Contract manufacture for the stationery trade

This ad is from a 1910 issue of The Bookseller & Stationer, a Canadian trade periodical. It nicely illustrates how stationery stores would contract to have fountain pens (and other products) made under their own names, and that many pen companies were happy to supply them. Most were like Sanford & Bennett in being New York based and not in the top rank when it came to market share and brand recognition.

Inside a Cross broker's pencil

This large gold filled pencil recently came in with the front end detached. I really shouldn't keep buying projects, but this seemed both straightforward and potentially interesting.

I could have cleaned and lubricated the mechanism in situ and just reattached the nose cone, but there were a couple of shallow dings to the barrel and I wanted to get a look inside. This is what everything looked like upon initial disassembly.

The lead measures a hefty 5.53 mm. The spring fingers of the holder make thickness less than critical, so modern 5.5 and 5.6 mm lead should fit with no problem. 

The mechanism propels and retracts the lead, using a simple track and helix design. Very sturdy with not much to go wrong.

Pencils of this sort were the subject of four related patents applied for and granted in 1882 to 1884: US263392, US296537, US296538, and US296539. Of these, the third most closely corresponds to our example. Cross pencils don't usually bear patent imprints, unlike Cross fountain pens and stylographics, and this pencil is no exception. 

Who made the Aztecs?

At the California pen show Chris Odgers came up to me to share a recent discovery: a sterling silver flat pencil holder with American Indian motifs in high relief. A beautiful and striking item in itself, but of broader importance in that the motifs are the very same as those on the celebrated Parker Awanyu Aztec.

The pencil holder is fully marked as a Mabie Todd product. I wasn't able to take a closeup photo, but from what I recall it bears the tiny "M" in square stamp. Mabie Todd, however, has never been identified as a supplier of overlays to other companies -- a reminder that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. While we have long known that Heath supplied overlays to Parker, we don't know how many other suppliers Parker might have used.  

The attribution of overlays is based upon relatively thin evidence. The pen companies did not publicize their sourcing, so we rely primarily on the existence of overlays found on various brands of pens that bear Heath markings. The problem is that only silver overlays appear to have been so marked, even where identical overlays were made in gold filled and solid gold, and that it appears that even those marks were eventually omitted -- not surprisingly, as penmakers had no wish to give the impression that their products were anything but wholly made in-house. 

Silver Aztecs are rare indeed. I don't have much hands-on experience with them, so had to make do with these images of a gold filled example from quite a few years ago. But I'm pretty sure that there aren't any silver Aztecs known with Heath marks. Chris didn't seem to know of any, and he's seen more than I have. A good number of Parker Snakes in silver bear the Heath mark, though, and there are Heath-marked magic pencils and dip pens with the same snake decoration. That seems to have led collectors to assume that the only other Parker figural overlay must share the same source.

Finally, we must consider the possibility that Heath was doing work for Mabie Todd, and that both the pencil and the Aztec overlays were actually Heath products. This seems unlikely, however, for several reasons. Mabie Todd had a long history of producing ornate pens and pencils of all sorts and of the highest quality quite on their own, and aside from the more basic patterns, their fountain pen overlays look nothing like anything offered by other pen companies. The same holds for their more elaborate magic pencils. I am unaware of any Heath-marked Mabie Todd products of any sort, and though I earlier inveighed against arguing from a negative, one must also give some weight to the absence of Heath-marked Aztecs given the prevalence of Heath-marked Snakes.

Thanks to Chris Odgers for sharing his discovery, and apologies for taking so long to get it posted. The photos of his pencil are his, and are used with his permission. Any errors and omissions are mine.

UPDATE: It turns out that Aztecs in silver are found with Heath marks. So what now to make of the pencil holder? Time for a closer comparison of details. A look at other makers's handling of American Indian motifs would also be helpful.

Magic pencils Pen Profile

This site is my usual location for sharing new information, but in some cases it is more appropriate to add it to the vintagepens.com website as a Pen Profile. That was the case when I decided to put together a piece on Dunn, and it the case now for magic pencils (upon reflection, I should probably move over some other posts here, or at least link them).

Please take a look -- comments and questions are always welcome. It was a bit surprising to realize that no one had previously tried to answer the question of who invented the magic pencil and when. 

Gold fabrication notes: a 1930s Swan section overlay

This Mabie Todd Leverless was made in England in the 1930s. All the external metal is 14k gold, which one would expect to be largely immune to issues from aging. But take a look at the section overlay -- definitely also solid gold and fully hallmarked. Click on the images below for a closer view.

