RichardsPens.com lives in the 1846 Italianate house shown to the left, in picturesque Nashua, New Hampshire. We got our start through Richard’s discovery that repairing and restoring pens was really fun. When Richard took a buy-out from his computer engineering job, he relaunched RichardsPens.com as his full-time business. (It was that or retire, and at 55 he wasn’t even close to retirement age!) The business grew, sucking in Barbara (whose experience as a tax preparer and fascination with numbers were the perfect training for the position of Managing Partner), and we were off and running. As a family business, we’re necessarily a small business, and we like it that way. We don’t want to grow so big that you’re just another customer; we prefer to think of you as a client: someone with whom we can enjoy a long and pleasurable relationship. We hope you will come to think of us the same way. Although we’re determined to stay small, we’ve found that to serve our clientèle we’ve had to add a few employees, all of whom have become like members of the family. (They all like cats and grandchildren.)

• Barbara Hauck Binder, the Managing Partner
• Richard Binder, the Revenue Producing Unit
• Jim Baer, one of our two assistant/apprentices, not related to Susan
• Susan Gomez-Baer, the other of our two assistant/apprentices, not related to Jim
• Julie Labrie, the Occasional Shipping Department and Gofer

Photo © 2007 Daniel Falgerho

Daniel Falgerho took this snapshot of Barbara at the Philadelphia Pen Show in January 2007.

I grew up in central Indiana, the eldest child of a career National Guard officer and his homemaker wife. I learned to write with a fountain pen in Catholic elementary school. (We were not allowed to use ballpoints.) In public high school I continued to use a fountain pen, and when I went to college I took my pen with me. Somewhere along the way it fell out of use, and I lost it. I didn’t become a fountain pen user again until I started working with Richard at pen shows in 2002. At about the same time, I began developing a little osteoarthritis, and I find that fountain pens are more comfortable than ballpoints.

I’m not a pen collector, but I do have (and use) about half a dozen fountain pens. I’m a left-handed overwriter, and it’s funny sometimes to see the misconceptions people have about being left handed. At one show, I was busily writing something with my favorite pen, a Bexley Submariner SE that Richard stubbed for me, when a man came up to our table and said to me that he couldn’t use fountain pens because he was left handed.

I spent more than 10 years as a professional tax preparer, and I’ve always enjoyed working with numbers that have dollar signs attached to them. This means that I’m the “front office” half of our business. I handle tasks that don’t require Richard’s immediate personal attention — this leaves him free to concentrate on the things that only he can do. We joke that I’m the Managing Partner and Richard is the Revenue Producing Unit, but it’s actually an arrangement that works very well.

I grew up in the Rocky Mountains of western Montana, the third son of a college professor and a medical technician. To them, insofar as I can remember, a pen was a thing to write with. Period. And the elementary school into whose care I was consigned had an ironclad rule forbidding the use of fountain pens, perhaps to avoid scenes reminiscent of that between Penrod Schofield and the hair of Victorine Riordan, the little octoroon girl who sat in front of him in school (Penrod, © 1914 Booth Tarkington). But my mother’s father, the well-known pictorial photographer and writer Paul L. Anderson, knew what writing was all about. When he used a pen (at least from the late 1920s until his death in 1956), it was a red rippled hard rubber Waterman’s Ideal Nº 7 with a Blue nib, a pen that I now own and cherish. Here’s his signature:

My handwriting in school was rather poor, and so it remained as I grew into adulthood. By the mid-1980s it had deteriorated from semi-legible script into an execrable scrawl. So I took it upon myself to reinvent my style, the idea being that if I had to concentrate on making different letter shapes, I’d have to be careful enough to produce legible results. Since then, as a result of having discovered the joys of fountain pens, I’ve gone through a couple of iterations. I’m currently working to develop a legible but still characterful sloped script.

