Perceptions - tools versus safe queens.

[Empty_of_Clouds]

Safe queens

[Bob]

The only thing that I would like to add is I’m impressed with the topics that you’re able to come up with.
Allan


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Chuck Naill]

This is a common internet forum topic whether it is musical instruments, straight razors, knives, and now pens. There is the concept of the "beater" used to describe something one can use and not be concerned about damaging.

For me, the enjoyment is use. I would not own something I couldn't use, but I am an outlier perhaps. I've carried my two old Esterbrooks this week and used them for the reason one carries a pen. I prefer a fine point and FP's fit that need.

I also think there is an appreciation of a old, well worn tool over a wall hanger. Willy Nelson's or Steve Ray Vaughn's guitars come to mind as does Dizzy Gillepsie's trumpet.

[amk]

With musical instruments, a lot of surviving old instruments from the 17/18c are 'display' instruments. For instance many lutes in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London have ivory, engravings on the ribs, inlays, and so on. They are all in good condition. Maybe they weren't played very much; they probably belonged to rich people who played occasionally, not to musicians who needed to play every day for their living. (There's also some bias in that the V&A is an art museum, not a music museum, so it acquired those instruments which were evidence of decorative tastes of their time.)

Not that musicians all want a 'beater' and indeed with the Limousin chabrette (bagpipe) in France, the ornamentation is part of the tradition - often the 'boitier' that holds the tenor drone and chanter is decorated with mirrors, sometimes with parts of watches or other artefacts, and there are ornamental turnings and ivory work. But a pretty instrument that doesn't play well is an abomination.

I have had fun looking for instruments abroad. Recently, I started trying out ocarinas in a shop in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. I tried out octaves and fifths, looking for instruments that were well in tune. As soon as the shop owner realised what I was doing, out came a tray of quite different instruments, plainer and more compact - and all precisely tuned. The pretty ones with Kyrgyz nomad designs on them are "only for tourists not for playing".

Sorry if this digresses rather a long way from fountain pens, but I think many of the issues are the same.

[azkid]

These are excellent questions. I have wondered the same. Fountain pens never came up while my parents were still alive, unfortunately.

Prices... 1922 a Duofold Jr. was $5, the equivalent of about $70 now.

Parker 51 prices in the early 40s were around $15 for a gold filled Custom, about $270 now.

As expensive as they may have been I would think professionals and business people would want (or even need) to carry their pen with them and would thus buy comfortably within their means so they wouldn't fret daily use.

1924 Parker Duofold advertisement.
From https://www.penhero.com/PenGallery/P...oldFlattop.htm

[Paddler]

In the early '50s, my father was promoted to foreman in a machine shop and began earning $21 per day. My mother was a 6th grade teacher and earned a lot less. They decided to buy a couple of good writing tools. They both bought Sheaffer "Saratoga" Snorkels.

Dad didn't carry his pen to work; anything he wrote was in pencil on oily paper. He used his "good" pen to write letters and for show when signing guest books at funerals and weddings (a marryin' and buryin' pen). This was the first pen I ever restored a sac in. It still works well.

Mom filled her pen with Skrip Permanent Royal Blue ink and carried it in her purse every day to school. She used it when grading papers. It took a hell of a beating. I inherited it. The barrel is so cracked I have to hold it like a flute to fill it. I re-saced it and it still works well.

Mom also had a Waterman "Lady's Model" Hundred Year Pen. It was a gift from her parents. This she filled with Skrip Red ink and used it for grading papers also. It probably beat up on the Sheaffer in her purse. The nib cracked in the center, away from any edge. Go figure. There is no other damage on this one, even though it probably saw harder and longer use than the Sheaffer. I fitted it with a new sac and it still works a treat.

Our "house pen" was a Wahl-Eversharp "Pacemaker" pen from the early '40s. This pen was the community property pen that my brother and sister did their homework with. It cost probably $3 or a little more. No damage. A new sac put it in working order.

My pen was a Sheaffer "school pen" and was left at school to be used for penmanship classes only (pax vobiscum). I still have it and use it, just to remind myself how damned old I am. My grade school journaling pen was a Wearever "Pennant".

So, we were a middle class family whose pens were tools, although Dad was probably a little vain about his Snorkel with the two-tone nib.