The surface has the appearance of a loose net, or of a greatly magnified hand-hammered finish. The net consists of incipient fracture lines with slightly flattened areas in between -- something like what you might get if you wrapped an irregularly shaped geodesic dome around a tapered cylinder. How did this happen? And why is only the section affected?

This is a result of stress corrosion cracking, discussed in previous posts in relation to gold nibs. The way in which the section overlay was manufactured left the metal in a highly stressed state. Subsequent exposure to chemicals found in inks and especially cleaning and polishing products would have provided the other necessary ingredient to start the cracking. This would not have happened overnight: it would have been a cumulative process over a period of decades, each exposure adding imperceptibly but inevitably to the outcome visible today.

What could Mabie Todd have done differently? That's a tough question. The overlay was made by attaching a section of gold tubing to the hard rubber section with a rosin-based mastic, the only contact points being at the ends of the tube, then spinning the metal down until it was in full contact with the section throughout. Since the section was locked into the overlay the assembly could not be heated enough to relieve the internal stresses in the gold. A different alloy might have been a solution -- going to 18K would have done the trick. On the other hand, I'm not sure how common a problem this is. Perhaps this particular pen had the bad luck to be cleaned with something particularly strong. We know that ammonia solutions are bad for 14K gold, but anything containing bleach is much worse.

A late-production Duofold Senior

 

The black streamlined Duofold Senior shown above came my way at the recent Chicago pen show. With complete lack of foresight I cleaned the tarnish off the clip and cap bands before photographing it, even though I knew that that tarnish was interesting -- for it was that characteristic dark grey that forms on gold only when it is on top of a silver substrate. This is consistent with other features of this pen, most notably the late 1944 date code and the use of celluloid rather than hard rubber for the section, blind cap, and cap top/inner cap. The pressure bar is three-piece, consistent with all the rest.

So why is the tarnish interesting? We already know that Parker periodically cleared out excess inventory of older spare parts by assembling them into complete pens, and that such pens typically bear date codes from well after their regular production was discontinued (I write "periodically" because the date codes on these pens aren't evenly distributed, but rather form distinct clusters). We also know that in many cases parts had to be made to complete these pens, as they often differ in subtle ways from the parts from the original production run. That is surely the case here, for Parker only began to substitute silver for brass as a substrate with the advent of WW2, which tells us that the clip must have been made around the time the pen was assembled, and that it was not an older part taken from inventory. The cap bands also must be war-era, which suggests that the entire cap was made then as well -- though it is not inconceivable that this started out as one of those caps kept in inventory in bandless state, allowing for customization for special order trim configurations.

The elusive Ten-Year Pen

The Congregationalist, 8 Sep 1906, p. 321

In was in the first decade of the 20th century that the self-filling fountain pen came into its own. Scores of ingenious filling mechanisms were patented, many even making it into production -- though often not for long. One design that proved lasting was the sleeve or thumb-filler, in which a manually-depressed pressure bar was by various means made either accessible for filling or safely concealed for use.

One of the earliest sleeve-filling fountain pens was the Ten Year Pen. In this variation the back half of the barrel was the sleeve, sliding over a metal sac housing with a cutout for access to the pressure bar. The first advertisements appear in the last quarter of 1906. Most ran in religious periodicals such as The Congregationalist and Christian World, The Christian Advocate and Journal, The Church School Adjuster, and the Baptist Standard, but ads also are found in publications such as The Mercantile Adjuster, The American Review of Reviews, and The Etude (for music teachers). In all these early ads the company is listed as The Ten Year Guarantee Pen Company of Ansonia, Connecticut. The earliest mention of the company I have found is in The Missionary Herald of July 1906, where it is listed as having given a donation of $15 in May of that year.

Expositor and Current Anecdotes, Dec 1907, p. 146

From the end of 1907 there is no more mention of The Ten Year Guarantee Pen Company or Ansonia. The pen is henceforth styled "The Ten-Year Pen", and shown with a cap imprint identifying George B. Graff of Boston as "Manager" (F. M. Barton in the ad above was the publisher of the magazine, who in an arrangement common in that era was also a sales agent for the items advertised there). 

The Ecclesiastical Review, vol. 39, 1908

The George B. Graff Company was an established Boston manufacturer of stationery supplies such as paper fasteners and clamps. Adding a fountain pen to their line would not have been such a stretch; the original Ten Year Guarantee Pens surely were made under contract -- the area of Connecticut comprising Ansonia and Seymour was home to Day Rubber and had been a center of contract manufacture of hard rubber pens and pen parts for decades -- so however the transfer was effected, it would not have involved the kind of capital required for actual factory ownership.

