In many cases, I can poach images that appear elsewhere on my site — but there are always things that I have to create anew. (Of the 774 entries in the glossary as of today, more than 200 have illustrations that are specifically for those entries. One entry that’s been bothering me for more than a year has been the entry for clerical pen. Not being a cleric, I’d never bothered to acquire a clerical pen, so that entry has gone blind (without an illustration) since I wrote it.
Yesterday, that lack finally changed. Some months ago, I stumbled across a cap among my Waterman parts, a black cap bearing chrome-plated furniture along wtih a small Latin cross hot-stamped below the clip and filled with white. Eureka! A cap for a clerical pen! But where was the rest of the pen? it certainly wasn’t attached to the cap.
Taking my cue from the phrase I’ve used for a title at the top of this entry, I decided I would have to build myself a lion. In case you’re not familiar with the phrase, it’s Latin, and it means “From a claw [we may judge of] a lion.” The idea, in my case, is that I could determine from the appearance of the cap what the rest of the pen should look like and then assemble the pieces to build it.
Okay, what does this cap tell me? The clip and its rivet say that the pen was made in the 1950s. (1940s rivets are flatter, and rounded instead of built up into the frustum of a cone.) The double narrow band suggests a pen that was not the top of the line. The size of the cap tells me that this pen was a smaller model, not a larger one, and that means it would likely carry a Nº 2A nib. Being a Waterman but not a C/F, it’s a lever filler.
That’s enough information to get me started. Digging through my Waterman drawers again, I turned up a barrel that had to be correct: right size, right shape, lever filler, complete with a section. It was even black.
But there were a couple of problem.
There was no feed. Ordinary Waterman feeds were too small in diameter, so I had to scavenge up a different section. This was a good thing in my book, because the original section was plastic, not hard rubber: a real bottom feeder. So I chased down a hard rubber section with a Tip-Fill feed. Not correct for a ’50s pen — Waterman discontinued the Tip-Fill feed in the ’30s — but a good overall match, and it was the right size. All it needed was cleaning and a very slight reduction in diameter of the portion that fits into the barrel. Clean it, turn it down, set the feed and a decent Nº 2A nib, and stick on a sac.
The plastic section also explains why there was a mold line around the barrel just forward of the lever box. I have other barrels that are identical except that the mold line has been sanded and polished away. So I sanded away the mold line and polished the barrel.
Oh, dear, this barrel had a badly corroded lever assembly, and what’s worse, it was gold plated. That won’t do, not at all! So I removed the lever assembly and cannibalized a nice bright chrome-plated one from one of the other barrels.
Put it all together, and voilà! A 1950s clerical pen suitable for photography.
This pen is not 100% correct, as I’ve noted: the feed is wrong. But it’s a clean, good-writing representative example of a pen type that I didn’t have before yesterday. And besides, I think it’s cool.
I don’t know whether I’ll be able to make time to blog from the Washington DC SuperShow this weekend, but I’ll be back next week for sure. Probably with a pen or two that I had no intention of buying until I saw them and couldn’t walk away.