(This page revised May 5, 2022)
[ Reference Info Index | Glossopedia ]
|
| This 1930 Waterman advertisement probably appeared in The Saturday Evening Post or Collier’s Magazine. |
“This Christmas there is something NEW — Waterman’s Patrician, a fountain pen so fine, so beautiful, that it is really a piece of personal jewelry.”
Thus ran the introductory line of a Waterman advertisement in late 1929. The Patrician, priced at $10.00 (or $15.00 with a matching pencil), was without question an elegant pen, but it wasn’t particularly new. Still featuring Waterman’s archaic Spoon feed, it had no new technology inside, and its slightly rounded flat-top design wasn’t particularly advanced — especially when compared with that of Sheaffer’s radically streamlined Balance,
introduced at about the same time as the Patrician. What made the Patrician such a great pen was its construction quality: it required more than 300 handcrafted operations and was produced in relatively small numbers, not on a high-speed assembly line.
The Patrician was Waterman’s first pen to receive a model name instead of a number (although it could be argued that the No 5 and No 7 should by rights be the first named models because they were the first to deviate from the Standard Numbering System as it was regularized in 1917).
From the Globe medallion set into the back end of the barrel to the pierced band and the stylized pocket clip, the Patrician’s design (U.S. Patents Nos D81,246, D81,248, D84,641, and 1,863,061) was high Art Deco. Even the venerable lever received a restyling to look more modern. As befitted a flagship offering, the Patrician’s nib was huge. The exposed portion of the nib is the same size as the exposed portion of the No 8 nib used in the No 58, and because the Patrician is smaller than the No 58, the nib actually looks outsized. None of L. E. Waterman’s subsequent models, not even the De Luxe Hundred Year Pen, featured a nib this large.
The Patrician was offered initially in four colors: Nacre, Jet, Emerald, and Turquoise. Shown here is a very early production Jet Patrician.
|
Because of its close association with H. P. & E. Day, a hard rubber company, Waterman was slow to switch from hard rubber to celluloid. The Patrician was the first Waterman pen to appear in celluloid, but the company had not yet given up completely on hard rubber. Early Jet (black) Patricians, including the one shown above, were made of hard rubber. Waterman completed the changeover fairly quickly for the Patrician, and most Jet Patricians are made of celluloid. (But the gripping section, the cap lip, and the end caps of both the barrel and the cap remained hard rubber.) Other models soon followed in celluloid.
The Patrician was a big pen, obviously designed to be impressive in the hand of an “important” person such as a bank president or a corporate CEO, and in the 1920s and 1930s, “important” people were all male. Waterman appears to have concluded soon after introducing the Patrician that there needed to be a ladies’ companion for it, and the Lady Patricia appeared in 1931. Small, slender, and elegantly styled, the Lady Patricia was definitely intended for the dainty hand of a lady. Interestingly, although it was designed for women, it has has one of the best “military” clips ever designed, on a par with that of the Esterbrook Dollar Pen. Interestingly, however, with its stepped clip and embossed cap band, it bears no family resemblance to the Patrician beyond Waterman’s ubiquitous boxed lever and the fact that both models have sections and cap lips of hard rubber. Shown here is a Lady Patricia in Nacre.
|
The Lady Patrica waas produced in all of the colors of the Patrician, plus one more. The additional color was called Persian, and it was one of the most beautiful colors of the Golden Age. Unfortunately, however, it was terribly prone to discolor, and today a Persian Lady Patrician with good color, if you can find one, will be very costly indeed.
To keep the buying public buying, a product needs continual updating, a concept known as Dynamic Obsolescence. The easiest way to update a product is to offer it in new colors that will, with luck, draw more customers. In 1930, Waterman added Onyx to the Patrician’s color palette, with something that none of the other colors had: hard rubber parts made of brick-red material instead of black. The pen illustrated here shows an unfortunate problem with the Onyx celluloid (and indeed with many other light-colored translucent celluloids): a tendency to discolor, in some cases severely. A Lady Patricia with better (but still not perfect) color is shown with the Patrician to illustrate the discoloration of the latter. A further problem, which cannot be seen here, is the extreme fragility of the red hard rubber parts; they break much more easily than the black parts on other Patricians. For these reasons, Onyx Patricians with good color and undamaged hard rubber parts are rare and highly prized.
|
|
In about 1933, possibly to ensure that last year’s pen looked like last year’s pen, Waterman discontinued making the Onyx Patrician with gold-filled furniture, replacing that version with one featuring chrome-plated furniture.
In 1932 came the final new color, Moss-Agate. Arguably the most attractive hue in the Patrician’s palette, Moss-Agate was copied by other manufacturers, including Inkograph and Sheaffer. (Sheaffer, however, used it only on sub-branded models.)
|
|
For really “important” people, Waterman offered the Patrician in Jet with solid 14K gold furniture. To distinguish it visually, this version featured an engraved band, as shown in the catalog image to the left, instead of the regular model’s pierced band. Today, however, perhaps the most collectible Patrician color is Turquoise, as shown by this pen:
|
Initially, the Patrician featured five point styles, from extra fine to stub. By 1934, the range had expanded to include all seven of the styles covered by the nib color code introduced in 1927. (But Patricians did not bear color names in their nib imprints as did the No 5 and No 7.) Further, Waterman could fit a Patrician with any of its specialty styles, such as music or artists’ points, or broad or extra-broad styles.
Because its design really was relatively antiquated, the Patrician did not survive long. It was not present in Waterman’s 1936 catalog or the 1936 “School” number (Vol. XXXIII, No 1) of the Pen Prophet, Waterman’s house organ, but it did appear in that year’s “Christmas” number (Vol. XXXIII, No 3), probably in an effort to clear out existing stocks, and it showed up periodically thereafter until 1938 or 1939 as and when small lots were assembled from leftover parts stocks. Today, with its rarity and beauty, it is among the most collectible of Waterman’s pen models — so much so that from 1992 to 1994 Waterman produced a “Patrician” version of its popular Man 100 model, as shown here. This model was offered in colors of Coral Red, Emerald Green, and Lapis Blue.
|
Because there are so few variants of the Patrician, it poses very little difficulty for the completist collector — unless you’re not able to lay out the four-figure prices being asked for good collector-grade pens.
The following table shows the Patrician’s range of colors.
|
|
|
| Colors of Waterman’s Patrician | |
| Color | Name (Year of Introduction) |
|
|
|
|
Jet (1929) |
|
Emerald (1929) |
|
Nacre (1929) |
|
Turquoise (1929) |
|
Onyx (1930) |
|
Persian (1931, Lady Patricia only) |
|
Moss-Agate (1932) |
|
|
|
The information in this article is as accurate as possible, but you should not take it as absolutely authoritative or complete. If you have additions or corrections to this page, please consider sharing them with us to improve the accuracy of our information.
|
|
