In My Collection

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	This very early Doric advertisement appeared in the September 12, 1931, issue of The Saturday Evening Post.

The year was 1931. Blocky was out. Art Deco was in. Two years earlier, Sheaffer’s Balance had set the pen world on its ear, and manufacturers were still trying to catch up. Wahl-Eversharp had made a foray into streamlined pens with a torpedo-shaped model that must have been a deliberate copy of the Balance. Reputedly, that effort was quickly quashed; a slightly less streamlined version did not fare well, and the company finally landed on an elegantly tapered design that it named Equi-Poised (a term derived from from equipoise, a balance of forces, and defined in Equi-Poised advertising as “Equally Balanced”) to emphasize its ergonomic qualities. These three pens are shown here:

As elegant as the Equi-Poised was, it may not have been quite au courant enough for the era’s rapidly changing tastes. Wahl-Eversharp’s designers went back to the drawing board (or maybe they just never got up after creating the Equi-Poised) and in 1931 introduced a pen featuring perhaps the most authentic and most recognizable Art Deco vision ever created for a writing instrument: the fabulous Doric, whose faceted design (by Robert Back, U.S. Patent Nº D81,742) still turns heads more than 70 years after its appearance. (Note that the advent of the Doric did not signal the demise of the Equi-Poised. The older design continued to appear in the Wahl-Eversharp catalog as late as 1937.)

This is an Oversize Gold Seal Doric in the rare and desirable Burma color.

(If there is a magnifying-glass symbol () next to an image, click the magnifying glass to view a zoomed version for more detail.)

The Doric’s 12-sided body tapers at both ends, finishing in flattened pyramidal crowns. The faceted Art Deco lever and roller clip and pierced cap band produce a clean, unified whole that has inspired numerous copies and tributes, including the long-lived Omas Paragon and the modern Bexley Americana. (The Paragon may have preceded the Doric; this is a question that is still subject to debate.)

In the early 1930s, life was speeding up; the world was shrinking as safe and comfortable air travel became a reality for those who could afford it. Capitalizing on the glamour of the new age, Wahl-Eversharp introduced the Doric with colors named for five exotic destinations: Jet Black, Burma, Cathay, Kashmir, and Morocco. (See the table below for color chips.) The unfortunate aspect of these lovely hues is that celluloid’s longevity is directly proportional to the depth of color and the curing time during the material’s manufacture as well as inversely proportional to the thickness of the part. In consequence, many Dorics are found with damage due to decomposition; their ends crystalize and eventually fragment, and the lighter colors — most of all Cathay — deteriorate most rapidly. Here is a Cathay vest-pocket Gold Seal Doric that shows serious crystallization of its cap and barrel ends.

(This pen is in my personal collection, and I fuse new cracks as I find them in an attempt to extend the pen’s life.)

The standard-size Doric below, in Kashmir, sits in the middle of the the range of sizes. (There were also ladies’ pens in clasp and ringtop versions, a “junior” Gold Seal version with a roller clip, and a midget purse pen with a clasp.) It also illustrates the slightly reduced trim level of the Doric’s non-Gold Seal version. Like the Cathay pen above, this Doric has an adjustable nib; but many of the lesser Dorics have ordinary nibs where the Gold Seal versions were fitted with Personal Point nibs as illustrated by the Burma pen earlier on this page.

Unique Features

Wahl-Eversharp implemented several features that were unique to its pens, not just redrawn designs of things everyone else was doing. Mentioned above is the company’s ingenious adjustable nib (introduced in 1932), which has a small slider that can be positioned in one of nine notches (illustrated to the right). With the slider moved toward the section, the nib is quite flexible. As the slider is moved notch by notch toward the tip of the nib, the nib becomes progressively firmer. With the slider all the way out, the nib is a rigid (manifold) nib.

People were still concerned about pens that could leak in the user’s pocket or purse, a concern that must have been exacerbated as more and more people took to the air in the flood of new commercial airplanes such as the Douglas DC-3. In about 1935, Wahl-Eversharp created a clever shutoff device that it called the Safety Ink Shut-Off (shown to the left). When the user capped the pen, the inner cap closed the shutoff by pressing on the metal tab indicated by the arrow in the illustration. Sadly, although it does work if precisely adjusted and well cared for, in real-world use the device did not work well, if at all, and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is said to have forced the company to withdraw it by prohibiting its advertisement.

