Category Archives: General News


New pens posted!

Yes, it’s been a while, I know. Life has a way of being, well, life. But I have 19 new pens posted, and about 30 more (mostly Sheaffers…) still to come. That still leaves roughly 30-40 more as yet unphotographed, even without the folio of nearly 100 Chinese pens I picked up along the way. No, I will not be cataloging all of them! Perhaps I can get some photos of the lot. 

In this update, several Conklin and Monteverde pens appear, along with a couple Deltas, a few miscellaneous brands, and two stunning custom pens from Atelier Lusso. I have photos ready of several more vintage odds and ends, and roughly 20 more vintage Sheaffers ready to post.  Yet to be photographed are three Benus, and a handful of others from Lamy, TWSBI, etc.

There are also probably a couple dozen inks I haven’t swabbed yet, and a bunch of seals and….*sigh* See you soon, I hope!

A tale of an orange obsession….

So I won’t lie – one of my ‘grail pens’ was the Delta Dolce Vita. From the first time I got my grubby paws on a Fountain Pen Hospital catalog, I fell in love with that radiant orange, and the contrast with it and the black and silver cap & trim. From there began a quest for orange pens, since I could not afford a Delta. (Still really can’t afford the one I’d love, but there’s a lot of pens like that….)

Funny thing is, turns out that orange, black, and silver look is pretty easy to find. Below are (and I’m not telling you the order they’re in!) A Delta Dolce Vita, a Conklin ‘Orange Nights,’ a custom-made Atelier Lusso with sterling fittings, and a no-name Chinese (I’m assuming) pen that came to me in a batch lot, but I’m guessing could not have cost more than $10.00. Can you tell which it which?

Unless you know each pen intimately, it’s tough to tell, isn’t it? They all have clips and clip bands which sit below the top of the cap, they all have a silver trim ring at the end of the barrel, on what might or night not be a blind cap, and then there’s the lovely gleaming marbled orange resin! It’s not easy! OK, here’s the real order: 

  1. Atelier Lusso custom-made Carina with sterling silver fittings, and a fire opal set in as the cap jewel.
  2. This is the Delta Dolce Vita Frederico, with a 14K nib, piston fill.
  3. Conklin Duragraph in Orange Nights, with a steel nib, converter fill.
  4. Chinese pen, probably a Jinhao our a Huashilai, steel nib, converter fill.

45 New Inks added & site revamp finished

Finally! I have finished the conversion for the site from straight HTML to a data-base driven site. I’m still adding the last few pens (mostly my modern Sheaffer pens), but otherwise it’s up and running.

A couple of swabs of J. Herbin’s 1670 Rouge Hematite, their first ‘shimmer’ offfering, and one of my all-time favorites!

I’ve also added 45 new inks, including 6 of Diamine’s ‘Shimmer’ inks, and all five of the current J. Herbin 1670 shimmering inks. I have learned that shimmer inks are ridiculously hard to photograph in a way that does them justice, but I put my usual swab together with a more angled swatch to catch the light. Hopefully you’ll get the idea. At right is one of my attempts to capture the beauty of what remains on of my all time favorite inks, Herbin’s 1670 Rouge Hematite.

Also new: three inks by L`artisan Pastellier Callifolio, a relatively new brand that makes some lovely colors. I’ve also got two inks by Tekker, the sadly now-defunct company that let you design your own colors. Started by a couple of college students, they ended up getting overwhelmed by the response, and were unable to keep up. No word yet if someone has picked up on this, but I”d love to see the concept back in business!

Coming soon:

Look for more updates to the Modern Sheaffer page, and then several dozen (close to a hundred) new pen listings, vintage and modern, including a couple custom pieces, a few low-price Japanese & Chinese pens and more!

General update

I know it’s been over a year since I updated this. In part, it’s because Ive been working hard on developing a database to run the pen indexing part of the site. The blog part works beautifully, but adding every new pen by hand not only got unwieldy to do, it made for page that took way too long to load. So that’s been in progress. Ideally, I hope to offer more ways of viewing the pens you’re interested in, such as brand, nib, filler, date range, maybe even by color. But there are very few non-commercial packages to do this, so learning to construct it has been quite a battle. I think I’ve got the hang of it now, so look for things to start going live soon. At this point, it is mostly the (monumental) task of manually re-entering the info for each and every pen I own. Yikes! (There aren’t really any free tools for doing that either, I’ve looked!). So far it’s looking pretty good though! You can see what the new database driven pages will look like on the bottom left, where there are a few pages labeled (BETA).

