It’s been a quiet few weeks here at the Nashua Pen Spa: no exciting restorations to describe. We’ve done some interesting celluloid repair, and I’m currently working out a repair for a vintage Montblanc piston, but nothing earthshaking. So, just to keep things stirring, here are a few interesting pens I’ve photographed recently.

First we have a Parker “51” that I bought at the Ohio Pen Show. It’s pretty ordinary in appearance until you notice that it has no blind cap (not a Vac) and no hole in the end or side of the barrel (not Aero-metric, either). So what is it?

As you can see, it's an original Parker factory cartridge/converter “51” from about 1960. A bit rare, a bit cool, and very happy in its new digs. Now the only “51” variant I need is a Red Band…

A few weeks ago, a friend pointed out to me a pen for sale on a Web site in France. This pen was particularly interesting to me because it was a Postal bulb filler. Well, not precisely a Postal — actually, it was a Bonded, with a very nice imprint on the cap to prove it. So why did I just call it a Postal? Simple. The company that made Postal pens and sold them only through the mail (whence the Postal brand name) apparently didn’t get enough business by mail. It also made Bonded pens and sold them through other channels. The two brands are physically identical, and that means my Bonded can stand in for photographic purposes as a Postal.

But why do I care about Postal pens? As best I can determine, they’re the original bulb fillers. And as if that weren’t enough to trigger my techno-geek gene, they were also among the early attempts to provide a visible ink supply; they have Bakelite barrels through which you can see the ink (or, when the pen is empty as shown here, the breather tube). And that is just plain cool. And pretty, too, don’t you think?

So this pen has a weird circular repair in the cap above the clip. I’m thinking somebody used epoxy because he or she wasn’t able to fuse celluloid. Maybe I’ll find some sort of period-appropriate medallion to affix there. Maybe there already was one, and maybe that’s why this pen has that repair. Qui sait ?

Next we have another in my small (but growing) sub-collection of sleeve fillers. This one is a pretty little BCHR Laughlin.

Laughlin was a small U.S. pen company, founded in Detroit, Michigan in 1896. They made eyedropper fillers and, obviously, sleeve fillers. Nice ones, too! This pen is of particular interest to me because of the filler design, which is identical to the later of the two designs used by LeBoeuf in the 1920s and 1930s. Here’s a LeBoeuf for comparison.

I find it fascinating the way what goes around comes around.

Okay, one more. What’s unusual about this pen? (Hint: it’s not a Snorkel.)