Where pretty much everybody made their visible-ink-supply lever fillers with partially transparent sections, Wahl-Eversharp went its own way and made a transparent band in the barrel just aft of the threads. This allowed the company to use a hard rubber section, which is technically better than the celluloid sections the other guys used, but it meant that there had to be a way to attach the sac to the section far enough behind the barrel threads. To do this, Eversharp added a screw-threaded clear celluloid extension to the back of the section, and cemented the sac to the back end of that extra bit. When the pen is assembled, the celluloid extension extends past the clear window in the barrel so that the user sees the ink supply through two thicknesses of celluloid.

This design actually works very well, and it also allowed Wahl-Eversharp to implement a capillary drainage device in the sections of Dorics with Personal Point nibs. In pens with nonremovable nibs, the company drilled a hole in the back of the feed and inserted a small strip of celluloid formed into a J shape so that the curved end touched the sac wall to provide a path for ink to flow out of the section when the pen was being carried. (This concept had been pioneered 40 years earlier by Parker’s Lucky Curve feed but had been discarded by Parker before the introduction of the Doric.) The removable Personal Point posed an obstacle to the inclusion of the celluloid drainage strip, but clever engineers split the straight end of the part and fused the two split points to the sides of the celluloid section extension. This adapted strip, which can be seen in the photo above as a dark stripe running lengthwise through the transparent area along the pen’s centerline, allowed removal of the Personal Point nib unit.

The Second Generation

A problem that exists wherever there is tensile stress on a pen part is the potential for cracking. The celluloid pens of most manufacturers (notably Sheaffer) were notorious for cap-lip cracks caused by posting the cap on a tapered barrel. Adding a cap band, although it is a decorative feature, was originally intended as a measure to prevent these cracks from occurring. But the history of innovation is the history of a competition between engineers and users, and cap lips continued to crack as users posted their caps more firmly. A stronger solution, one that had been used decoratively on companies’ more expensive pens, was a band that extended all the way to the cap lip. In 1936, Wahl-Eversharp redesigned the Gold Seal Doric with just such a band, still Art Deco in design, that solved the problem. (Parenthetically, the company did not even imply that the new band was intended to address the cracking issue; that would have been to admit that the older design had been defective. What did make it into the new version’s advertising was the fact that the new band was perfect for adjusting the slider on an adjustable nib!)

At the same time, the company did away with its roller clip, fitting all Dorics with the rollerless clip design that had appeared on the vest-pocket Gold Seal pen (as a clasp) and on lower-priced Dorics. The new clip was also re-engineered to attach to the cap in a different way, making it much less costly to manufacture. A new, updated set of colors topped off the redesign.

With the second generation, Wahl-Eversharp also introduced a plunger-filling version of the Doric. The plunger filler, operationally identical to Sheaffer’s Vacuum-Fil, differs slightly in design and does not infringe on Sheaffer’s patent. Wahl-Eversharp called its design the “One-Shot” vacuum filler. Although it works the same as Sheaffer’s version, the Wahl-Eversharp version is somewhat more elegant in appearance, with its blind-cap threads arranged so that the visible boss at the back of the barrel is threaded on the inside and thus more visually appealing. Some models, as shown by the pen above, featured a metal “thimble” covering the boss for additional elegance and durability. And, for further visual appeal, Wahl-Eversharp used an attractively reticulated pattern for its transparent barrel areas.

Colors of the Doric

The Doric’s first-generation colors are relatively standard for the 1930s: greens, a burgundy, black and a gray. But they were treated in unusual ways; Cathay, for instance, was a lovely green swirl instead of the more usual “chunks and chips” of the time. Also, while Wahl-Eversharp used chrome-plated furniture on gray pens as Parker and Sheaffer were doing, it also applied chrome-plated furniture to Cathay; this use of white-metal trim on green was unique among the first tier’s top-line models.

Th second-generation Doric brought with it a greatly broadened range of colors. Some of the colors are similar to earlier ones, with a golden brown replacing the lighter green of Cathay and the burgundy of Morocco brightening to garnet; but there are additional colors, including a blue. These newer colors are “chunks and chips” in pattern, attractively treated with parallel narrow striations in their chunks. (Wahl-Eversharp referred to them as “Shell” colors.) And there are some strikingly different colors (e.g., Green Veined Brown) that appear only on lower-priced models. The color range shown here, lacking any of the Shell colors, is far from complete! I will add images to this page as I see the pens and photograph them.

Original Doric Colors
Color	Name
	Jet Black
	Burma
	Cathay
	Kashmir
	Morocco
Second-Generation Doric Colors
Color	Name
	Jet Black
	Green Veined Brown

The information in this article is as accurate as possible, but you should not take it as absolutely authoritative. Some of the information here was kindly provided by Syd “The Wahlnut” Saperstein.

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