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My next purchase was a Parker T-1. It skipped and I threw it away.

You did what??!!?? My stomache feels queezy now for some reason.

When I was in grade school in the 50's, we were marched to the school bookstore every month or so to stock up on tablets, pencils, pens, etc. I always blew my budget on Estie (red only) pens, and tried all of the nibs available. In high school, I remember ink wars among us sitting on the left side of the room. The teacher was blind in his right eye.
In the late 70's, I started searching flea markets for fountain pens, particularly Esterbrooks, but few were to be had in South Louisiana. Finally in the mid '80's, lucked onto one at a flea market in Crowley, and a year or so later, the university where I taught dumped a big collection of old n.i.b. renew points on the sale table for about a dime apiece. Bought 'em all. That got me off to a start collecting, and then really got involved when I found lots of pens on ebay in the late 90's.

I've always used fountain pens.  As a product of a parochial school education, fountain pens were mandatory as was penmanship.  At the end of my 3rd grade, I got a nice Esterbrook J and used it throughout my grammar school years.  When I graduated 8th grade, my grandmother gifted me with a black Sheaffer Valiant and I used that pen all through high school and 6 years of college.

Upon graduation, I was drafted and shortly thereafter spent the rest of my milatary years in Vietman.  Upon coming home (I was one of the fortunate ones) I entered the business world as a Mechanical Engineer and worked for 33 years in that area.

Since my mid teens, I have been an avid camera collector and still am to this day.  About 9 years ago, I purchased a large camera collection from the widow of an elderly gentleman who was also a fountain pen collector.  His specialty was vintage Sheaffer pens.  Having used my venerable Sheaffer Valiant for many years, I purchased his pen collection along with the cameras.  I've been seriously collecting fountain pens ever since.

Jack

An old thread, but I'm new here, so here's my story. My first fp experience was in the mid 1960's in what we now call middle school. The Sheaffer school pens in red, blue, and clear plastic barrels and chrome caps were all the rage. I also had fp influence from my Grandparents, but I didn't appreciate it at the time. Years later, I would come to love the smell of vintage inks because it reminded me of my Grandfather's pens.
I didn't write with fp's in high school or college but I did begin an appreciation of better writing instruments. The company I worked for had a good habit of recognizing good work by awarding nice pen sets, usually Cross bp/mp's with the company logo on the clip. There were also Cross select tips and fp's available. The fp's were rarely given, I think because no one knew anyone who used fp's. I made it a habit to always use good pens and carried a couple of the Cross Select tips for years.
Sometime in the early/mid 1990's my wife gave me a MB 144 fp as a Christmas gift (although I didn't know from 144 then). I tried using the pen with the cartridges supplied and went through a box or so and wasn't impressed with the pen's performance so I put it in the box for a year or two. Then one day in Staples I spied a bottle of MB Blue/Black ink. U'mmm, I bought it and then figured out what that funny looking thing in the bottom of the MB box was (sometimes I'm slow in that regard). The pen responded well to the converter/ink combination and for the next few years I carried it and used it nearly exclusively.
I tired of the M nib in the 144 for note taking in meetings and started searching for a finer nibbed alternative - discovered Swisher Pens online and a Pelikan Steno with an EF nib and in the process ebay and acp-p and it was all down hill after that. My next purchase was an Estie J from ebay and with some help from Frank Dubiel and Hal Arnold on acp-p I repaired the pen and was hooked on vintage pens and pen repair. That was in 2001 and the accumulation has grown substantially, mostly vintage but with some modern pens thrown in as well.
It's good to be a part of this obsession.

Still very fresh in my mind. My mother was kind enough to have instilled fountain pens in my life since I was young. Very sneakily. I remember her pointing out my grandmothers fountain pen (I must ask where it's gone, now I think about it!), and her buying me cheap and cheerful ones when I was in primary and into secondary school, my beloved one being a black and yellow CAT pen.

I've kept a loose journal and taken notes most of my adult life, it's something I've always enjoyed, but up until recently I always used a pencil. I liked the utilitarian nature, the pleasant scratch-scratch and light resistance to using it, and the physical act of sharpening it (always with a knife!), too! About 2-3 months back I was haunting ebay and spotted a Visconti Van Gogh, which I remembered seeing a picture of months before. It had had a 'wow' factor to it and I couldn't resist bidding for it.

At that point I had just lost my job, so, with lots of free time, I spent a few hours each day obsessively reading FP blogs, forums, trawling sites and shops, until now my taste and sense in fountain pens has begun to settle :) A few weeks after the Visconti I bought my second pen, and now I'm in the process of saving for my third!