I dabbled with fountain pens more than once over the years, including a period during my retraining effort, until 1998, when I meandered too close to the Maelstrom and was finally irretrievably sucked in. I came to the hobby through a succession of pens that began with a Cross “Solo” and culminated with a Bexley Fifth Anniversary. As I gained experience, I gradually became a firm adherent of vintage American pens. But ignoring pens from other countries, vintage or modern, would be like cutting off my nose to spite my face, and as of this writing, my pen collection comprises about 300 pens.

Once having come to love vintage fountain pens, I soon found that the next obvious step was learning to work on them as well as with them. As a result of that discovery, I have the pleasure of being paid to play with fountain pens. Initially, I intended to sell vintage pens that I’d purchased and restored; but my business rapidly decided without my help that it was going to be based primarily on high-quality repair and restoration for clients. I then branched out into nib adjustment, customization, and repair — if the nib is no good, it doesn’t matter how fancy the rest of it is, it’s not a good pen. I find this latter skill very rewarding; to hand a nib to a client and get a “wow!” in return is a great kick.

In the summer of 2002, I bailed out of the computer industry to become a full-time pen person, and from that point on my wife Barbara has become an ever more important part of the business. These days, it's “we,” not “I.”

I’m a card carrying member of the Baby Boomer Generation. I grew up in the suburbs of Boston and after college (and my stint as an actual Hippie!). I started up, with some college buddies, an Import company designing and manufacturing photo frames. We toiled in that vineyard for 28 years and then sold our company in 1998. I spent those years traveling extensively in China, India, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, as well as around the U.S.A., meeting customers, doing trade shows, etc.

At some point in those working years, I was called to take my old “stuff” out of Mom and Dad’s attic. There among the flotsam and jetsam of my youth, carefully packed away, were my two fountain pens, a dinged up Parker 75 Ciselé gotten for my 12th birthday after a good report card and a Black PFM I bought at some point in high school (50% off as I recall, since no one wanted fountain pens so much back then).

The two pens followed me around for 20 more years! One day along about 1995, after reading an article about the popularity of old pens, I dug them out, got some ink, and fired them up. It was cool writing with antique pens!

I was hooked. Found Ebay, FPN, and other sites. Suddenly I was accumulating old pens much faster than my ability to learn how to fix them.

I am now in the enviable position of working a few days a week at my avocation. I ruminate every week during my commute to Nashua at my marvelous good fortune.

In elementary school, we wore blue-and-white checkered smocks that hid ink splats. In secondary school we were freed from the tyranny of ink bottles and did away with the smocks. Most of my classmates started using ballpoints, but I had a brand new Parker 45 that used cartridges in a pinch. I loved changing nib width and ink color. Eventually I put my collection of garden-variety Sheaffers and Parkers away because most of my writing was from a keyboard.

The “good” pen in the family had been a Parker “51” with a gold cap, but it was missing when I cleared my parents’ apartment. I did find some vintage pens that I had never seen: a PFM V, a little Wahl-Eversharp ringtop... another world of pens opened up. Instead of just replacing that Parker “51”, I started buying interesting looking vintage pens and collecting ink varietals and colors. Those Internet-bought pens weren’t always in their prime. There is a world of repairs I am learning, but I have a head start: I am a fair silversmith, so I know that nibs require a well-calculated touch.

I was born and raised in Nashua. I’m a junior at Keene State College, a school that I surely enjoy. I’ve known the Binders since before I was a teenager and worked for them since late 2005, and have been dragged deeper into the world of fountain pens. Fountain pens are very interesting, and I tend to show my friends the two fountain pens that I own. Most don’t know what they are, and I gladly pull one out and show them how it works, then I let them try it out. They wonder why a person my age has fountain pens, and I simply tell them that when I was hired to pack and ship them I discovered how cool they really are.

Most of the time I pack and ship pens that are returning to their owners or going to new homes. (I’m basically the shipping department.) However, I often get to do a little more. I also do several other things, such as logging pens in and out of inventory and assembling orders for shipping. I fill in for Barbara in the “office” when she is out of town. Most importantly, I get to play with the kids. Susanna is my “God-Sister” (my parents’ goddaughter), so of course naturally I play with her. I play with her older brother Patrick, too, as he and I spent a summer reading books on the hammock when he was younger.