What’s out there? Well, it all depends on where you’re looking and what you’re looking for. First in today’s list of “them” is the two Nashua denizens in this picture:

These charming characters, female Virginia deer, are occasional winter visitors to our yard, coming up out of the woods behind the barn to munch on the 30-foot-high cedar hedge just on the other side of our driveway. Oh — what does this have to do with pens? Nothing, really, except that I shot the photo while I was in the midst of yesterday morning’s marathon email-answering session. (Please excuse the photo’s poor quality: I was shooting through two thicknesses of somewhat dirty window glass.) Working at home has its benefits!

Next up is a very ordinary Foliage Green Esterbrook Model J:

Except that it’s not so ordinary. This pen, which was in a small group sent to me by Barbara’s brother-in-law, who enjoys picking for me when he goes antiquing out there in the wilds of Louisville, Kentucky, is an example of a very short-lived transitional wartime J. It’s a single-jewel model without an imprint on the clip — no surprise there. But there’s more. The ribbed cap jewel doesn’t screw in as it does on most single-jewel Js; instead, it’s pressed in. The furniture is not stainless steel, for whose lasting qualities the J is renowned; instead, it’s sterling silver. The only steel in the entire pen is the lever snap ring and the pressure bar. Which means, of course, that the nib isn’t steel, either. It’s an 8968, an iridium-tipped broad nib made of palladium alloy. Not exactly your garden-variety J, is it?

Check out this pretty little straight-cap eyedropper-filling overfeed pen from the 1890s:

The pen is marked only with a barrel imprint reading “THE RIVAL” PAT. FEB 14 – 93 (including the quotation marks). I paid very little for the pen; I bought it because at the time I “needed” an overfeed pen for my collection and to serve as a photo model for my overfeed glossary entry. I didn’t know who had made the pen. I did some Web research and came up with the name W.M. Smith, of New York City. Until today, I’ve assumed that Smith made the pen. Today, however, I was leafing through Cliff Lawrence’s Illustrated Fountain Pen History, and I tripped (mentally) over an ad connecting the name Rival with another maker entirely. Then I remembered the patent date on my pen. Heading off to the Google Patents site, I learned that the ad was right, and I had been wrong. The maker of this little pen was David W. Beaumel, one of the New York crowd of movers and shakers in the early days of fountain pens. This information is particularly interesting in light of the fact that Beaumel partnered with Francis C. Brown, who invented the helical-cam safety pen and a couple of zillion other cool pen things, to patent and produce a pen they called th4 Dashaway.

Which brings me to the last item for today:

This is a Caw’s “Safety” pen, model 327, made in the 1890s by — you guessed it — Francis C. Brown. It’s a lovely specimen except for the lack of iridium on its nib (a remediable deficiency). IN addition to being a safety, it has another interesting feature in the form of a monumentally complicated over-under feed. I traded for it with a friend who lives in Europe. This friend won the pen on eBay. He then decided it really wasn’t destined for his collection and so offered it to me. What makes the whole thing so fascinating is that L. E. Waterman, who had testified for Brown in a patent-infringement lawsuit brought by PauLl Wirt, later bought the right to manufacture its own safeties using an enhanced design based on Brown’s patent.

So, you see, there really are cool pens — some very cool in themselves and some having great history behind them — to be found “in the wild.” Happy hunting!