Looking back on it you would say that 1948 might not have been the most auspicious year to launch a new high-quality fountain pen.  The ballpoint, which took off more quickly and more successfully in Britain than in the USA, was already making inroads into fountain pen sales.  The country was struggling to recover from World War II and there was strong competition from brands like Swan and Parker.  Nonetheless, it was in this year that Truepoint made their bid for a place in the market.  It was doomed to fail but it left us with an exceptionally well-made rarity that probably outshone its competitors in terms of quality though it never achieved the market share to succeed.

This is a big pen, 14cms long capped, with considerable girth.  It’s a button filler.  The blind cap blends into the barrel seamlessly.  It’s a tapered pen, sharing a shape with the English Duofolds or larger Conway Stewarts of the time.  The cowled, ball-ended clip is stamped with their “coat of arms” logo, as is the huge semi-flexible gold nib.  Unusually, maybe even uniquely, the cap band configuration is a broad and a narrow ring.

This was a pen that should have succeeded given its first-rate build quality but not only did it fail, the company appears not to have sold many pens.  It’s rare today; this is only the second one I’ve seen in my many years of of interest in fountain pens.  Perhaps the price was set too high; the only advertisement I’ve seen doesn’t show a price.  Maybe the capital wasn’t there to market the brand properly or to carry the company until sales would have taken off.  This pen and a few others like appear to be all that survives of this proud venture.

Months will go by when I don’t see a Wyvern, then I get two on the same day, beauties both of them.

The No 60C is a bit of a puzzle.  It appears with different levels of trim and, indeed, as a completely different pen from this one, more slender and cheaper-looking.  This version, with its Greek Key cap ring and cowled clip is doubtless quite high in the range and probably post-war.

The 404 is definitely post-war.  The best dates I can find for it are 1948 to 1956, when pen sales came to an end.  The hooded nib hints at the Parker 51, though in fact it’s a perfectly traditional nib, not a tubular type as was featured in the Parker.  Indeed, though it looks a little more modern than the No 60C it’s made in exactly the same way.  There’s no collector in hiding beneath the hood, just an everyday feed.

What makes this 404 especially interesting is the broad nib.  You don’t get many of them!

Have you seen this $48,000 Omas pen?  It’s reduced from $60,000 so I suppose that makes it a bargain.
$48,000!  Google tells me that’s £28,742.50.  That’s a lot of money when you can buy a perfectly good  Pilot V-Pen for £7.76.  I could buy a really snazzy car for that or, more to the point, a whole stable of hot motorbikes.  Or even enough used pens to fill my workshop to the roof.  I’d have them but I couldn’t work on them because I couldn’t get in.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, they say, but for me that’s one very ugly pen.  It’s bulbous, the colours are garish and the clip looks like the handle of a teapot.  In the sales-speak blurb they say “The highly original clip is inspired by movement and harmony.”  Yeah?  Well so’s my dog’s hind leg, the one he lifts at every lamp-post.

There are some comments on the page that are highly amusing.

Is this kind of thing good for our hobby or does it expose it to ridicule?  What do you think?

The only Indian pens I’ve had have been two Walitys, a medium-sized piston-filler (good) and a large eyedropper filler (dreadful), so I thought I might try something else from there as the pens are so inexpensive.  After looking through the plethora of pens available I settled on Fountain Pen Revolution and and chose their Triveni Acrylic.  According to the blurb: “The Triveni Sangam is a confluence of 3 rivers in India.  The handmade Triveni accepts 3 fill methods (converter, eyedropper, cartridge).”   That makes sense.  The pen cost me the princely sum of $45 (around £28 – £29).  It arrived this morning.  First impressions: it’s very long at 14.7cm.  The red and black acrylic is translucent and very beautiful.  The black tassie and blind cap set it off very well.  (These serve no purpose other than the aesthetic)  The fine nib is a nail.  The pen takes two and a half turns to close, which feels like a lot.  The chrome-plated metalwork is good.

The syringe-type converter takes up a mere two-thirds of the barrel length, so the excessive length seems to be catering to modern tastes rather than serving a practical purpose.  The pen would be much better if it was 2cm shorter.  Thankfully Indian manufacturers seem to work honestly with their materials, unlike the Chinese who often bury lumps of brass pipe in their pens.  This pen, then, is the combination of the acrylic and a little thin metal, so it’s very light indeed, perhaps even at the lower end of acceptably light even for me, and that’s saying something.  The section is black plastic at the top.  That’s where I’d grip it and it feels comfortable.  Further down it’s metal.  Aesthetically, that seems like a mistake and I’ve known metal sections to corrode severely when in contact with ink.  The nib seems well enough made but it is noticeably scratchy.  I think that’s a function of the shape of the tip which is quite angular.  A spell on the micro-mesh may well cure that.  However, as I said above, the nib is an absolute nail.  I’m inclined to feel that with a nib like that, this is the pen for the person who wants no more from a fountain pen than he gets from a ballpoint.

Another thing about this part of the pen: though this is a normal-sized nib, similar to a Swan No 2 in size, the excessive length of the barrel makes it appear very small and out of proportion with the rest of the pen.  If the pen is to be so very large, a bigger nib would look better.  The feed appears to work well but I haven’t used the pen enough to be sure.

I’ve been critical of those things about the pen that I don’t like, but overall this is a well-made pen.  All the parts fit together perfectly with a much finer tolerance than I’ve seen on much more expensive pens.  For instance, if the Sheaffer Intrigue of less than fond memory had fitted together as well as this pen, it wouldn’t have turned out nearly the bow-wow that it, sadly, is.  With some nib work it will probably be more pleasant to write with and I believe that FPR supply a flexible nib, which might be the way to go.  I can’t see this pen becoming one of my users, but I bet there are plenty of modern pen buyers out there who would find it impressive for the small amount of money it costs.  Finally, almost anything could be forgiven because of that delightful acrylic.  It looks good in blue or orange as well.