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Photo © 2006 Daniel Falgerho

Daniel Falgerho took this snapshot of Richard at the Washington DC SuperShow in August 2006.

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. Here’s his signature:

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. Shown to the right is an exemplar of my current handwriting as of summer 2007, as written with a Pelikan M250 modified to a vintage-style full-flex duo-point.

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 collection comprises about 300 pens, including models as diverse as the Parker Lucky Curve Nº 1, the 1946 Parker “51”, and the Gold Starry (French) safety pen shown here.

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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 inestimable pleasure of being paid to play with fountain pens. Initially, I intended to sell vintage pens that I’d purchased and restored, and I do sell a few of these pens; 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.”

People began asking us for recommendations for modern pens, and that led us to develop a retailing aspect to our business. Rather than try to be all things to every possible purchaser, we’ve chosen to carry only a few selected brands, marques that we like and consider reliable. We also offer a selection of accessories to enhance the pleasure of owning and using pens.

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© 2008 Richard F. Binder

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