HERO Brand

**spencerwilli** · February 15th, 2021, 01:57 PM

Anyone have any experience with the HERO brand? I know it’s Chinese and all but I saw their 718 model last night and had to buy it. It’s a spitting image of the MB 1912 but has a 10K nib that is supposedly flexible. I should have it by mid March.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

**Jon Szanto** · February 15th, 2021, 02:21 PM

Hero has been making pens in China for a very long time, decades and decades. They primarily serviced their own market before coming to the West in more recent years. I don't know that much about them but there are people who know quite a bit of the history. For instance, while in the West they got discovered for ultra-cheap knock-offs of hooded design pens (primarily Parker 51), in the past they have also had very nice, much better made and more expensive pens. They also make ink.

I'm sure that there will be people with better info than this who will weigh in, but I can tell you for a fact that in the Chinese pen subforums on Fountain Pen Network there are some people who know a lot about this company. Just a thought for further research.

**Jerome Tarshis** · February 15th, 2021, 03:00 PM

The company was renamed Shanghai Hero in IIRC 1966, referring to a hero of the Communist revolution whose name I never did know. Also, and I write this under correction, the company has long expanded beyond pen manufacture and is something like a conglomerate making all manner of Nice Things for the Home, including pianos. There has been a lot of enterprise in China.

During decades past when Asia seemed to be a poorer place than can seem today, what with New India and all that. inexpensive Hero fountain pens were sold far beyond the borders of China. My Indian pen pal Vivek Narayanan knew them in his student years, when they were somewhat extralegally imported into India, and they were also common in Central Asia. Great Russia, I should think not.

As Jon says, Hero made not only cheap pens but also fairly substantial and not-cheap pens. What comes to us in the West is a sharply selected list of products and ideas.