I wrote about the Osmiroid 75 back in February 2011.  You’ll find it here: http://wp.me/s17T6K-osmiroid.  To reiterate some of what I said then, the 75 is the best Osmiroid.  It has an excellent piston filling system and the plastic is rather better than that of the 65.  Generally there is less shrinkage with the result that these pens still cap well and the cap rings are usually in place.  They are not collectable but they are much appreciated for calligraphy.

This one is plain black, but that’s okay.  Nobody buys Osmiroids for their decorative quality!  It’s in very good condition and works well – what more can you say about an Osmiroid.  Well, in this case you can say that it has a couple of extra nibs in addition to the medium soft that it is photographed with.  There’s also a B2 italic, and that’s a very broad nib.  There’s also a gorgeous B3 music nib.  This one looks, at a glance, like a very broad italic but on closer examination you see the twin slits.  That’s not the only type of music nib that Osmiroid made.  I’ve seen a pointed one, with the general shape of the medium soft in the photograph.

Despite the fact that they were inexpensive pens aimed at the school market I’ve always liked Osmiroids.  Part of it is for that very reason.  I have no doubt that James Perry expected to make a good profit from sales of Osmiroids, but he evidently had a genuine wish to provide school pupils with the tools to develop good handwriting – and at an affordable price.  Platignum, to its credit, did the same thing.  Yes, I have no doubt that they competed for market share, but Platignum pens were the result of good intentions too.  Platignums have not lasted as well as Osmiroids, so the used calligraphy market concentrates on the latter.

Collectors and high-end sellers ignore pens like this but I think that they are something that we should at least take note of even if we do not use them ourselves.  If you had looked in a kid’s pencil case back in the 50s or 60s this, or a low end Burnham or Platignum, was what you would have found rather than the more collectable Conway Stewarts, Swans or Onotos.  They are part of our writing heritage and are admirable in their own right.

Here is a trio of elegant Onoto pens from different dates and in different styles.

I read recently somewhere that De La Rue discontinued the traditional plunger filler Onoto because the filling system had become outdated.  This is nonsense, of course.  Filling systems don’t become outdated.  If they did, we wouldn’t have modern eyedropper filler and bulb filler pens.  Truth of the matter is that the replacement pen, a lower quality piston filler was much cheaper to manufacture, an essential in those days of severely declining sales The Onoto plunger filler was the first efficient self filling system and it remains the best even today.  Sheaffer borrowed the idea in 1934 though they did not implement it as well as it had been done with the Onoto.  The new Onoto company makes plunger fillers once again, though sadly they are well out of the reach of most pen buyers.

In many respects the Onoto is the ideal fountain pen.  It holds a tremendous amount of ink and the nibs are wonderful.  The filling system can be serviced comparatively easily and at no great expense.  Time between services is very long, and a pen that is regularly used may go for decades between services.  My favourite writer for many years was a slender slip cap 1920s Onoto with a flexible medium oblique nib.  In a moment of madness I sold it a few years ago, a decision I have regretted ever since.  Maybe I’ll find another one, one of these days.

I note that my post of January 3 was full of good intentions.  I managed a post on the fourth, and there’s been nothing after that.  Explanation is that I’ve had the most vicious attack of arthritis, probably down to the awful weather that we’ve had.  Result was that I’ve done nothing for quite some time.  I’m a bit better now and I hope to get back into my stride again.

I last wrote about Savoy pens back on 26 November 2011 – how time flies!  In that article I covered the debate about who makes Savoy pens.  I’m still of the opinion that they are made by Langs.  In every respect these pens look like Langs work to me.  The name, too, follows their usual pattern of calling pens after London street names or districts.

This example has seen a bit of use, and even abuse.  You will note that the lever is bent, though it functions perfectly well.  I’m not entirely sure that the arrow clip is original – but it might be.  I think these clips were used on Langs-made Stephens pens at one time.

The imprint doesn’t help much in deciding who made the pen.  It just says “Savoy British Made Made in England”.  A bit emphatic about the location of manufacture, perhaps!  This is my second coloured one, and very nice the pattern is too, in a sort of rose marble.  I’ve also had a couple of black chased ones, very like 40s Stephens.

So that’s the Savoy.  Tell me who you think made it.

This one’s a bit special!  It’s a Mabie Todd and Bard Swan eyedropper filler.  Bard was dropped from the company name in 1907 so this pen is before that but I don’t know how much before that.  Going on advertising images that I have seen my guess would be somewhere in the late 1890s.  It cost quite a lot but I suspect I got off light and the real price is rather higher at I paid.

It’s a gold filled half overlay and the overlay is printed “The Swan Pen Pat Feb 8 81 Feb 21 82 Mar 6 88 Mabie Todd & Bard New York”.  The pen measures 13.4 cm capped.  The cap bears a Swan imprint.  It’s the most basic of eyedroppers and the nib appears to be a medium.  I suspect that it’s a replacement as the base of the barrel carries the letters “OBL”, signifying that the pen was issued with an oblique nib.

It’s a slender pen, which was what people expected back in those days when they were making the transition from dip pens, almost all of which were very slender.

The hard shelled case has a leather finish and apart from one scuff on the top it is in good condition.  There are some ink stains on the inside.  The original eyedropper is included.  The rubber bulb has hardened with the passage of time, but these can be bought on the Internet.

This pen was issued at a time of comparative peace and plenty.  The two horrific world wars of the 20th century were yet to come.  Though society was ordered in a way that we would reject today, it was stable and wealth was distributed more fairly than it is today.  The economy was sound and unemployment was low.  I wouldn’t want to go back there but at least they didn’t have the daily diet of horrors that comes our way.  It’s interesting to compare the conditions under which people lived in Britain then and now.  I think we’ve seen plenty of progress but little, if any, improvement.

