A Zeppelin-sold fountain pen

 

This is a pen I've owned for quite a few years. It's a Greif -- a lesser-known German marque -- from the early to mid-1930s in a desirable blue-on-blue marbled celluloid. By itself not anything all that special (I paid a negligible amount for it) but there is a rather special imprint on the barrel:

"GEKAUFT AN BORD DES GRAF ZEPPELIN" (bought on board the Graf Zeppelin). While postcards similarly marked are not hard to find, I have yet to discover another pen so marked. And though I have long been fascinated by the great rigid airships, I have not found any accounts describing how and where souvenir items might have been sold in flight. Perhaps they were more commonly offered during short intra-European excursion flights than on the grand intercontinental voyages for which the Graf Zeppelin is so famed.