A good place to start with vintage fountain pens

plus: peasant's quest

I think one of the reasons I’ve been slow to get into vintage fountain pens—in addition to their lack of skulls—is the somewhat overwhelming buying experience, at least at a show.

It’s pretty easy to buy a new pen at a trade show: some vendor is going to be standing behind a nicely-arranged table with a few of each model laid out. “Haldo, weary traveler,” they will say.¹

“Here, have some grog. Let me sing you a song of our latest model, made of the most precious of plastics. It works like exactly every other pen you’ve ever used. If it doesn’t work and you can’t fix it yourself, you can return it easily. Feel free to check pricing on the internet.” You have to decide if you like the thing and that is basically it. Also, they will take credit cards.

The vintage tables, on the other hand, can have the feel of being at Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar. There will be 1,000 pens crammed into folders and trays that take up every square inch of the table. These can range from late-model pens that are basically still brand-new to pens so old they look like they’ll disintegrate if you pick them up.

you have to pay for that now

Unless you already have a solid knowledge of a specific pen you’re looking for, you’ll need to figure out what kind of seller this is and how much you trust them, whether the price they’re quoting sounds generally reasonable, if the item is genuine or not, if you can fix it if it doesn’t work, if the ATM in the lobby still has cash left in it because the vendor may or may not take other forms of payment, and so on.

It’s a lot.

I don’t know if this problem is unique to me, but it shows up in the two vintage pens I actually own: a very old Moore lever-filler I bought from Redeem Pens—a vendor whose setup at the Dallas Pen Show doesn’t fall into this trap, as Will does a pretty nice job curating and presenting a limited line that he works on himself²—and this Sheaffer Imperial I’m about to talk about, which was in a case with a dozen or so other pens in a design store in Cork.

I like both of them. And if you are looking to try out what an old gold nib and vintage feed feels like, I’d specifically recommend this Shaeffer.

Let me give you a brief overview of the pen, then I’ll explain why it’s a good place to start.

There are a lot of variations of the Imperial; this is an Imperial 797. From the shape of the inlaid nib, it’s probably made on the later side of the 1970’s, which means it’s probably right around fifty years old (per this writeup of the same model here, at Peyton Street Pens).

The nib is 14k gold; the body is electroplated gold. Older versions of this would be gold-filled instead, but don’t worry about the difference—both electroplating and gold filling are to actual gold what La Croix is to flavor. It’s shiny yellow metal either way.

This pen puts down a truly bananas amount of ink. There isn’t much line variation, but it’s an incredibly smooth and wet writer. I can blow through a converter’s worth of ink in less than a week. It really feels very good to use.

There are a few cons: it’s a more slender pen than I like. It doesn’t have much of a grip section, though the taper is gradual enough that I don’t have the same problems I have with the Lamy 2000. It uses proprietary Sheaffer cartridges and converters, so you need to buy one of those and that’s mildly annoying. All kinda minor stuff.

Now, if you’re wanting to try out a vintage gold nib, I’d recommend something like this as a nice way to limit the number of variables you’re playing with. That is:

• This Imperial is widely available. If something breaks, you can find a part for it.

• It uses a cartridge/converter filling system that you already know how to use and clean.

• If you’re not sure how much it should cost, there are ton of listings online so you know what to expect ($100-$130 depending on condition).

• If that’s too much, there are lower end versions available without the gold plating. And if you want something more substantial, you can get one of these Frankenpens from Peytron Street where they put old Imperial sections in new ebonite pens from Lotus. (I’m genuinely interested in these as it feels like it’d solve the pen-is-too-slender problem, so please let me know if you’ve tried one.)

the Lotus/Shaeffer hybrids from Peyton Street

In short—and in stark contrast to the Moore I have and its floppy rubber sock filling mechanism—there’s not much of a learning curve beyond “do I like how this feels,” which will probably determine if you go further down the rabbit hole or not.

If I were doing it all over again, I probably would have bought this one before the Moore, and I’d probably own more vintage pens already.

look at it go, so floppy

Other Stuff

HOORAY FOR DROMGOOLE’S and also YAFA: Thanks for the feedback, guys! I sent an email and pictures of the Stipula I covered last time to Dromgoole’s (retailer), who forwarded it on to Yafa (distributor). This problem—the chrome wiping off—was new to both of them, and they said I could either wait for Stipula to fix it (3+ months) or exchange it for something else that Yafa distributes. The Stipula is now on its way to Houston and I should be getting a Diplomat XO and another Diplomat Aero (dumb review here)³ once everything checks out. Neither will have a gold nib or a bunch of hilarious pirate theming, unfortunately, but they will probably actually work.

HOORAY FOR FRANKLIN-CHRISTOPH: I do have one good pen repair story: Franklin-Christoph. I bought a hand-painted pen from them at a pen show last fall; it looked great, but the hand-painted finish rubbed off with some minor use. They re-applied it, re-varnished it with a better varnish, and had it back to me so quickly that when I wrote the post asking about pen repair time I’d totally forgotten it’d even happened. It has a cool matte finish now, too. I’ll talk about the pen when I review it later, but another good vendor to recommend.

HOORAY FOR TARDUK THE ANNIHILATOR: I am now actively working on my system apocalypse body-swap comedy, in which a woman must survive a sadistic game show while teamed up with her boss, a failed Real Housewives of Salt Lake City cast member who has swapped minds with a tyrannosaur named Tarduk the Annihilator. The working title is T-Rex Tradwife Apocalypse.

To make a long story short, I got bogged down on the literary horror thing I’ve been working on after about 60,000 words and needed a palate cleanser. So I’m returning to this, a project I thought of when I was coming out of anesthesia after surgery last year. I plan to serialize this one online over at Royal Road, so look forward to that in the upcoming months.

1. i hate that this trailer was posted to youtube sixteen years ago. you used to be cool, time

2. i realize the difference i’m articulating may be between “some guy who collects vintage pens as a hobby” and “some guy who makes a side business out of restoring/selling vintage pens.” The latter is obviously going to be a more orderly, less overwhelming experience

3. i feel like diplomat is an underrated brand, what do you guys think?