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The pen is a Wirt slip-cap dropper filler in black hard rubber with a gold filled "filigree" overlay. Normally worth several hundred, this one carries an auction estimate of $15,000 to $25,000 thanks to inscriptions that identify it as a gift from Theodore Roosevelt to Pat Garrett, including the date of December 20, 1901, when Roosevelt nominated Garrett as customs collector of El Paso. According to the catalog entry, this pen previously appeared at auction in 1996 and was shown in a book first published in 1992.
The problem is that this pen cannot date to 1901. The nib and feed are of a form that Wirt adopted only a couple of years later (US patent 724984, applied for and issued in 1903), though the exact form of the feed appears to be later yet (see US patent 978420, applied for in 1908 and issued in 1910). And even if the nib and feed had been updated later, the trefoil pattern filigree of the overlay is a design that was only introduced in the 'teens. What Wirt was actually making in 1901 is nicely illustrated by the 1901 and 1903 catalogs in the PCA Reference Library.
The interesting thing is that the engravings don't appear to be new -- though they are suspiciously crude for what purports to be a presidential gift. This isn't the first pen that's turned up with an old inscription that wasn't as old as it purported to be -- I'm thinking of a Waterman silver overlay safety pen that recently turned up at auction with a Stanford family inscription -- so this sort of "enhancement" seems to have been going on for some time.
