An Intro to Collecting Sheaffer (Photos!) by David Isaacson

[david i]

Part 2: Focus on the 1930s:

Sheaffer's aggressive marketing back when has blessed us with a plethora of catalogues and adverts with which to identify pens, that same paper offering appealing challenges to collectors given the prevalence of anomalous and off-catalogue pens, spice for the collecting soup, no doubt.

One might call the 1930s Sheaffer's "Decade of the Balance". Sheaffer's new streamlined pen, Balance, took the industry by storm and-- as noted in my Gold Bond Fountain Pen article appearing in the May 2014 PENnant Magazine-- forced other pen makers to take steps to embrace the move from the plain cylinders that had dominated pendom for thirty years or more, a move made more difficult by Sheaffer's litigious nature. Patents and industry notices for Balance appeared in 1928, adverts and sales commenced apparently in 1929, catalogues persisted through 1941 and some adverts and production continued perhaps even further into the 1940's.

Sheaffer Balance late 1930s. Rare Variant with Off-Catalogue Cap-Band.
Possibly the only one known in this color/size

Besides Balance, the 1930's saw a marked growth of Sheaffer's sub-brand lines, with late Craig pens yielding to Univer pens and to various items marked "WASP" or embracing the word "Vacuum". These lower priced lines offered lovely plastics, often a bit more outré then those offered by the more conservative and upmarket Balance. They generally had good quality plastic, but often featured weak trim and small nibs. Sheaffer sub-brand collecting has blossomed during the last ten years.

Sheaffer's 1930s was rounded out by the appearance in 1937 of a series of pens that would gain the name Crest in 1938, that name used intermittently by Sheaffer for another 60 years at times for individual models at times for entire series of pens. Original Crest was notable for use of a flush metal cap on plastic barrel, embracing a curved gripping section with distal threads and allowing for a pen even more streamlined than Balance, while avoiding the aggressively stepped down gripping found on some of the straight-cap and taper-cap pens of the 1880's-1910's. Original Crest offered an early model (scarce today) with sterling cap on gray striped barrel, more common brown-stripe and solid black pens both with gold-filled caps, and black pens with solid gold caps-- Crest Masterpiece-- including an uber-rare "Honor" model with special and elegant cartouche on back of cap for engraving. Roger Wooten seems to be the only fellow known to have one those monsters. The Honor pen appeared at the tail end of the '30s, 1940 to be precise, the last variant to appear among the original Crests.

After about 20 years of offering lever filling pens with opaque barrels, Sheaffer in 1934 began to offer transparent barrel pens with its plunger-fill system, a rather rare case in which Sheaffer lagged its competition on the innovation front. Besides the lever and plunger systems, some of the sub-brand pens in the USA (in Canada including some fully marked Sheaffer-branded items) offered what Sheaffer described as twist-sac pens, a term that might cause some readers to cringe.

1930's Sheaffers including Balance, late flat-end pens, Sheaffer Junior, sub-brand pens and Crest
Details below

1. Oversized Balance Black-and-Pearl rare with solid gold Autograph trim. Serious Sheaffer Collectors have tried to pry this one from my collection
2. 1931-2 (at least) Blue Petite Balance
3. Oversized Balance Carmine, 1938-41
4. A late-issue oversized flat-top in Jade Celluloid. Killer color
5. Sheaffer Junior in black with huge ink window
6. Sub-brand Vacuum-Fil, a lever-filler done in spiral-pattern
7. Screaming Souls in Purgatory Celluloid in Gray, a sub-brand WASP Vacuum-Fil with twist-sac filler.
8. Sub-brand Vacuum in brown Lahn Celluloid. I was pleased to contribute to the hobby a few years back the discovery of the Lahn name
9. WASP Clipper (yes, another sub-brand pen) in Celluloid known to collectors as Circuit-Board
10. 1937 Crest set in Gray/Sterling, a quite uncommon variant.
11. Lady Crest in more common gold-filled/brown.

Though I am a but a wee dabbler in things Sheaffer, Balance is the second most prevalent series in my own collection, following Parker's Vacumatic. I must have 250-300 of 'em. About 18 months ago I acquired the only publicly acknowledged example of what many consider the most significant Balance variant, but that's a tale for another day.

regards

David