Pens on this page are part of my personal collection and are not for sale. If there is a magnifying-glass symbol () next to a pen, click the magnifying glass to view a zoomed version for more detail.

A Midget Among Giants

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Fountain pens come in all sizes. Although not the smallest pen ever made, the Wahl “Bantam” is among the smaller models. It was produced beginning in about 1933. These pens are about 3³/4" capped and 4½" posted. The Bantam is a bulb filler, and most Bantams write very well, albeit not for thousands of words! The Bantam’s nib is a Wahl No. 0, the smallest the company made.

Bantams exist with either steel or gold nibs; the blue and brown pens here have gold. Some Bantam nibs (as on the blue pen here) are flexible. Because it was a novelty item, the Bantam has metal trim that is very thinly gold plated, and the plating is often worn. This blue pen’s furniture has been replated.

This green pen, fitted with a steel nib, has a transparent barrel and double narrow cap bands.

The next two Bantams bear a cap-band imprint for the Century of Progress exposition of 1933/1934. The blue swirl is the more common type, a round pen, while the burgundy marble (Morocco) faceted pen is quite uncommon.

Here is another burgundy marble faceted pen, this one fitted with a taper as part of a desk set.

In 1949, Sheaffer introduced a filling system that used air pressure to compress the sac. The pen has a “plunger” that isn’t a plunger at all, but rather a pneumatic cylinder, and it fills the pen on the downstroke. The company called this system Sheaffer’s Touchdown, but it really wasn’t a Sheaffer invention. It had been used by the Chilton Pen Company nearly two decades earlier! (There is a technical description of the Touchdown system in my reference page on Fountain Pen Filling Systems.)

My first Touchdown is a Valiant, from 1949. This pen, with a remarkably smooth factory stub nib, is 5⁹/32" capped and 5¹⁵/16" posted.

The second pen is also a 1949 Touchdown; this is a Persian Blue Sentinel, 5¹/4" capped and 5¹⁵/16" posted, with an extra-fine nib.

Next is a Touchdown TM (Thin Model) Autograph, from 1950 or 1951. The Autograph features a cap band of solid 14K gold, intended to be engraved with the owner’s signature. This pen is 5¹¹/32" capped and 6¹/8" posted. It also writes very well with a very firm medium nib.

The Touchdown TM, introduced in 1950, includes some rather diverse models. The Autograph above is the “classic” shape, thin and fitted with metal section threads. The “marketable” Touchdown TM pens lasted only until the 1952 introduction of the Snorkel, but Sheaffer’s low-line models lasted after their higher-end companions disappeared. These less costly pens have a much more typical “pen” shape with a little more thickness and a very ordinary cap band on a plastic cap — all except the Craftsman, which retained its late 1940s wire cap band band and thereby earned the honor of being the last wire-band model in production. Shown here is a Craftsman, 5¹/8" capped and 5³¹/32" posted. This pen has the expected Nº 33 nib, in a fine grade, and writes well.

Founded in 1921, the Dunn-Pen Company, Inc., was out of business before the end of 1924, driven under by a prolonged employees’ strike. The founders, interestingly, did not include Charles Dunn, who had in 1920 patented a pump filler that gave a very large ink capacity for the size of the pen. But in its three-plus years the company produced pens of very high quality, fitting them with Dunn’s filler (U.S. Patent Nº 1,359,880). The Dunn-Pen is distinctive in appearance because of the “Little Red Pump-Handle” with which the user operates the filler. Many of these pump knobs are made of a plastic that crystallizes, but some, on early pens, are hard rubber. My Dunn-Pen has a hard rubber pump knob. It’s a very small pen, 4¹⁹/32" long capped and 5⁷/16" posted. With its restored pump and its very nice flexible Nº 2 Dunn Pen nib, it’s quite a nice pen to use.

Duofold Redux

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In the mid-1930s, as the Vacumatic’s star rose, Parker discontinued the Duofold. But in 1939, the name reappeared on a button filler called the Geometric (“Toothbrush”) Duofold. The Geometric survived only two years before being replaced by a range of “Striped” Duofold models that included both button fillers and Vacumatic fillers. Vacumatic-filling Duofolds, like the Vacumatic itself, had transparent barrel stripes intermixed with the color; button fillers had black stripes.

Immediately below is a 1940 Sub-Deb in Blue Pearl. 4³/4" capped and 5⁷/16" posted, this pen has a very flexible fine nib.

Next is my 1941 Senior model in Dusty Red.This pen is 5¹/4" capped and 6¹/16" posted.

Third in line is another Blue Pearl pen, my only button-filling Striper, a Lady Duofold from 1942. This pen, with a rigid extra-fine nib, is 4¹³/16" capped and 5½" posted.

Next is my 1945 Senior in Blue Pearl. This pen is 5¹³/32" capped and 6³/32" posted.

Last is my 1946 Green and Gold Senior, 5³/8" capped and a surprising 6¹/8" posted. All of these pens are Vacumatic fillers and have firn fine gold “Chevron” (or “V for Victory”) nibs.

© 2008 Richard F. Binder

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