An excellent post, peterm1. (I didn't post it along with this response as, well, it was long enough to pass as one of mine, ha!)
I recall the era of yuppies flashing their expensive MB Meisterstucks as icon symbols - late 1980s. One gentleman in the admin office of a state government agency I worked for then (in Melbourne), had not only one but two of those monsters, he was very much into consumerism and being noticed to be same and often made a big to-do of flashing them at meetings and reminding everyone how expensive they were, a limited production pen, and so on, ad nauseum (sic). Until one day at a staff meeting someone squelched him perfectly by casually mentioning it could do double duty - as a dildo. Said pen-owning gentlemen was openly gay (and had been the first civil servant in the office to "come out" openly at work as gay, amusingly to many of us but to his great annoyance when no-one around him either noticed nor cared. He reacted quite badly to this and disappeared from the social scene in the office for a fair while, but eventually we all made friends again and he returned and resumed his pen-flashing. For all his prissiness he was an intelligent and amusing person, he owned a Leica iiic and a Rolleiflex 3.5F so we had more than pens as a shared interest. Ee enjoyed some interesting discussions about the art/theater scene in Melbourne. Sadly we lost contact after I left the project in 1991. I do wonder how he turned out and if he still has his pens.
To move all this on, at his urging I tried his MB a few times and found it rather too big for my liking, which annoyed him - I suspect he may have had thoughts of selling it to me, but at the price they were going even back then (IRRC they cost AUD $450 and up from one of the ritzy pen shops in Collins Street) I wasn't about to bite at his bait. At the time I was using a ca 1960 gold-rolled Parker 51 I had acquired at a giveaway price and had restored - the cost for which was three times what I paid for that pen. I still have this pen and I've just now taken it out for its ritual distilled water/Sunlight dish soap treatment so I can resume using it again, after too many years languishing in one of my storage boxes. Anyway, the 51 suited my style of writing at the time and it's also smaller than the Meisterstuck. Being cynical and suspicious by basic nature I was always careful to not let this shiny gold pen go anywhere out of my sight. Like your Mont Blanc this gentleman's pen, one of the pair, disappeared mysteriously one day, from his desk. He raised holy Cain about this and actually wanted the police called in to search all the desks in the office (it didn't happen). I later heard he somehow got the agency to replace the pen on work insurance, but by then I was planning my escape from that job and I didn't pay much attention to this.
That really is my only involvement with the Meisterstuck. Fifteen years later I lucked into a Mont Blanc Noblesse, a lovely and hardly used 1980s pen in beautiful burgundy red, which I acquired for a whopping AUD $5 from a charity shop and still use regularly to this day. Until then I had no idea Mont Blanc made such usable pens, if I'd known this back in the '80s my writing life could well have gone a different way.
I have a fair collection of Parkers of varied vintages but sadly these are all kept securely stored (I use hard cases of the sort sold for eyeglasses which the pens fit into perfectly, I make sure they are emptied of ink and rinsed out and for extra production are wrapped in microfiber cloths also sold for eyewear). I enjoy my collection and I take out these pens quite regularly and handle them but alas, I no longer use them to write with even tho' I did test them all for ink leakage etc at the time of purchase. I now feel rather guilty about all this and I often think about either rotating the pens so they all get their turn at my writing desk, or disposing of the collection. The latter would probably bring me some spare cash but no enjoyment and having to "sacrifice" the joy of having them around. So I put them away and let them languish in the dark for a while longer. I reckon we all do this as after all collections are usually passive in nature and we tend to acquire those nice items more to look at than make use of. Many of my cameras echo this thought as well...
Ditto ink. I have several bottles of ink dating to the 1940s and at least one that is nudging the century mark. Most still contain some ink and at times I wonder if ink as a writing fluid has a shelf life. I've intended to fill one pen with some of this vintage ink and test it out, but I've not yet taken the time to do this.
Plungers I have a love-hate relationship with. My Mont Blanc and several of my more upmarket Parkers and Sheaffers came with 'brand name' plungers which work okay. The cheaper China-made ones are, well, for me the jury is out on them. Sometimes they fill properly but at other times they refuse to soak up more than a few drops of ink. I put up with them but it's like driving a Mitsubishi when what one really craves is a Mercedes...
As a school kid in Canada in the 1950s we all had fountain pens, mine were probably Sheaffers and low-cost ones as I recall they were much given to leaking blue-black ink which we all used in class all over my school shirts. Back then moms could buy some sort of liquid potion to remove ink from white shirts altho a faint stain always remained. In 1958 or 1959 the first 'biro' ballpoint pens came on the market and we all changed over to those. Hundreds of fountain pens were likely thrown away in my small town alone. I never took to ballpoints which I thought were purely utilitarian much like cheap can openers and shoe horns, useful for some things but somehow not pleasurable to use. A further two decades passed until I eventually found my way back to using FPs again.
So much for nostalgia from me in this post. In the next week I intend to take out my stash of pens and mechanical pencils and actually do some sort of spreadsheet of the ones I own, also look up whatever data I can find online about the more interesting and vintage ones.
I will then decide what to do with them. One of my step-nephews (is this a term?) in Malaysia is the family "egg head" (another long-disused term from the '50s, along with "square" which I'm sure the older readers here will recall) and adores writing in all its guises, altho' more prone to using a laptop than pens. I must make him a gift of a good fountain pen with a plunger and some quality ink and see how he takes to it, on the proviso that if he is not attracted to writing by hand with a decent pen then he can give it back to me. So win-win all the way.
Theads like this one are such wonderful places for story-telling... 😛😛😛
en.wikipedia.org