Over the next few years Ten-Year Pen ads continue to appear in various publications, though without the pronounced evangelical slant of the original company's promotional efforts. After the end of the decade these ads drop away, though Graff continues to be listed as the seller of the Ten-Year Pen in stationery trade directories such as Walden's and Geyer's up through 1912 at least.

Gregg Writer, Sep 1915, pp. vii 

Gregg Writer, Oct 1915, p. iv 

The ads above clarify the later history of the Ten-Year Pen: renamed "The Dependable", taken over by Hermann Frederic Post, and moved from Boston to Chicago. Post continued to advertise The Dependable as late as 1921, still touting a ten-year guarantee. The last mention I can find is in the May 1928 American Stationer "Buyers' Classified Directory" -- but that list is so extensive and each entry so perfunctory that it is likely that at least some defunct or moribund companies ended up being included.

Ten-Year Pens aren't often seen, even by those who have been hunting in the company's home territories for years. Most examples are plain black hard rubber, though gold filled bands were advertised as an option. Several overlay examples are known in both gold filled and silver, the filigree overlays undoubtedly sourced from Heath. The pen shown here belongs to Gabriel Galicia Goldsmith, who generously gave permission to use his photos for this post.

There has been some confusion about the parentage of the Ten-Year Pen. As long ago as the 1990s collector lore was associating the pen with William I. Ferris, unlikely as that would have been given Ferris's central position at Waterman. Whether such a connection was posited in print, I have not been able to determine (it is not mentioned in the big Fischler and Schneider volumes, nor in the Pen Fanciers' Magazine). How it came about is easy to see, though. The patent date that appears on the pens and in advertisements is September 19, 1905, which is the issue date of Ferris's first sleeve-filler patent, US799897. Yet if one examines that patent it is clearly not relevant: it is for a one-piece barrel with an aperture, covered by a rotating sleeve with a matching aperture -- a design never used for Waterman-branded pens, but produced as Remex and Aikin Lambert models. There were at least three other fountain pen patents issued on that same date, however, with Robert W. Gorham's patent US800129 clearly being the one referenced in the Ten-Year Pen imprint.

One of the claims of Gorham's patent is shown in the image above. The text explains, "It is also the purpose of my invention to make the plunger more efficient by having a lug thereon within the aperture" -- that is, a projection attached to the pressure bar, making it easier to press down all the way. And sure enough, this lug is visible in the early Ten-Pen ads (the image below is a detail from the 1906 ad at the very top of this post).

So who was Robert W. Gordon? And who was behind the original Ten Year Guarantee Pen Company?  If I have the right Robert W. Gordon, he died quite young, and though mechanically inclined is not listed as involved in pen manufacture in any of the records found to date. This would suggest that he sold his patent, with others yet to be identified having been the ones who actually brought the Ten-Year Pen to market. Then there is the question of the priority of the sleeve-fillers made by Standard & Vulcanite in Brooklyn under Hamilton's patent US781649, issued February 7, 1905. Were the claims in this patent too narrow, allowing closely similar designs such as the Ten-Year Pen to avoid infringement by changing minor details, such as using an unsprung pressure bar, or a sliding barrel without a catch? All these questions are going to take some more digging -- ample material for a followup post.

Waterman’s “J” Pens: A Mystery Solved

For over 35 years Waterman collectors have puzzled over an extraordinarily rare model typically described as a slip-cap safety pen, with an end knob of distinctive form imprinted 1XJ (“X” denoting the nib size). Some have guessed that it was some sort of prototype or experiment. Few have given full consideration to how nonsensical a slip-cap safety pen would be.

Although the J-series pens do not appear in any known Waterman catalog, they are mentioned in both company and retailer advertisements and – most helpfully – in a Canadian instruction sheet that I found several years ago. The “J” stands for “jointless” and while the nib retraction mechanism is the same as that found on early Waterman safeties, the nib is only intended to be retracted for filling. Once the pen is filled the nib is extended and left that way until refilling is necessary. 

The first ads that mention Waterman’s Jointless date to the last quarter of 1909. The first that I could find appeared in September with all of the rest appearing in December. Many more followed in the first half of 1910 with only sporadic sightings thereafter. The last Waterman ad that I could find that mentions the Jointless is in the May 29, 1913 Geyer’s Stationer – though it does get a passing mention in 1915 in a published transcript of a Waterman executive’s lecture on sales. There it appears only at the tail end of a recounting of miscellaneous models outside of Waterman’s “active line”, suggesting that it was by then out of production but still in inventory or available on demand (American Stationer, vol. 77, May 22, 1915, p. 30).

Abraham & Strauss ad, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 18 Oct 1909, p. 8; perhaps a soft launch – a limited test release – as no further mentions are to be found until regular mentions begin two months later.

