A New Discovery Thanks to an Old Book

When I saw Lee Chait at the Triangle Pen Show in Raleigh, Lee had a problem. Actually, he had several hundred pages of problems. Lee had a pile of old books on pens on his table that he really didn’t feel like hauling home with him. Most were from the early 1990s – not antique, but not filled with the state-of-the-art information that research by the pen community, coupled with the power of the internet, have added to the knowledge pool over the last two decades.

Still, I love reading the old books written in the days before authors thought they knew everything, when all they could do is take a stab at putting out there everything they knew. And besides, often times people put stuff out there in those early books, whether it be a picture or a bit of information, that we have collectively forgotten about.

Needless to say, as the show wore on and Sunday packup loomed, Lee’s price got better and better, until it reached the point of irresistability, and I bought the whole stack. I’ve had at least one of those books by my side ever since then, poring over one thing or another.

One of the books I got from Lee – a classic by most standards, is Fischler and Schneider’s Fountain Pens and Pencils: the Golden Age of Writing Instruments from 1990. There’s a lot of great information in that book, and it’s loaded with pictures, including a fantastic picture at the end of the owners of Fountain Pen Hospital, complete with Miami Vice hair and dressed in scrubs, preparing to do "surgery" on a few pens laying in a surgical tray!

I’ve been lazily thumbing through that book, casually admiring all of the ultra-rare pens that just seem to have disappeared over the last few years, wondering what it must have been like to go to an antiques show or flea market and actually see some of them once in a while.

And then I saw something in an online auction that rang a bell somewhere in my head. I went back to Fischler and Schneider, looked more closely at one of their pictures, and I wondered . . . could it be?

The lot contained about ten pencils, most of which were your common dollar-bin fare. Towards the bottom of the picture was a coral Carter’s pencil, but the tip looked a little messed up. The seller didn’t seem to know beans about pencils, other than what he or she could read on the clips, but one of the names in the description was "Waterman" and that name certainly didn’t fit anything else in the group. So I bid, and I think I now owe Lee Chait a drink, or maybe something from Lord & Taylor, because if it hadn’t been for that old book he sold me, I wouldn’t have known what this is . . .

NOTE:  This article is now included in the print version of The Leadhead's Pencil Blog, available anywhere you buy books, or also from The Legendary Lead Company.

To order, here's the link:  Volume 1 at Legendary Lead Company