[Sandy]

The evidence from my grandparents is that they had one fountain pen at home. A Valentine's/Parker hybrid that my grandfather probably picked up whilst he was serving in Newhaven, where he served part of his time in the Navy.

The pen stayed at home - and seems to have been used for official documents only. all the informal stuff - letters, notes and so on was written in pencil. Writing in pen, at least until these new fangled biros came out was reserved for signatures on documents - life policies, apprenticeship documents and so on. Even the letters we have from the army (1st & 2nd world wars) were all done in pencil.

He was a plasterer by trade and worked at the power station, so I guess he didn't need a pen for where he was, and it would be jostled about as he was in the blue collar part of the plant.

[Cookedj]

I am into the point in my life where I only buy things I will use from fountain pens to firearms, tools and razors. I have been purging unused/unneeded items, with most going to my son-in-law. This is such an interesting topic.......

[welch]

Thinking on the history of fountain pens - although this could also apply to any tool that is seeing a modern resurgence in popularity - has got me thinking about what owners of fountain pens thought of their pens and why they had purchased them (ignoring the inheritances for the moment).

Today there are a large number of very expensive pens, often made with materials that are also pricey or difficult to work with. How does the relative cost of these pens today, as measured against income/local economy, compare with (say) the 1920's? Further to this, did a person in the 1920's (again just as an example decade) who spent a modern day equivalent sum of money (if they are equivalent) on a luxury pen consider such a pen as a daily carry tool or a safe queen/at home desk pen only? (Hence the title of the thread).

There are a number of threads here and on other pen sites that talk about whether one keeps pens at home or risks them 'in the wild' of a working or other extramural environment. And I wonder if this represents a change in the habits of pen user/owners over time.

So, there are a number of things to unpick there, and I do hope the more erudite among you are able to bring some light or clarity to this subject.

Up through the mid-60's, a fountain pen was how you wrote, if you wanted something more permanent than pencil. My parents, who graduated high school in 1940 and 1941, used inexpensive pens. Probably pens we consider "third-tier" pens today. When my dad was sent to an aircraft carrier in the Pacific, it was such a time that Mom saved up and bought a Parker Vacumatic. That was a big deal.

As best I remember from the '50s, nobody had more than one fountain pen.

It is hard to map current pen use back against the way life was lived in, say, 1957, a year that I will take as the peak of the Golden Years of fountain pens. That's why Sheaffer made their school pens, figuring to make us Sheaffer users when we were young, say, about 4th grade. That's when we switched to ink from pencil.

Another device that cut into fountain pen use: the typewriter. Before about 1960, the typewriter was an office machine. Then families began to get typewriters so the kids could type school reports. When I went to college in 1966, nearly everyone brought a typewriter. Most of them were Smith-Corona, or Royal, portable electric machines. Cost, then, was about $120. My Parker 45 had cost about $4.98 in 1960, so it might have been $6 by '66. Ink was 25 or 50 cents -- can't remember exactly. McDonalds had just bumped their prices, which had been "only forty-seven cents for a three-course meal...at McDonalds (beep! beep!) the drive in with the golden arches". That was the advertising jingle about 1963. A VW Beetle was about $1,700 in the early '60s, and, in 1969, there was no place along I-80 that sold or repaired VW's between Salt Lake and Cheyenne.

All that makes it misleading to take a list price Parker 51 from 1950 and extrapolate by inflation. It's also tough to calculate how many days or hours of work by an "average" worker could buy any particular pen. A lot of people didn't need a pen, or could use a stick pen at the post office when they needed to ink a letter.

So, a great question, but hard to answer in a way that gets at what you want.

[azkid]

If it is misleading to take a 50s Parker price and adjust for inflation, it's even more so to do that for 1920 so I probably should have acknowledged that in my post

I was thinking as I wrote it how very different the economy was then vs now—the range of income from minimum wage to high earning professionals, the set of expenses (no cable, internet, cellphone, less throwaway stuff, free radio), housing costs, transportation, ...

It's really deeply fascinating to hear from those who grew up in prior decades. It gives a bit of a glimpse of how things were.

I think about my kid growing up now trying to imagine my life before cellphones, internet, cable tv, and computers.

Oh by the way, on that comment about typewriters, I didn't know about the increase in popularity of personal typewriters and it reminds me of the personal computer trend.

