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.

Sheaffer’s Imperial, from the 1960s, looks like, but is not, a PFM (“Pen For Men”). It’s a good pen: classy and masculine, a trimmer version of its broad-shouldered parent. The Imperial line included cartridge models and Touchdowns.

The Imperials here are 5¹¹/32" capped and 5⁵/8" posted, and 5³/8" capped and 5¹¹/16" posted, respectively. The top one (originally a cartridge-filling Lifetime Imperial that I purchased new in 1965) has a more recent Sheaffer replacement medium nib (14K gold) and a new barrel that also accepts a converter; thus, it is much like “my grandfather’s axe,” with only its cap original. The second pen (a Touchdown) has an original fine. This latter pen, ostensibly an Imperial VI, is technically a Frankenpen because it has a Lifetime cap; Sheaffer did not offer the Lifetime Imperial as a Touchdown.

At 5⁷/16" capped and 5¹³/16" posted, this gold-plated Touchdown Imperial illustrates the slight increase in size necessitated by the metal barrel and blind-cap overlay parts. (Its extra-fine nib illustrates just how sweetly an extremely fine nib can write.)

The basic Imperial design, with polished or gold-plated steel nibs, returned to production in 1995 as the Triumph Imperial. Sheaffer used this design in 1996 to produce the first in an annual holiday series, the “Holly Pen.” This pen, with a gold-plated steel medium nib, is 5³/8" capped, 5⁹/16" posted.

Next is a pen that’s something of an odd duck in the Imperial lineup. This pen, an Imperial I, has a Stylpoint nib (like that of a contemporaneous cartridge pen) and a narrow cap band, and it uses a modified Touchdown system with a short sac and a solid piston plunger. Its gold-plated steel nib is a medium, and the pen is 5¹/4" capped and 5¹¹/16" posted.

This brown Touchdown Imperial desk pen, 6⁷/8" long, has a buttery medium Inlaid Nib, and its base is onyx.

Seth Sears Crocker’s Crocker Pen Company produced simple pens of high quality. In his quest for a filling system more efficient and easier to use than the eyedropper system, and simpler than Conklin’s Crescent-Filler, Crocker took perhaps the most straightforward approach possible: He took a cue from the Conklin and used a sac; and, in a stroke of brilliance, he simply put a hole in the end of the barrel and created the Ink-Tite blow filler. To fill Crocker’s bare-bones pneumatic pen, you immerse the nib and section in ink, cover the hole, blow gently to collapse the sac, and release the pressure to allow the sac to fill itself. Aside from the proximity of an open ink bottle to the user’s face and the inherent risk therein of acquiring an extra beauty mark or two, the system is one of the best from the first quarter of the 20th Century. Including the ring mount, my lady’s ring-top Crocker pen is 3½" capped, 4½" posted. Its fine flexible nib is very smooth and a delight to use.

Seth Chilton Crocker was the son of Seth Sears Crocker. In 1923, he founded the Chilton Pen Company, which in 1924 introduced a remarkable single-stroke pneumatic pen. The barrel was a plunger that slid along an internal aluminum tube fastened to the section. When the user covered a hole at the end of the barrel and pushed the barrel home, air pressure within the pen collapsed the sac. Uncovering the hole to release the compression allowed the sac to fill. (There is a technical description of the Chilton system in my reference page on Fountain Pen Filling Systems.) My first Chilton is a superb Jade Green vest-pocket pen of this first-version design, 4³/8" capped and 6¹/16" posted.

This filler design required an extra-long cap that some users found unattractive. In about 1927, Chilton engineers came up with a second version that reversed this arrangement, sliding the internal tube and adding a blind cap to its end for the user to grip when extending it. (This design was the inspiration for Sheaffer’s Touchdown, introduced in 1949.) The company continued to produce innovative features, and the Wing-flow, introduced in 1935, embodies a nib with tabs (“wings”) that wrap around into notches on the feed to prevent it from shifting. This sturdy design ensures better control of the flow, and it is still in use on pens such as the Parker Sonnet. My Wing-flow, made in about 1937, also has a “Lox-Top” section, with notches into which a small tab attached to the cap fits, locking the pen together to prevent the cap from unscrewing inadvertently when the pen is clipped in a pocket. This feature was not a marketing success, and it was very short-lived; the Wing-flow itself was phased out by 1939. My Wing-Flow has a fine flexible nib, and it’s 5¹/16" capped, 6³/16" posted.

The Wing-flow’s successor, introduced at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, was the Golden Quill. Chilton had by this time discontinued the national advertising that it had begun when the Wing-flow premiered, and the Golden Quill was less than spectacularly successful in the marketplace. It is, however, a superb writing instrument and a very attractive one, elegantly streamlined and trimmed in a minimalist style with no band. On the back of the cap, to balance the clip, sits an inset gold-filled indicia in the shape of a feather; and a gold-filled crest tops the cap from back to front (like a “Mohawk” haircut). At 5⁵/8" capped and 6¹³/32" posted, the pen is larger than its predecessor — but it retains the excellent design of the Wing-flow nib (now graced with a feather design in the imprint), augmenting it with a feed that extends through the section’s transparent window to encourage more reliable flow. It’s difficult or impossible to see in photos, but the color of my Golden Quill is a deep, deep blue rather than black.

Breathe Like a Submarine: Sheaffer’s Snorkel

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During World War II, the German navy adopted a device called a Schnorchel, which was a tube that could be extended above the ocean’s surface by a submerged submarine, allowing the submarine to draw in fresh air without surfacing. In 1952, Sheaffer’s Snorkel appeared on the market. The pen uses a tube like a Schnorchel, but in reverse; the pen’s tube allows the pen to draw in ink without being immersed in the bottle. The most complex filling system ever applied to a fountain pen, the Touchdown-derived Snorkel system was a last-ditch attempt to fight the onslaught of the ballpoint pen. The system works remarkably well, and Snorkels are considered very reliable pens. They appeared across Sheaffer’s product line, all the way from the low-priced Special to the prestigious Crest Masterpiece. In 1959, Sheaffer phased out the Snorkel except for one model, the famous PFM, which was actually introduced in that year.

My first Snorkel is a burgundy Sentinel, a White Dot model with a gold-trimmed stainless-steel cap and a buttery smooth medium two-tone Triumph nib. It is 5½" capped, 6³/8" posted.

Next is a Snorkel demonstrator, a Valiant made of clear plastic so that a dealer could show prospective purchasers how the mechanism worked.

My third Snorkel is a Valiant in the uncommon Periwinkle color, my favorite of all the Snorkel colors. This pen has a medium nib that’s perhaps a little finer than most modern mediums — but I love it anyway.

I hadn’t thought about the possibility of acquiring any Snorkels with open nibs, but I reckoned without one of my friends. He decided that this Snorkel Sovereign’s three-tine music nib wasn’t right for him — so he gave the pen to me!

This black desk model has the usual two-tone Triumph nib and a base featuring a prism cut from lead crystal. The pen is 6¹¹/16" long.

© 2008 Richard F. Binder

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