A Happy New Year to you all.  Now that the festivities are over it’s a good time to think about this blog – what I’ve done over the years and where it might go.  Despite the many years that I have had an interest in pens, I remain a generalist.  I don’t have the knowledge about any one manufacturer that the more avid collectors will have.  However I do have quite a wide knowledge of pens and my pen buying always includes the unusual, whenever I can get it, as that provides subjects for discussion in the blog.  It’s nice to get a hold of something rare and old.  With some of these oddities, there’s nothing to refer to on the Internet, and I feel that if I can get at least a basic description of such a pen, it gives buyers something to refer to if they come across another example.

In the last quarter of last year, or so, I was posting less than I had been from the beginning.  That was mostly down to my workload which was pretty intense, and there was some ill-health in there as well.  I hope to do more this year.  It’s certainly not that I’m running out of ideas or pens to write about; there’s plenty more out there to discuss.

When I started this blog I was only interested in old pens.  Though they remain at the core of my interest, new pens have begun to catch my attention.  Some of them are not as bad as I assumed all new pens to be, and in fact the pens on my desk, for the last few weeks, have been a cheap Chinese pen with a very nice fine nib and a Monteverde Invincia Stealth which is a very pleasant writer.  Once the ink runs out they’re likely to be replaced by old pens again, but I think that new – or at least recent – pens will feature here a little more.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 110,000 times in 2014. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 5 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Well, that’s the first part of the festivities over though the Hogmanay shenanigans is still to come.  I enjoy Christmas and New Year but they do break my routine and it’s hard to get back into it.  Here I am, trying to throw off the sloth of the past few days.

I see that Lamy is bringing out a new Limited Edition for 2015, in Copper Orange and black, just the colours of my Laverda Jota motorcycle of nearly 30 years ago.  It was a mighty three cylinder 1000 cc beast that gave vent to a stuttering roar when it was on song.  Fond memories, and how did it become so long ago?

Fancy that, a Limited Edition Lamy Al-Star!  Though it has many admirers, the Al-Star is the kind of cheap pen that you carry in your pocket and don’t grieve too much if you lose it. Lamy Al-Stars and Safaris don’t work for me; they just don’t fit my hand, somehow.  They are good pens for the price but they hardly lend themselves to the bombast of the Limited Edition!

I had an email from Carlos Garcia of  goldnibs.com which I reproduce in full here as it may be of use to some of you.

I confess that I am sometimes drawn in by the allure of Chinese pens, but in my defence I maintain that they are much improved – or at least some of them are – and some, it seems to me, are not all that far behind much more expensive European and American pens in terms of quality and presentation.  A case in point is the Picasso Red Flower which I bought recently.

It’s extremely well presented.  It comes in a cardboard outer box decorated with a tiny image of a Picasso painting.  Inside is a hard case containing the pen, a quality inspection card and a well illustrated Picasso booklet.  Every bit as smart as any of the European pens I bought lately.

My one complaint about the pen would be that it is enamelled brass construction and therefore quite heavy, though so far I haven’t found that to be a great disadvantage in use because it’s quite well-balanced.  The pen is very pretty, black with splashes of red in a fairish imitation of urushi.  The clip is two-toned with an image that I can’t quite make out – maybe it’s a pen nib above an ink bottle, but maybe not.  Have a look – see what you think.

The push on cap fits very securely with a satisfying click.  The black plastic section has an embossed pattern which gives a good grip.  The nib is 22k gold-plated stainless steel, and is as smooth as any pen I have ever tried.  The ink flow is generous and after several pages of writing it hasn’t skipped yet.  Unscrewing the barrel exposes a twist converter which works well and of course the pen will take international cartridges.

This is a lot of pen for under £20!  I’m not saying that it rocks the foundations of Mont Blanc or Visconti, but it does make one wonder about the prices that they are set at.  Undoubtedly, they are better pens but are they several hundreds of pounds better?

I confess that I bought this pen with the intention of sneering at it.  I’ve had several Montblancs over the years and I haven’t been unduly impressed with them.  At the same time, I have been very aware of the ridiculous hype and the even more ridiculous prices that are charged for Montblanc Meisterstucks.  They are status symbols, something that I despise, but I have to admit that they are something else as well – a very nice pen!

This is the smaller Meisterstuck.  I believe it’s called the 144.  The plastic has kept its shine and the gold plating is nice.  The pen has a pleasing tapered shape and it evokes several vintage pens, to my mind, much more than it does any of the other modern pens.  It has a press-on cap which slips firmly into place without any drama.  It posts well too.  The gold nib is instantly recognisable as a Montblanc by its shape.  The nib is engraved “4810 MB 14 K Montblanc 585”.

Unfortunately the 144 is a cartridge/converter filler, not a piston filler like it’s a bigger brothers.  However, once filled, the pen more than lives up to its reputation as a splendidly smooth writer.  This particular example is not flexible though I believe quite a few are.  Quite small for a modern pen, it nonetheless fits my hand very well and I find it very pleasant to write with.  What more can I say?  That’s all a fountain pen is required to do.  I don’t need it to boost my ego, nor to elevate my standing among my peers, so I can only judge it as a writing instrument and it is a very good one.

All in all, I’m very pleased with it.  I would quite happily pay £100 for a pen like this.  Of course, I know that it costs more than that, but that is what I would regard as a reasonable price for such an excellent pen.