Once it’s done, I will be adding a LOT of new pens and inks, several repair updates, and maybe even a page for all the vintage pencils I have also accumulated. So stay tuned!

New pen cabinet, and new pens coming soon

It’s been a busy summer, so I haven’t updated as much as I should. There’s a new batch or pens coming soon, as well as some long overdue ink swatches.

Meanwhile, I offer for your viewing pleasure these shots of my new pen cabinet (or curio, I suppose). The case itself came from my cousin, in a fantastic trade for a couple of pens.

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(click to enlarge, of course!)
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First Batch of Pen Boxes are Ready

The cigar boxes I snagged a while ago have finally begun their transformation into stylish pen boxes! I have about six more to do once I get appropriate colors in the edging material to match both the box and the liner.

If you look at the black and red boxes in the front, you’ll see a band of red inside; that is a soft foam strip that helps keep the tray liner in place, provides a ‘bumper’ for any pens that might get jostled out of their grooves, and makes the whole think look more ‘finished.’ The red one in back (which is a stunning box; the photo doesn’t show enough of it to see here) has a red liner, but the red foam looks muddy next to the brilliant red liner, so I’m going to put a black band in that one instead. I have boxes with liners in blue and burgundy as well.

I’ve been using a couple of these myself, and they are great! I’ll be finishing the next batch in the next week, and posting them for sale soon. Drop a line if you’re interested!

penboxes

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I’ve revamped the site again!

I know, I just rebuilt this website, and I was really pleased with it. But I’ve been getting back into tinkering with my collection again, and doing some repairs, and adding a bunch (too many, really), of new pens…. My “News” page was getting way too big. I looked for some kind of blog extension that I could embed into the site, to no avail. So now I’m running the entire kit and caboodle (what does that mean, anyway?) via WordPress.

I don’t think I did too badly keeping the look and feel of the old site, and it’s running a little fast and leaner, too. So please, look ‘er over, kick the tires, see if I’ve missed anything!

And stay tuned: I have over a dozen new pens to add, and several new inks, including three from a brand that’s new to me: Callifolio out of France….

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A more thorough site rebuild & some new links

I’ve finally finished a long-overdue reconstruction of this site from the ground up. Instead of a table-based layout, the structure is now CSS-based. I still used tables to contain the pen and ink listings, but the site itself should run a little cleaner and meaner. I’ve also updated the links list at left and removed a lot of dead links. And I’ve added a contact page, so if you know of a pen seller or website I should add, drop me a line!

I’m still working on getting the cigar boxes (below) converted into pen boxes, and will post pics when I do. I’m also thinking about possibly cross-linking with some of the sites I mention. Use the contact page to let me know what you think!

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And we have a winner!

Never mind that silly horse race business, I scored the jackpot on wooden cigar boxes! I got hold of 6 really nice boxes, and have a source for more. I have already ordered some liner trays, and will be turning these into custom pen-boxes in the next week or so. I’ll post some pics when they are done of course! Look for them on FPN’s classifieds!

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I recently acquired some new writing-related gear!

Over the last few weeks I’ve been scouring antique shops for a couple of things: a rocker blotter (to keep my black glass elephant company), and a few pen racks. I scored a couple lucite display racks, which now house a selection of my treasures in the dining room curio. (Pics of that to come). Back here in my study, I have also added a few new items.

First off is something I’ve been hunting since I saw one on Pendemonium that was beyond my budget. I kept looking, figuring someone has one of these and doesn’t want it! My patience paid off:inkstand

The top row (currently cradling my MontVerde Intima) holds 3 pens, and the inkwell, while far from airtight, is nevertheless quite functional, and in mint condition. My other goal was a non-glass rocker blotter. I have and love my little glass elephant (See him at the top of the Project Pens page), but I was hoping to find something less breakable for frequent use. I nabbed these:

rblotter1

This one has a lovely Victorian feel, but you have to ‘spring’ the bottom portion out of the top to change the paper. This is bound to end up with part of it flying across the room in my fumbly hands. Nevertheless, it’s a great size, gorgeous, and fits comfortably in the hand for use.

rblotter2

Then I stumbled on this beauty! The top handle unscrews via the two ‘flowerbud’ shaped screws, and releases the gripper plates that hold the paper. I have never seen a blotter with this intricate construction, or such lavish design before! My only problem? I need more space!!!

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