Richard’s Pen Collection : Other Pens

Writing instruments on this page are part of my personal collection and are not for sale. Click the magnifying-glass symbol () next to any pen to view a zoomed image for more detail.

What pens am I carrying today?

In 1985 Sheaffer introduced one of the most genuinely likeable — and, in the event, popular — pens of the latter 20th century. Sold until 1995 under Sheaffer’s own marque and resurrected in 1998 as the Levenger Seas, the Sheaffer Connaisseur is a truly attractive, vintage-styled, and reliable pen. Sheaffer produced the Connaisseur in several versions, from a plain black or burgundy model to the chased black Model 815 that I have and love, to the Grand Connaisseur in a variety of elegant metal finishes. My Connaisseur is 5⁹/₁₆" long capped and 6¹⁷/₃₂" long posted — a delightful size, I’ll have you know — and its custom-ground 0.9 mm cursive italic nib is sweetly smooth.

In 1906, De La Rue & Company, of London, England, began marketing a remarkable self-filling pen called Onoto the Pen. The company chose the name “Onoto” for its euphony and the fact that it needed no translation for international sales. The pen’s innovative pneumatic filler, invented by a mechanical engineer, tinkerer, and sometime vaudeville performer named George Sweetser, flushes the pen and refills it in a single out-and-in cycle of a barrel-length plunger, and in 1934 Sheaffer began selling pens with its own version of the system.

My first Onoto is one of the earliest versions, a slip-cap model with a very firm stub oblique nib and an over-under feed. When this pen was made, De La Rue had not yet adopted the Waterman channeled feed technology, and the feed on some pens of this type cannot control the flow well enough to be used. This one works very nicely! This pen is 5²⁵/₃₂" capped and 6³²/₃₂" posted.

At 5³/₃₂" capped and 6¹³/₃₂" posted, my 1930s celluloid Onoto 5500 is pretty, delightfully slender and light in the hand. (Its burgundy marbled celluloid and its overall shape are strongly reminiscent of a Parker Duofold from the same era.) It’s fitted with a lovely flexible stub Nº 3 nib.

In some parts of the world, school systems still understand that writing is an important skill, important enough that it should be taught to children. By the time they’re old enough to handle most ordinary fountain pens safely, children are past the optimum teachable age, and so there are special pens for them to use while they’re young. One such is the Lamy abc, widely used in several European countries but not even available in the U.S.A. My abc came to me courtesy of a Dutch friend who attended the 2005 New England Pen Show. This durable wood-bodied pen is 5⁷/₃₂" capped and 4¹⁵/₁₆" uncapped. (It doesn’t post; the cap won’t fit over the ball at the end of the barrel.) I’ve fitted it with a modified Parker converter. There are a name space on the cap and a circular place for the owner’s initials on the back end of the barrel, and the pen comes with adhesive labels and clear film overlays to fit both of these spaces. I was surprised by how nice the abc is and how well the ergonomic section fits my adult hand. With a little smoothing on the nib, it writes amazingly well.

I don’t know whether the Lamy Safari might have been planned to fit into the progression of pens available to young writers as they grew up, but I do know that the Safari is a remarkably good and very inexpensive pen suitable for nearly all ages. It’s sturdy and, at 5¹/₂" capped and 6¹⁹/₃₂" posted, it’s a very good size. The section is ergonomically shaped, like that of the abc, and the Safari is easy on the hand. The postmodern styling is unique and practical, even to the extent of an ink-view window in the barrel. My Lamy Vista, a “demonstrator” Safari, has a fine nib that I’ve tuned to write smooth and wet.

Dr. Lamy’s idea was that parents, after their children had learned to write well with a Lamy abc and maybe a Safari, would take the children out and buy them better pens — specifically the Lamy 2000. I didn’t learn to write using an abc, but I finally broke down anyway and bought a 2000. At 5¹⁵/₃₂" capped and 6¹/₁₆" posted, the 2000 is a comfortable size, and its “brushed” finish makes it pretty much impervious to fingerprints and most other day-to-day disfigurements short of actual damage. Mine has a smooth, wet medium nib, and I really like it. Although my pen is modern, I still think of the 2000 as being sort of vintage; it’s been in continuous production since 1966, a remarkable record.

