Eye Candy. Sheaffer Balance brown-stripe with off-catalogue cap-bands.

[david i]

I'm not sure how long I've dabbled at the special/off-catalogue Sheaffer Balance cap-bands. Likely within my first year or two of collecting, probably before year 2000, I had a couple with the longitudinally-lined "Jeweler's" cap-bands. The other stuff is well more scarce. The common and catalogued form of Balance sees smooth single cap-bands.

But, years of hunting Parker Vacumatics, particularly the esoteric sort, gave me a pretty strong grounding for stalking the quirky stuff. As scarce Vacumatics grew fewer missing from my collection (and harder to find), it seemed natural to turn the gun (so to speak) on a 1930s series with many parallels to Vacumatic, Sheaffer's Balance. After having grabbed a few good ones in Golden Brown just the last few months, I took a few minutes this week to toss 'em together. Slender pens with double, triple, fish-scale cap-band pens the last few months have been nice additions to what probably is the world's heftiest collection.

The pic shows six cap-bands "special" and/or "off-catalogue" in this color. I might have to update that 14 page article I wrote for Erano when he was chairing the PENnant, this time for his http://www.fountainpenjournal.com. All four USA_made special patterns are present as oversized pens. The solid gold (smooth) Autograph band is typical for that band, which was not catalogued in brown stripe. I still need to score one of those in OS. Kudos if you can identify everything in the pic.

I rather like this shot.

Regards

David