Bookseller and Stationer (Canada), May 1910, p. 4

Ads and instructions only mention three sizes: 12J, 14J, and 15J. Examples of all three sizes are known, all in black hard rubber – though reportedly at least one in red hard rubber is extant. All examples that I have examined have the early internal mechanism with helical grooves cut into the barrel which make the nib carrier twist as it is extended and retracted. 

This mechanism was adopted by Waterman for their safety pens in 1908 to avoid infringing Peck & O’Meara’s patent 523,234, then held by the Modern Pen Company (A. A. Waterman), and appears to have been used only until that patent’s expiration in July 1911. Whether Jointless production continued after that date is an open question. Perhaps it did, for our instruction sheet also has a spare parts page where for both safety and jointless models “Interior Spirals” are listed – a term that could in no way be applied to the straight-track equivalents used in their  earlier versions.

So what was Waterman thinking? The goal was surely to compete with arch-rival Parker, whose own Jointless had been on the market since c. 1898. Parker’s version required the nib assembly to be pulled out manually from the front of the barrel, a process just as messy as dealing with ink residue at the joint of a conventional dropper-filled pen. Waterman’s version obviated that issue, but at the cost of making the pen as complicated as a safety without the benefits of a safety. And this right at the same time that Waterman brought out its sleeve-filler, a simple design which made filling yet cleaner and more convenient. Perhaps no surprise that the Waterman Jointless was so quickly forgotten.

NOTE: Some extant Jointless pens have unusual protrusions on top of their caps, which in at least some cases are made to be inserted into a matching recess in the turning knob (similar to certain Caw's safety models). I have yet to see any mention or illustration of this feature in contemporary advertisements, however.

NOTE: The Canadian instruction sheet that solved this mystery came into my possession way back in 2008. In 2014 George Kovalenko noted the existence of a short-lived Waterman jointless model in a blog post but without recognizing the connection with the so-called slip-cap safeties (whose existence but not correct identity was first noted in print as far back as 1987 in Bob Tefft's Waterman syllabus, with another example shown in Fischler and Schneider's 1994 "Brown Book"). Most of my followup research in digitized periodicals was done in 2017 and the writeup and all photography was done by 2023.

Premature latex sac failure and ammonia

For quite a few years now pen collectors have been trying to determine why latex rubber ink sacs fail -- and in particular, why they sometimes fail so quickly. Certain inks have been implicated, and yet efforts to conduct controlled experiments have for the most part not succeeded in producing consistent results and clear conclusions (the exception being highly alkaline inks, which have long been known to attack sacs).

Some time ago I asked my old friend Peter Amis, longtime proprietor of the Pen Sac Company, if he could provide any insight into why newly-made sacs didn't seem to be holding up as well as those made in the 1950s and 1960s, but I never got a clear answer. Peter recently passed away, far too soon -- a huge loss to the pen community. During Peter's illness, Todd Eberspacher stepped in to help keep the Pen Sac Company going, eventually leading to an agreement to take the business over. 

Todd has shared with me much about what he has had to learn about the making of pen sacs. It turns out that environmental and workplace safety issues have led to major changes in how latex pen sacs are made, with the toxic solvents used in the past replaced by water-based solutions. This has affected durability in much the same way as the switch from oil-based to latex house paints. And the new formulations are in part activated by ammonia -- which I am told makes them particularly vulnerable to subsequent ammonia exposure.

The risks ammonia poses to gold nibs has already been documented at length here. That it is also bad for sacs has not been noted previously but should now be accepted as fact. Ammonia-containing pen flush products should not be used on either gold nibs or in pens with latex rubber sacs, including Vacumatic diaphragms. 

A Waterman prototype surprise

Many years ago I acquired a group of prototype Waterman Hundred Year pens, all of first year design but most in colors that never made it into production. Recently I finally got around to cleaning them up for proper photographic documentation, and inside the pen shown above there was an interesting surprise.

There was actually a bit of a clue beforehand -- "LEW" and "X" and "I" scratched into the bottom of the feed. Plus of course the pen's completely nonstandard color, an opaque metallic blue.

Nonetheless, there was no anticipating this. Incidentally, several of the pens in this prototype group came with #7 keyhole-vent nibs. As pre-production examples, they might well have been put together before nibs with the Hundred Year imprint had become available.

And here is a more complete view of the feed. At some point I'll have to look to see if a patent application was filed. 

While some of the pens in this group are pristine, such as the light green metallic example shown above, most had been carried and used, including the blue pen. It was undoubtedly a working prototype and not just a material trial.