Not too long ago, I wrote about the 39 Soenneckens one of our clients had sent for restoration. Those pens arrived in five boxes organized as subgroups for accounting purposes. We did triage and then sent the pens to Daniel Kirchheimer, who was in line to replate the furniture on many of the pens and also a few of their nibs that were two tone but had lost their palladium plating. Two batches had come back from Daniel when last I wrote, and I’ve now finished work on the third batch.

There were some really interesting pens in this batch. The most spectacular, but not the most interesting, was this 111 Extra:

The 111 Extra is an exquisitely made pen, small by modern SuperSize standards but perfectly sized for most people with hands of average size. It’s a piston filler, with a twist. Yes, I know, all piston fillers have a twist knob of one sort or another, but the 111’s knob is different. Unlike other exposed piston knobs, this one can’t turn accidentally and cause the pen to hork up ink “all over your new $49.50 charcoal gray suit” (apologies to MAD Magazine — referring to a Dave Berg “Lighter Side” piece I remember from 45 or 50 years ago, in which pizza, not ink, was the substance in question). There’s a latch in the mechanism, such that you have to pull the spring-loaded knob out a little before you can turn it to drive the piston down. Once past the latch, the knob turns freely, and when you turn it the opposite way to draw the piston back up, it clicks into the latched position. Nice.

This baby was in wonderful condition except for one vital point and one lesser cavil: its piston cork was a goner, shrunken and shriveled and generally beyond help, and the piston wouldn’t snap into the latch.

So I took it apart. The knob wasn’t snapping because there was some schmutz (corrosion, actually) on one of the parts; a quick cleansing took care of that. The piston cork entailed a few measurements and a visit to the lathe, after which I reassembled the pen and adjusted the nib. It’s wicked easy to understand why the 111X is a pricey, collectible pen. It writes wonderfully, and it feels so organic that you almost have to check to see whether it’s growing attached to you. It doesn’t do that, of course, but I could easily grow attached to it!

The winner in the “Most Interesting” category was actually several different models that share a common filler design. Here are two of them:

These pens are a Soennecken Rheingold 613 and a Sonnecken Präsident 1. They’re both button fillers. But, unlike Parker’s button fillers (which hide their buttons under a blind cap that you have to remove and can therefore possibly lose) or the Filcao Tukano (which relies on an unusually stiff spring action to keep its exposed button from being depressed inadvertently), they protect their buttons in a very clever way. Here are two pictures of the Rheingold:

Look at the back of the barrel. Notice that it’s solid black in the picture showing the pen capped, but in the capless picture the black doesn’t extend as far. There’s a white button showing. The black part is a collar that screws up or down. Screw it up and the button is shielded against accidental activation; screw it down, and you can press the button. This is a very clever system. It’s not cheap to make, but it is reliable and easy to use.

Oh, but wait a minute. Button fillers don’t have transparent barrels with breather tubes. These pen are actually button-actuated bulb fillers! So now I’m wondering: Who’s On First? Was it Soennecken, with a button/bulb filler, or was it Waterman’s Ink-Vue, with a lever/bulb filler? Even the “ray” pattern in the celluloid is the same!

Your guess is as good as mine, and I’d love to hear what you think.