Interestingly enough, my mom's parents bought her a Smith-Corona portable (which I still have) sometime in the 1940s. I wished I knew more about that decision.

I think she would've been middle school age when they got it. Apparently, they were ahead of the trend getting that for her?

I'm going to believe that's the case because her mom, my grandma, got me a Commodore 64 when they first came out when I was in middle school. That computer led to a 20+ year IT career.

Mom went on to teach art, then English. Oh... and also she taught typing for a few years. I have a vague memory from early childhood ('73 - '75?) of visiting the room full of mismatched surplus 1950s typewriters and furniture they used.

[penwash]

What amazes me is that today, we don't have to use fountain pens at all. Yet the interest in fountain pens are strong and healthy even among young people for whom computers are the fact of life since they were born.

People in the 1920s to 1950's have little else to choose from if they decided to not want to use fountain pens. But today, we don't even have to write with our hand if we choose not to.

So the question is why? Why do we find people today who chose to bother themselves with fountain pens?

I think the answer is that today's pen people are discovering that writing (sketching) "feels" good, and it brings them joy as a hobby. More importantly, the fountain pen as an instrument has an appeal outside of its utilitarian purpose, namely, pretty and looks even better in a well curated collection.

So no matter what you call them, a tool, or a shelf-queen (that term seems to have a mocking ring to it), the fountain pen has found a place in many people's heart. And if what I saw in reddit.com is any kind of indication, the number of these people are increasing... daily.

[Chuck Naill]

What amazes me is that today, we don't have to use fountain pens at all. Yet the interest in fountain pens are strong and healthy even among young people for whom computers are the fact of life since they were born.

People in the 1920s to 1950's have little else to choose from if they decided to not want to use fountain pens. But today, we don't even have to write with our hand if we choose not to.

So the question is why? Why do we find people today who chose to bother themselves with fountain pens?

I think the answer is that today's pen people are discovering that writing (sketching) "feels" good, and it brings them joy as a hobby. More importantly, the fountain pen as an instrument has an appeal outside of its utilitarian purpose, namely, pretty and looks even better in a well curated collection.

So no matter what you call them, a tool, or a shelf-queen (that term seems to have a mocking ring to it), the fountain pen has found a place in many people's heart. And if what I saw in reddit.com is any kind of indication, the number of these people are increasing... daily.

No need to be amazed. Often we stop looking for what we truly want or need assuming it's not available or no longer obtainable. Often we discover we didn't know what we needed.

[KBeezie]

You can use this if you find the old ads to do a comparison to the value of today's dollars : https://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/

For example the Parker 75 Cisele when it came out in 1964 was $25, in 2019 that would be about $204. I got my 75 Cisele for about $120 and you can commonly find them for around $125 to $175 depending. But course it's not that far down from what used pricing reduction would be from new pricing.

I feel like many of the pens are going to be cheaper than what their original brand new prices were when inflation are considered. The exceptions of course are the rare ones to survive.

One such exception I recall would be the early Eversharp Skylines in the Moire finish, which was at the time much more economical to make those compared to the newer solid color plastics and gold filled caps. But now days the moire models will be a fair bit more expensive than the newer plastics and gold filled caps.

[Jon Szanto]

Since this basic question/topic has come up with regularity over the years, I'll reiterate my reason for not buying into it: versus.

I don't believe it is an either/or decision made on a pen-by-pen basis. I think the pens I own lie on a continuum, from ridiculously inexpensive pens that I wouldn't give a second's thought if I lost it or if it was broken in battle as an EDC, all the way up to prized possesions that most certainly stay at home, in the studio, used seldom but admired always and cared for with acknowledgement of the singular nature of the pen: meaningful, personal and probably irreplaceable. With those as the end points, all of the other pens span the gamut in between and will go out or not based on the kind of assessments used in the examples above.

I have pens I use and pens I adore, and you can't put me in any one camp.

[Kaputnik]

Although I got the point of the thread anyway, I have to ask. Am I the only one who had to google "safe queen"?

https://www.urbandictionary.com/defi...m=Safe%20queen

Odd term.

[Jon Szanto]

I apologize for my comments just a couple of posts back, as I completely missed the fact that OP was wondering about how this question played out in the distant past, not how we feel currently about our pens. I would just propose that unless someone can come up with first-hand accounts from the time or other hard data, the answer(s) iwill be a complete guessing game, nothing more.

