Production Desk Pens

[The Nid Hog]

I was sorting out some boxes that we had stored in our garage and I came across an old desk objet that's been in my family for a while. It's like a cast bronze paperweight with a fountain pen mounted on top of it. The mounting assembly is still in place, but the pen and cap are long gone. I thought it might be kind of neat to put a pen back on it and return it to service in my office. The pen would be for appearance sake more than anything else--I'll continue to use the pens I carry--but it would be nice to have in an emergency.

I don't want to go full bore and find a vintage desk pen just yet. There seem to be a couple of inexpensive desk pens out there now--Pilot, among others. Has anybody tried any of them? Thoughts?

 

[Jim]

Sounds like a great find Chris, I have a couple of desk pens and to my surprise do use them very frequently. I have no info on the newer pens available but the good news is that the vintage desk pens are much less expensive than the comparable pocket version. I would really enjoy a photo of this item if you can find the time to take one.

 

[Mike H]

Great find Chris, I would love to see a picture too.

 

[andrew98]

It would be handy to have on the desk just to grab for a quick note. Some of them look really cool, too.

-Andy

 

[cursethis]

I love Esterbrook's Dipless desk pens. They're ridiculously convenient.

 

[The Nid Hog]

Sounds like a great find Chris, I have a couple of desk pens and to my surprise do use them very frequently. I have no info on the newer pens available but the good news is that the vintage desk pens are much less expensive than the comparable pocket version. I would really enjoy a photo of this item if you can find the time to take one.

Jim, you completely caught me! I was dreading somebody asking this so I tried to be as vague as I could about it. It's actually an award I won as a wee lad, and I'd be mortified to put a picture up. It turned up in a box of stuff that I had left at home for safekeeping before a deployment in the mid-80s. There was some nice family stuff in the box--at some point, my dad had filled up the rest of the space with things that he wanted to save, including all kinds of photos from my grandparents' generation, letters that one of my uncles had written home from the time that he enlisted in the Marines in '37, and letters that my dad's dad had gotten from his brothers and sisters in Denmark after he immigrated to the US (too bad I can't read Danish). Unfortunately, my dad died while I was on deployment and his brother put them in his attic to give them to me when I got home. We somehow forgot about that for close to thirty years. My uncle eventually passed away last summer. When I was back for the memorial service, my cousin gave me the box--he found it when he was cleaning up, along with a note on it to hold it for me. I didn't have a chance to look at it then, and put it in the trunk of my car. When I got home after the service, it got shifted to our garage and stacked with a couple of boxes of stuff from my mom's estate that needed to be sorted out. When I finally had a chance to do that this past week, I also found this long-forgotten box and had a look inside.