We all get a kick from pens that are a little out of the ordinary. This week, the queue bubbled and burbled and spat onto my bench one of the most “out of the ordinary” pens I’ve seen for a long time. This German piston filler bears the brand name Lomo, as witnessed by the logo that I’ve photocopied from the instruction sheet that was packed with the pen:
The pen itself is called a Stempelschreiber, a typically agglutinative German word that translates to “stamp writer.” No, it doesn’t write postage stamps or anything like that. What it does becomes apparent when you start fooling around with it (which, quite naturally, I did). First, the above photo of the pen may be a little deceptive. You don’t post the cap, you see — you post pretty much the whole thing. The pen, the actual pen, looks like this:
See, there’s a nice piston and a knob and everything. To use the pen, you unscrew it from the body, turn it around, and slip it back into the body. (I forgot to clean off a faint line of flannel dust around the barrel before I shot the first of these two photos, so you can see how far the pen goes in.)
So what’s all that extra length about? Remember the stamp thing? Well, duck, because here it comes. First, we remove the cap:
Then — sort of like an Apollo Lunar Excursion Module — what’s under the cap unfolds.
That funky thing that unfolded like a LEM’s legs is a rubber stamp!
The upper arm, as the unit is shown in the photos, holds an inked stamp pad, and the thingummybob pivoting on its mounting at the end of the lower arm is the stamp. The trigger-like piece sticking out through the side of the lower arm is a brace to keep the stamp from collapsing when you use it, and it’s also the release lever that you push to re-fold the thing. (Note to Apollo geeks: unlike the Lomo’s rubber stamp, the LEM’s legs could not be refolded.)
So, I presume we can all agree that this just about takes first prize in the Funky Fountain Pen category; but for all its weirdness, it actually does work. More, it’s a serious pen: the original nib was a 14K German WARRANTED nib of good quality that had been bent upward far enough to crack across where it entered the section, and I’ve replaced it with a very similar Kaweco nib. The piston mechanism is a very basic one, without a key to keep the piston from rotating as it goes up and down; but friction between the freshly paraffined cork and the barrel wall serves the purpose, and the filler works surprisingly well.
Funky enough for you?