[guyy]

It’s only a movie, but in the Flavour of Green Tea over Rice, an Ozu film from 1952, there are shots of the husband working at his desk at home and at work. He uses a variety of instruments at home, but one of them is a fountain pen. At work he is shown using a pencil only. The company president has a glass jar on desk with a variety of writing instruments in it, but none clearly recognisable. There’s also a bottle of Superchrome on the president’s desk, so presumably whatever fountain pen or pens he used were destroyed — unless the boss was carrying a 51.

[Jon Szanto]

It just dawned on me that this would have been the perfect question to ask Fred Krinke, who passed away just about a month ago. His family business (The Fountain Pen Shop), which he inherited from his father, has been in business for over 90 years in Los Angeles (later Monrovia). I'm certain that he would have known what the customers were buying and using and needing maintenance on well back into the 1920s.

Sadly, too late.

[Chuck Naill]

It just dawned on me that this would have been the perfect question to ask Fred Krinke, who passed away just about a month ago. His family business (The Fountain Pen Shop), which he inherited from his father, has been in business for over 90 years in Los Angeles (later Monrovia). I'm certain that he would have known what the customers were buying and using and needing maintenance on well back into the 1920s.

Sadly, too late.

I read his personal favorite was a 1950's Esterbrook.

[Tjphysicist]

I'll have to echo some of what was said here. But before that a bit of background:

1. I'm also a member of the straight razor/wetshaving hobby community and the history of it is a big interest for me.
It's interesting to look at it from that perspective. For SR's, especially if you go as far back as the industrial revolution and before that - they were VERY expensive items. And it's a bit hard to make a direct comparison sometimes, because class division was a lot more back then. Rich lords could afford things like a 7 day set made from ivory and silver in a decorated gold box, but regular folks, it seems, would barely be able to afford one. HOWEVER, this was used. I doubt people who could barely afford a straight razor would BUY one just to keep it in a showcase and stare at it...buying things to not use them, I feel, is more of a thing you do if you're rich enough to be easily affording what you buy. They were EXTREMELY prized, ofc, and they were rare even at their height (thus barber shaves), but they were def. used even by those folks who would buy them only once in a lifetime. Especially because pre and near the start of the industrial revolution these were handmade, specifically designed to last a LIFETIME. Rather than factory made by the billions as throw away items. If something went wrong, you took it to someone to fix it. I think Fountain pens may share some of that, especially the expensive pens, regardless of the era. A montblanc is a montblanc - you bought one ONCE in your life and used the crap out of it everyday and took care of it like a samurai would his sword. There was a shop around the corner that you took your pen to if something was wrong (I've def. had that growing up for my FPs).

In contrast, these days, unless you go for some specially custom made thing, some of the best NEW straights I've used don't cost more than $200, relatively affordable for most folks. I'm not sure if that's a function of people in general being richer and hobbies being more affordable, OR more likely, that the middle class has come a long way in the last 300+ years.

2. Unlike a lot of people in my generation, I actually GREW up with fountain pens. A lot of what the older folks describe on this thread as what they remember, or their parents/grandparents told them about it was like back in the day is very much what I experienced 20+ years ago growing up in India. (India never DID come out of the fountain pen era. Even today, ballpoints etc are more common but I have no doubt that all my Indian Colleagues know how to use a fountain pens and wouldn't bat an eye at one if I brought it to work).
We had 'cheap' pens, you know the <$10 stuff that would be use in and around the house. Or we kids would get when we were old enough to stop using pencils only. (I remember this as a BIG point in my life, when i would FINALLY start using a pen, and got my Red Parker Vector!). THEN there was what I always viewed as the "adult pens", the more expensive stuff the adults always carried with them. My dad still has his collection of Watermans and Cross pens. MAYBE I would get to use it once, but generally it was what the adults had in their pocket and locked in their drawer to be taken out to sign stuff or write things that were important. And these were pens that were carried everyday, but never SHARED, or taken out lightly, but well taken care of. I'm fairly certain they were expensive, but 100% used everyday. IDK about "beater", that has a different sort of connotation, but "everyday use" at the very least. (carrying something or using something everyday doesn't mean you expect it to get beaten up more. I carry my phone with me literally 24/7 but it's basically the most expensive thing I own, I'd literally break down into tears if that thing broke in some way).