-- Edited by Highbinder on Friday 6th of November 2009 05:14:26 PM

Your post is made of win, Jar.

jar wrote:

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I came to fountain pens late in life. As a child starting school we had to bring our own stones to scratch lines into the cave wall. For art we had to chew charcoal and ocher to spit over our hands leaving shadow paintings. Later we learned to sharpen sticks and make better drawings of the bison that almost killed us yesterday and the mastodon that used to chase us on our way to school.

Later we learned to search for the GREAT Fire bird and steal feathers. We went down to the stream and found rocks that we could split giving us sharp edges that could be used to shape the end of the feather into a nib. We would chew up the charcoal or ocher and mix it with water and fat to get lovely inks, red and black, purple and brown. But we had no paper and so tried to write on the hide of the antelope. Unfortunately they refused to stand still so writing became a challenge and often left us gasping for breath.

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I'd probably gotten my start with fountain pens back in Junior High school [ca. 1970-1972?], when I'd traded another kid something [I cannot recall what] for an old lever-filler [I know it was a big orange flat-top lever filler, make/model unknown at this time].
The pen probably had a broken sac although at the time I knew nothing about "sacs" or how a lever filler really worked inside. I never did fill it with ink but I did fill it with water to use as a squirt gun and is how I'd found out it leaked. It made a "stealthy" squirt gun, is all I had in mind at the time, squirt guns themselves being banned in my school [yet kids still brought them in and usually had them confiscated by the teachers] but no bans on fountain pens.
There was a small card and gift shop near where I lived that also sold magic stuff, like disappearing ink, bought some of that and nearly got my tail kicked when I squirted the wrong person with it as a practical joke.
Turns out that squirting people with invisible ink isn't particularly funny, not when the person being the squirt-ed has no idea it's going to disappear! Live and learn, usually the hard way in my case.
I have no idea what ever happened to that pen, probably stolen by my younger sister that was always stealing my stuff when I wasn't home.

It wasn't until @ 1985 when I tried getting a new fountain pen [I was @ 21 at the time], a MontBlanc Classique in black that was a cartridge pen I'd found on sale at a stationery shop.
I'd thought "Maybe if I buy something of quality, maybe it will work. You get what you pay for." scenario running through my brain.
Seeing it marked with an MSRP of over $400, on sale for @ $250, I thought it had to work, yet I was very wrong in my assumption that high cost would = high-reliability.
That pen ruined me for several years afterward, it leaked, it skipped, it was awful and I couldn't use it and had no idea back then how to fix it.
It was more than 20 years before I got another fountain pen, thanks to that defective and very expensive MB experience I thought all fountain pens were going to be just as nasty.

Christmas of last year, 2008, a carpenter friend went into pen turning due to the U.S. Economic & housing market crash.
He made me a nice fountain pen from South African Knobwood, he being from South Africa this wood was native to where he'd come from and made it even more special to me.
That pen wrote like a dream, it never leaked, never skipped, was by far a better pen IMO than was the very expensive MB that had tainted my experience and impressions for so long.
I still have that pen, I use it from time to time, yet it's unable to be posted and a bit too short for my rather large hand.
From that moment on I began to research fountain pens on the Internet, found a few forums and became so intrigued by the multitude of pens & inks that I'm hooked now!
I researched nib smoothing and re-shaping, found I have a talent for the same and began making my own specialty nibs and re-working nibs for others.

Now that I've found there are many great fountain pens out there, pens that don't leak, don't skip, some really interesting designs, filling systems, materials, my biggest regret is not finding out about them sooner.
Finding out about the vintage Sheaffer's with the Vac'Fil system really intrigued me, the idea of a sac-less pen that held ink in the barrel was to me both simplistic and sensible.
Learning about the Pelikan piston-fillers was also a revelation to me, as I'd previously have no idea such pens even existed.
My first Pelikan was an M605, a beautiful all-blue pen I'd bought NIB only to find it felt too light and too small for my hand when it arrived.
Not long after getting it I'd received a PM on another forum by a member that read my posts about how disappointed I was with the size & weight of than Pelikan, was made an offer to trade mine for a larger/heavier M800 so I jumped on that offer.
It wasn't until the M800 was already in the mail to me that I'd found out I was getting an "Old Style", had to research what that even meant as I had no idea at the time.
When I finally got the M800 ti was obviously "gently" used, a few scratches here and there that just got me into pen restoration supplies, bought some stuff from Tryphon and restored it to near-new glory.