NOS pens

[Jon Szanto]

Here's a classic NOS situation I encountered a number of years ago.

I was at the LA Pen Show and Fred Krinke (owner of the venerable Fountain Pen Shop in Monrovia) was going to give a talk/seminar about a subject I was unfamiliar with. I also wanted to spend more time in his presence, so I attended. It was the story of the Golden Rule Pen Co., one of the many, many small companies from the early pen era, in this case the 1920s. They were a somewhat successful job shop in NY and wanted to expand to the West coast (details may be a bit fuzzy, don't quote me!) and arranged some sort of deal to open a distribution point out here. IIRC, one of the next things that happened was the stock crash and Great Depression, and it all came to an end.

However, they had purchased a building or something, and a stationery business had been handed down over the years through a family. At some point, Fred was contacted because there was stock that needed to be cleared out from some facility. He went to examine and found boxes of unopened old pen stock from this time. The biggest batch was a basic lever-fill BCHR pen. He purchased all of this and, coincidentally, had brought a good number of them for sale at his table.

The majority of the pens did not have nibs installed but he had a supply of Warrented nibs of the era and had fitted them out. What I was looking at, in my hands, was a truly brand new, unused hard rubber pen that had been sealed away from the elements. No degradation, no discoloring, perfect chasing. In many ways, there is nothing remarkable about the pen, it isn't large or high-end, but as it was early in my pen 'education', I couldn't ask for a better example of "what does a black, chased, hard rubber pen look like when it is brand new?"

As such, I absolutely saw no reason to ink it up. I have plenty of other pens that I can write with, and no pen comes close to this as being a wonderful example of what a pen back then would look like. I keep it just like that, because I can and choose to. And I always think of Fred Krinke when I look at it.

(Quick phone pic)