I am not a fan of the fashion among many pen collectors of using china markers or the like to highlight imprints. In the vast majority of cases, imprints were not originally filled, and to my eye an imprint filled with bright white pigmented wax is glaring and throws off the overall aesthetic balance of a vintage pen. There are some cases in which imprints were originally filled, but typically the infill was colored rather than white.
Eagle, for example, often filled their imprints with gold pigment. The pen above nicely retains its original infilling, in a special imprint for the well-known Albany, New York company, W. H. Sample & Sons, founded in 1871 and using this business name from 1917. The company sold cutlery, leather supplies, and sporting goods; its name is especially familiar to collectors of vintage straight razors.
Although the Eagle name does not appear anywhere on the pen, "Capitol" was an Eagle trademark, registered in 1906 but in use since 1890, and both the shield imprint on the nib and the ribbed section are characteristic Eagle design features. The pen likely dates to the later 'teens.
2 comments:
Do you happen to know their usual method for filling the imprints back then? Was it just metallic gold wax melted onto the imprint and polished off?
In this instance, it looks very much like the standard method of heat-imprinting still used now, where the stamping is done through a thin sheet of metallic foil. Look up "hot foil stamping" for the process.
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