About Us

Our “six minutes of fame” came on October 27, 2009, when Richard and our assistant Jim Baer appeared in a segment of New Hampshire Chronicle on WMUR, Channel 9 in Manchester, New Hampshire. Reporter/producer Tiffany Eddy and videographer Scott Hazzard spent a delightful afternoon and evening with us — click the Go arrow and you, too, can visit the Spa!

RichardsPens.com lives in an 1846 Italianate house located 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.)

Among the nicest things we receive from our clients are notes of thanks. On our Clients’ Comments page you will find some of the email messages we’ve received about our work. Sometimes these notes are accompanied by, or are themselves, lovely works of art. You will find some of our clients’ artwork on our Art Gallery page.

Barbara Hauck Binder

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.

Richard Binder

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:

Fountain pen

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.”

Jim Baer

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.

Viviana Mason

My name is Viviana Mason and I’m happy to be part of the Binder Pen family. I too live in Nashua, with one husband, one son who is almost of college age, two lovely greyhounds, one spunky Italian Greyhound/Jack Russell mix mutt, and four crazy cats.

Currently, I package your pens and pen accessories, and print the shipping labels so that they may find their way to you.

Except for the occasional tongue lashing or beating, it is a fun and pleasant place to work. I’m happy to be a small cog in the Binder wheel.