In 1974, Lamy introduced a pen for the times, slender and elegant, with a nicely streamlined nib. A big nib. There were four catalogued versions during this pen’s production life, and my Lamy Profil 81 is arguably the most luxurious of the four. Fitted with the same ultra-reliable piston filler and spring-loaded clip that that 2000 premiered along wtih a rather nicely springy 14K medium nib, my pen is 5³/₈" capped and 5³¹/₃₂" posted. Lamy added a feature to the Profil to guarantee an airtight inner-cap seal: the inner cap is spring-loaded against the section. That’s a cool piece of engineering, but perhaps the best feature of this delightful pen is that it can be disassembled completely for cleaning without the use of tools! (That clip is really bright chrome plated, by the way; it just looks black because of my photo setup…)

Ohio’s Bexley Pen Company sprang into existence in 1993, thanks to the enthusiasm of a group of collectors who lamented the disappearance of the grand old American pen companies and wanted to hark back to the Golden Age.

At 5³/₈" capped and 7¹/₃₂" posted, the Bexley Sleeve Filler, produced in 2001, is a good-sized pen, similar when posted to Waterman’s Ideal Nº 7. it is perhaps the most nostalgic of all Bexley’s designs; there were few sleeve fillers in the early years, and by the Golden Age the only one of note was LeBoeuf’s. This Sleeve Filler, which was given to me by a friend, is a nice lightweight pen, and its Bexley stub nib is delightful.

David Broadwell, a well-known maker of custom knives and pens, is a friend of mine. At one point he began lobbying for us to do a Limited Edition pen with Bexley. The idea of hooking my name up with David’s was obviously a good one, but the design I wanted to use hadn’t solidified in my mind. Then, the very next summer, Bexley’s gorgeous new America the Beautiful appeared on the scene, and in a heartbeat I knew. Emails began to fly, phone calls happened, and the upshot was that David and Howard Levy and I collaborated to create The Pharaoh in woodgrain ebonite with solid 10K gold furniture handcrafted by David. With its Equi-Poised shape and a vintage-style black resin section, it’s a real classy looker, and it’s also a surprisingly nice writer’s pen. The pen turned out to be every bit as good as we’d hoped it would be, and I’m just glad I had the good sense to order one extra for myself! The Pharaoh is 5⁹/₁₆" capped and 6⁷/₁₆" posted, and I’ve fitted my personal pen, marked Prototype instead of bearing a series number, with a boring — but very sweet — 14K Bexley medium nib.

At 5²⁵/₃₂" capped and 6¹³/₁₆" posted, the Americana is long! But it’s a respectful tribute to the Eversharp Doric without being a slavish copy, and it’s also a pen I’ve wanted ever since I first laid eyes on one, and I finally bit the bullet to buy this one in Sanibel Blue. It’s fitted with Bexley’s delicious broad stub, and it’s destined to knock the socks off who knows how many friends when I take it out to use!

Bexley’s 1999 tribute to the Waterman Hundred Year Pen isn’t remembered as one of the company’s best efforts, but I like it. And at 5⁷/₁₆" capped and 6⁷/₃₂" posted it’s a me-sized pen. My red Gemstone is a little off the radar; as a prototype, it has a clip that’s a bit different from the final version — and, because I had access to some loose parts, its cap band trim is a thin-fat-thin triple instead of the quadruple thin bands that graced production Gemstones. (The broad center band is actually just a stack of three thin ones, but it changes the appearance dramatically and, to my eye, for the better.) I’ve fitted this pen with a generic 14K nib because that’s what I had and also because Waterman didn’t use two-tone nibs on Hundred Year Pens.

My oldest Bexley is this Deluxe Demonstrator. The Deluxe is a gorgeous pen, and making it into a demonstrator just makes it all the sweeter. This is one of the very few pens Bexley has made that aren’t cartridge/converter fillers, and at 5⁹/₁₆" capped and 7" posted it’s a whale of a lot of button filler. This beast is obviously patterned on Parker’s Duofold Deluxe, but Parker didn’t do it with solid gold furniture (10K white gold in this demonstrator’s case). This pen, Nº 106/250, has a 14K medium nib and the ebonite feed that got Bexley off the ground in 1993. It was a gift from a close friend, and I’m in love with Bexley all over again! (I did mess with the Bexley formula by replacing the original latex sac with silicone — which wasn’t available when this pen flew out of Columbus.)