Sheaffer Flat Top, What have I bought.

[david i]

David;

A flat top also has flat sides. Perhaps we should be calling them "flat ended cylidricals" that would be much clearer to aliens intercepting our transmissions.

Roger W.

I would modify your statement to: Some "flat top" pens have flat sides.

Indeed, a top largely is independent from a side, when it comes to angles.

Perhaps we can call them just Sheaffer Cylinders, as the flat side seems to be more defining than the literal flat top (which the Junior does have). But, no, that's certainly not consistent with long standing collector convention, which we now know is not original Sheaffer nomenclature.

You do more with early Sheaffers than I do, but iirc, ironically not all the cylindrical 1912-1930 pens have flat ends. Don't some of the early pens have a bit of a dome to the top? Are these non flat-topped Flat-Tops?

And isn't there a bit of slope to the butt end even of the cylinder-era pens?

But, tangents aside, we do now break through to level 2:

• Collectors tend to call "Flat Top" the minimal-to-no-taper pens shaped like those seen in 1920's catalogues that have nice square ends (save for the domey early ones, which still tend to be lumped with the flat tops).
  
  
• Even though the Junior from the mid 1930's has as flat a top as the earlier style pens, because the sides are more streamlined than what Sheaffer collectors (Sheaffer itself somewhat out of the picture now for this chat) typically call flat-tops, collectors tend not to consider it a flat-top pen.

As to "truncated". That term appears with the mid 1930's Sheaffer Juniors such as I showed, as the pens looked like chopped Sheaffer Balances (the streamlined cigar-ish pens that dominated Sheaffer's 1930s). Truncated Balance is not an unreasonable description for the early Sheaffer Juinor, especially as the Junior gained the Balance shape not much later. The pen does evoke a bit the streamlining of Duofold.

regards

d