Information on the repair of antique pencils is much more difficult to find than for fountain pens. The skill set required is different, and notably eclectic.So it is with considerable grat...
https://vintagepensblog.blogspot.com/2024/04/a-repair-manual-for-early-mechanical.html
The Parker Wood Pen is one of the most enigmatic of limited editions. Solid documentation is hard to come by, and most of what is known to collectors is hearsay. This is not surprising for a desi...
https://vintagepensblog.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-parker-wood-pen.html
I've been sounding the alarm about the abuse of flexible nibs for years now, and though others have also tried to spread the word, far too many irreplaceable vintage nibs are still being destroye...
https://vintagepensblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/more-on-overflexing-of-vintage-nibs.html
When it comes to old writing instruments, the least standardized consumables must be erasers. There are some hard to find lead sizes, to be sure, but the number of different eraser sizes is...
https://vintagepensblog.blogspot.com/2024/02/erasers-for-vintage-eversharp-pencils.html
New Jersey: A Guide to its Present and Past, 1939, p. 335I'm afraid we are a little late to book a group tour of Waterman's New Jersey factory. Would surely have been interesting. Waterman left i...
https://vintagepensblog.blogspot.com/2024/02/touring-watermans-newark-factory.html
It has long been known that Waterman purchased overlays from George W. Heath & Co. A number of early Watermans bear silver overlays with the Heath "H" mark, and though the mark is absent on l...
https://vintagepensblog.blogspot.com/2024/02/waterman-and-heath.html
Once upon a time and long long ago, American collectors would occasionally come across safety pens with fancy overlays like the one shown above. They knew that these pens were European but not mu...
https://vintagepensblog.blogspot.com/2024/01/please-stop-calling-them-continental.html
There is a misconception among pen collectors regarding the claim that certain aftermarket pen parts were made on original Parker machinery. While the claim might be narrowly true, the use of an ...
https://vintagepensblog.blogspot.com/2023/10/unpacking-made-on-original-parker.html
Eagle's glass-cartridge fountain pens are relics that I've always been content to regard as nonfunctional historic curiosities. A few years ago though after multiple requests for usable exa...
https://vintagepensblog.blogspot.com/2023/08/plastic-replacement-cartridges-for.html
The R.G. Dun collection of 19th-century credit reports first came to my attention years ago with the publication of Barbara Lambert's A. T. Cross monograph (Writing History, 1996). Though housed ...
https://vintagepensblog.blogspot.com/2023/06/rendell-and-fairchild-revelations-from.html
A customer was recently asking about safety pen leakage. A safety with good seals should be as leakproof as any fountain pen could be. That doesn't mean, however, that it can't leave a mess quite...
https://vintagepensblog.blogspot.com/2023/06/making-safety-pens-yet-safer.html
I recently promised Pennant editor Jim Mamoulides a few short articles on early safety pens. Over the years I'd managed to accumulate some interesting examples by Horton, Moore, and Caw's -...
https://vintagepensblog.blogspot.com/2023/05/research-in-progress-rewriting-history.html
Collectors have long wondered about the naming of the Moore Fingertip. The streamlined nib assembly echoes the aesthetics of airplanes and rockets -- so why "Fingertip" (or "Finger Tip")?Nearly t...
https://vintagepensblog.blogspot.com/2023/04/whats-in-name-moore-fingertip.html
Waterman's first lever-fillers have been a longstanding focus here, but it is only recently that I have started to look into the chronology of the vest-pocket size ½V models. Paradoxically,...
https://vintagepensblog.blogspot.com/2022/12/a-waterman-412vpsf-with-surprise-inside.html
Most collectors think of Moore as a rather staid company, especially in the hard rubber era. For the company's first couple of decades, it's pretty much only their classic safety pens, virtually ...
https://vintagepensblog.blogspot.com/2022/12/a-moore-sleeve-filler-in-safety-disguise.html
When did Waterman first offer lever-fillers for sale, and what are the likely dates for the various design changes in the first few years of production? This is very much still a work in progress...
https://vintagepensblog.blogspot.com/2022/10/waterman-psf-chronology.html
It has been a while since I last checked, but digging into some 1920s Waterman research I found to my surprise that several volumes of the American Stationer that had formerly been snippet-...
https://vintagepensblog.blogspot.com/2022/10/more-american-stationer-volumes.html
Pen history has largely been written by collectors rather than trained academic historians, so one often has to scramble to find solid references for what has become accepted knowledge. An exampl...
https://vintagepensblog.blogspot.com/2022/10/waterman-and-barnes-lever-filler-patent.html
This lovely pencil arrived not long ago but to my frustration I could not recall what the letters "W. M & C" stood for. No luck with a Google search, nor checking Jon Veley's indispensi...
https://vintagepensblog.blogspot.com/2022/09/remembering-w-m-c-and-not-for-nott.html
Having grown up in California, I have a special interest in pens made there. Especially appealing are those dating back to the 19th century and the Gold Rush era. Not many writing instrumen...
https://vintagepensblog.blogspot.com/2022/08/a-gold-pen-from-san-francisco.html
We have been selling specially-sized O-rings for plunger-filler ("vacuum-filler") packing unit repair for quite a few years, but not any more. Instead, we will be offering a significantly s...
https://vintagepensblog.blogspot.com/2022/06/improved-plunger-filler-packing-seals.html
It's not every day you see an early 20th-century taper-cap with a glass barrel. A patent application for this design was filed on October 24, 1910 and US patent 995307 was duly issued on June 13,...
https://vintagepensblog.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-van-winkle-pen-company.html
One of the items in a recent eBay lot was the twist-pattern dip pen shown above. When it arrived, my initial reaction was disappointment: I had been hoping it would be silver, and possibly Gorham...
https://vintagepensblog.blogspot.com/2018/05/john-holland-and-aluminum.html
This Parker Vacumatic set came to us from an old collection, assembled in the old days when vintage pens could be found in the wild in such abundance that most collectors soon gave up on restorin...
https://vintagepensblog.blogspot.com/2022/02/a-slender-maxima-set-restoration.html
There are not a lot of surviving medieval writing instruments, so this bronze-nibbed pen excavated last year at Caherconnell in County Clare is a big deal indeed. For the full story, I will refer...
https://vintagepensblog.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-bronze-nibbed-dip-pen-from-11th.html