Wearever flattop – 1930s

The pen featured in my last post, but cleaned up and with new sac and J-bar installed.

I couldn’t find a replacement nib so I left the original in.

It’s a very wet writer. I did bend the nib down closer to the feed, and reset nib and feed with hot water but the base metal (I suspect copper) is too malleable and is already bending away from the feed despite my best attempts to write lightly. The spoon tip digs into the paper on some upstrokes too, which is annoying.

New project – Wearever flattop

Wearever before repair

My latest project pen is a Wearever flattop pen that clearly takes design cues from the classic Parker Duofold “Big Red”

Wearever was a third-tier pen maker turning out masses of low-priced but serviceable pens. It’s interesting to see how they cut costs. Here, the threads on the barrel are few and shallow. The clip is folded from shape cut out of a metal sheet.

Spoon nib

In lieu of welded tipping material, the tips of the tines have been stamped into a bowl to provide a curved surface area in contact with the paper – a “spoon nib” according to Richard Binder. The 14K gold plating, a sop to public tastes, was likely very thin. Most of it has worn off over the years to expose the underlying metal which looks like copper.

The pen is missing a J-bar and sac, but considering it probably dates from the late 1920s, it’s relatively clean with – best of all – no cracks. The repair job looks straightforward. Hope nothing untoward happens.

Vintage Pilot pen (circa 1940) and a glimpse at a dark past

As you can see from the pictures this vintage Pilot eyedropper isn’t in good condition. The once-translucent barrel has ambered so badly that I can’t tell what colour it used to be. There’s also a line that spirals around the barrel, like a toilet roll tube. Perhaps the celluloid was originally a strip that had been rolled into a spiral to form the barrel?

The cap, though retaining more of its translucence, is ambered and cracked. The plastic resembles algae in dirty water ;p It’s a mismatch with the barrel too.

I was curious about the pen’s origins and type of nib. Thanks to Ron Dutcher (Kamakura Pens) and Stan (Ryojusen Pens), I’ve been able to date the pen to around 1940.

- The nib is a Pilot stenographer nib, as indicated by the rectangular breather hole.

- The date code stamped at the back of the nib — 2.40 — indicates it was made in 1940.

- The barrel was most likely made between 1936 and early 1938. It has the “Pilot Pen Mfg…” imprint with the “N” inside the logo.

- The sword clip was made between 1935 and 1954

To illustrate their points Ron and Stan also provided images of advertising cards from Pilot.

Courtesy of Kamakura Pens

Courtesy of Ryojusen Pens

Stan’s card led to another curious diversion down darker paths.The “2600″ refers to the 2600th year since Emperor Jimmu, descendant of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, supposedly founded the Yamato dynasty from which the current Japanese imperial family claims an uninterrupted line of descent. This was identified with 1940 in the Gregorian calendar, and that year saw special rituals and events to commemorate this event.

One such event was the unveiling of the Hakkō ichiu tower. Situated at the site of where Jimmu’s palace was supposed to have stood, the tower was the architectural embodiment of the Japanese regime’s expansionist ambitions, fueled by militarist-nationalist beliefs of the Japanese being a divine, superior race via the imperial family.

I was surprised to learn that the tower still stands today in Miyazaki prefecture, even retaining its carved calligraphy of the imperialist slogan Hakkō ichiu. It’s now disingenuously named the “Peace Tower”.

Esterbrooks return!

Ever since the Other Half looked over my shoulder one evening and said she liked that pen on the computer screen, I’ve been looking for a Green Esterbrook J.

The irony is that I once had 8 Esties and sold them all :p A101s and a few Deluxe models. I only had one Blue Esterbrook J, and with a cracked jewel at that.

My eBay purchases were all unsatisfactory, so I decided to just stick with FPN and got lucky. And as several warn on FPN, once you get one it’s hard to stop…

Anyway, three recently purchased Esterbrook J pens just turned up:

- early Green (no registered trademark symbol) with a pleasant, equally early-looking 2284 nib;
- Olive-looking Grey with a 2668 nib, flat feed; and
- Blue, also with 2668. Needs lots of cleaning though.

How Not to Send a Pen

Normally I’d be pleased to receive a pen I’d won on eBay, but when I drew this wrinkled envelope – resembling a small lumpy pillow – out of the mailbox and saw the postage label I became annoyed. The seller had charged USD15 for shipping and only sent the pen First Class International from the US – the cheapest possible rate. No insurance either. What a jerk.

But even worse: he was a negligent jerk. The seller hadn’t bothered to protect the pen. See what came out of the bubble envelope:

This joker had simply dropped an expensive decades-old pen in a sandwich bag, loosely folded some bubble wrap around it, and dumped everything into a thin bubble mailer with some crumpled brown paper and a couple of packing peanuts.

Many sensible sellers enclose their pens in a length of PVC piping – cheap and effective. Would it have killed him to at least use some scotch tape and swaddle the pen snugly in layers of bubble wrap?

The pen now has a significant crack running down across all the barrel threads and a hairline crack on the cap lip. Who knows whether the damage was already there or whether this idiot’s negligence is to blame. I’ve already asked for a refund.

Want vintage letterheads?

A sampler pack of vintage letterhead repros is up for grabs in this contest by “Everyday Correspondence” — a blog that extols the epistolary arts and paraphernalia.

A National Day song for the people

The indomitable mr brown spoofs this year’s National Day theme song:

Another look at the pen junk box

The most recent Singapore fountain pen meetup on 4 July has given me new impetus to work on a few clunkers in my pen junk box. Often these were ill-considered, impulse buys.

I was a little disturbed to see that a Waterman Crusader had begun to develop fungus around the nib. But unsurprising considering how long it’s been neglected. I don’t think it’s worth the hassle of disinfecting and the worry of contamination, but I can’t bear to throw it away – yet.

The most promising candidate seems to be a green striated Sheaffer Craftsman. Minimal wear and brassing, lever working fine. The reason why I put it in the junk box: the fine nib is missing its iridium. Now I think I can smooth it into something that writes acceptably, but first I need to refit the nib and feed.

No Country for “Old Timers” + FAQ update

BIC Singapore returned my call about Connaisseur and Balance 18K nib units – an insane S$216 each.

Looks like my Sheaffer Old Timer will be staying in the drawer for a while.

Updated the fountain pen FAQ too. Pls see the tab on top of this page or click here.

“Of Love and Honor” (Bushi no Ichibun) (2006)

High production values. Fits the genre to a T: melodramatic and predictable, with overwrought weather elements and even a cameo by Ogata Ken as an Obi-wan Kenobi figure (the facetiousness of such an analogy is fully warranted imho). In other words, dull viewing.

At one point, the movie presents a possibility that it could transcend its banality: the lead Mimura has divorced his wife for sleeping with another man in order to keep him fed, and modern audiences would no doubt be ambivalent about Mimura. Hence watching him seek revenge would have been interesting. But it’s soon revealed that the other man had lied. The wife Kayo reverts to being a cardboard Oshin, the other man is suddenly just another stock villain, and Mimura has an empty, heroic, crowd-pleasing gloss. Naturally, the film winds up with a wholly unrealistic ending, stopping along the way for the obligatory fight scene.

Director Yamada Yoji is best suited to mining humour from scenes of humdrum existence, and the early scenes with the low-ranking samurai food tasters are the best. As a whole though, this movie is cinematically insipid.