese pens, so often criticised for not working well, are now much better than their reputation.  I have found low-cost Indian pens to be excellent and I think that experience is shared by many.

Was it like this in the old days?  Did people have to take their Parkers and Conway Stewarts back to the shop because they didn’t write well?  It seems impossible to tell, but I have a theory.

When pens are an absolutely necessary tool, as in India today or in Europe and America in times gone by, quality control would have been very important indeed.   Waterman or Onoto wouldn’t want word to get out that their new pens were faulty.  Certainly, there wasn’t the internet around for people to complain to the whole world but word of mouth could be effective, too.  It meant that manufacturers had to try harder.

Most purchasers of new and very expensive pens don’t buy them to be their sole writing instrument.  To a greater degree than ever before, other aspects of these expensive pens are as important – or even more important – than their ability to write well.  So many of those pens are offered for resale, months or years later, uninked.  The fact that they have never been inked makes for a premium price.  Perhaps it’s hardly surprising that the manufacturers don’t spend a lot of money on quality control.  The relatively rare buyer who uses his limited edition pen is often disappointed.

A very kind friend sent me a box of pens.   I had to go out this afternoon and I only had time to unpack them and give them a cursory glance.   I hope to be home in time to examine them all this evening.   Few things excel the pleasure of working through a batch of old pens, identifying them and deciding what’s needed to make them work again, if that’s possible.  If not, that’s rather sad, but they go into the spares bin and the day will likely come when parts from that pen will complete another.  In that way old pens never die.

When I first took an interest in old British pens, like most other people, I only wanted the very best, the Onotos, the Swans and the best of the Conway Stewarts.  I’ve become less choosy over the years.  Certainly for my sales site I would still like to present some special pens for my customers, but for myself, there are no pens I don’t really like anymore.  The pens I use in preparing this blog are often the workhorses of the pen world – Platignums or Osmiroids, or the everyday output of the large manufacturers like, for instance, the Parker 45 or the Waterman Champion.

So as I go through the batches of pens that arrive on my bench, I’m mentally separating them into several groups.  The first group is those pens that will be restored for sale.  The second group is those pens that are beyond repair and will be consigned to the spares bin.  Then there are pens that are low-value but write well.  They will probably eventually appear in the ‘Bargains’ section of my sales site but only after I have enjoyed writing with them for a while.  Finally there are pens that, generally low or no value, will go in my everyday writers box to go into such rotation as I operate.  I love making a shabby battered old Osmiroid write as it should.  That gives me as much pleasure as restoring a glowing celluloid Swan.

 

Click “Play” to hear the review.

 

A very generous friend made me a gift of an Osmia 223. This is the button filler version from the nineteen thirties. Many German pens are very good; some are great, the Osmia 223 being among them.

It measures 12.9 cm capped and is a typical tapered pen of its period. The blind cap fits well and is almost invisible when it’s in place.

The button filling system is well-made and the pen takes a good draught of ink, but like many great pens it’s all about the nib.

The nib is semi-flexible and a medium with no pressure applied. The tines separate with only the very slightest of pressure.

 

Many flexible pens require concentration to write well at speed; this little beauty does not. The gentle flexing gives noticeable line variation and does so with grace. It is truly a delight to write with. This pen will always be on my desk.

I’m back on the subject of German piston-filler school pens again. I’m sure I must have mentioned my enthusiasm for them before, but that’s okay. You must expect a certain amount of redundancy in a blog that’s been going as long as this one has.

These low end German pens are remarkably cheap for what they are, though there is some variation in quality. The Geha that I wrote about before is perhaps at the upper end of those pens targeted at schoolchildren and the one I plan to write about today is further down the scale. It is an Orienta, a cork-sealed piston filler. I’m not at all sure about the date of its manufacture. Going by appearance I would say that it might be as early as the nineteen-thirties but on the other hand, a successful design might have remained unchanged into the nineteen-fifties.

I bought it from a seller in Fountain Pen Geeks, a regular there who specializes in low-cost pens and goes under the moniker of LEXAF. He seems to have a talent for seeking out New Old Stock European pens and I have admired his stuff for some time before I decided on this purchase. He said that the original nibs were no good and he replaced them with Paledua gold-plated steel nibs.

The pen is quite chunky and old-fashioned-looking and measures 12.4cm capped. The barrel looks a little uneven as if there has been some shrinkage going on there but the piston slides up and down smoothly and there is no leakage. The fading gold imprint on the cap reads ‘Orienta’, a strange enough name for a pen but many pens have strange names. The pen holds a good charge of ink and the nib is a firm medium. It’s not quite my cup of tea; I prefer a fine but that’s nothing against the pen, just my preference. The ink delivery is generous but not over-generous. In all, it’s an excellent writer.

While it’s no Pelikan or Montblanc, this is an excellent, soundly-made German piston filler at a bargain basement price. As I said, it’s probably around the bottom end of these pens. That would make it the equivalent in price of the British Platignum or Queensway. It comes out of that comparison rather well, in the sense that it writes well, doesn’t leak and is robust enough to write for another generation or two. It whets my anticipation for more of the host of low-cost German pens out there.

I’ve written about this before but I feel I must write about it again.
I bought four pens from the same seller and they arrived yesterday
morning. One of them was crushed. They had been packed in a soft
plastic tube, surrounded by bubble wrap and placed in a padded bag.
During the transport and handling the pens had moved around and the
most robust had crushed the weakest. It was completely
unrecoverable.

The seller recompensed me but that isn’t the point. It was an
interesting Lang’s pen in a subtle blue and black marbled pattern. I
hadn’t seen that pattern before. The nib and section had been
replaced but I have spares. It wasn’t high-value but it was a
rarity. I would have loved to have brought that pen back to some
semblance of what it once was.

I’m sure that padded bags have their uses but they are a menace to
pens. I’ve used them myself when sending out spares but I wouldn’t
use them to send a pen even if it was swathed in layers of bubble
wrap. Pens need to be protected by something rigid. I use postal
tubes. Some people use rigid plastic piping. Others use plastic
tubes that appear to have been made for the purpose. All sorts of
cardboard boxes can be reused. Some people even make up their own
boxes out of reused cardboard. They’re all good. Padded bags are
not.

 

For years I’ve seen those New Old Stock Reform pens sold in eBay for
tiny prices. I’ve often wanted one but for long I never did
anything about it. This week I bought a Reform 1745 for a fiver.
Imagine! A European-made piston-filler for £5.00. I’ve seen on the
discussion boards the suspicion voiced that some of these pens are
counterfeits. Frankly that’s taking paranoia to a new level. Who in
the world would fake a discontinued pen that requires sophisticated
tooling and can hardly be sold? On examination the build quality of
the pen is quite high. The work that has gone into the construction
of the cap assembly alone would bankrupt the counterfeiter.

 

I am using it to write this. It’s a slender little pen and that’s
not going to suit everyone. It’s on the fine side of medium and if I
had my druthers I’d rather a true fine. That said, it’s a nice
writer, adequately smooth but with enough feedback to make it easily
controllable. The ink delivery is quite generous. Being a
piston-filler it holds plenty of ink. In its green and black livery
it looks very nice. I find this much nicer to write with than the
last over-expensive new Pelikan I had. I would pay quite a bit more
for such a pen. I’m just glad I didn’t have to!

On this Highland day so wet
New pens are here for sale, you bet.
Some pencils of mechanical make
Round out things nicely, no mistake.

Italian Marble, slightly cracked
Can still be used rather than sacked;
And if a Calligraph’s your taste
Then don’t delay, come see, make haste!