The blog since 2013
261 posts since September 2013 by Nathaniel Cerf: how to start collecting, what happens at the repair bench, inks under the sun, fake Montblancs, and the pens of presidents and writers. "It is a space dedicated to pen lovers old and new."
It has taken us nearly a week to recover from the awesomeness that was the Atlanta Pen Show. It was that good. The show was packed with collectors on Saturday and Sunday. We got to meet hundreds of people, and we saw more awesome pens than we could afford. I did come away with a…
Use Testors paints to fill in the blue diamond of your Parker Vacumatic clips. Some clips have old paint that tells how dark you should repaint it. Testors 1111 Dark Blue paint is good for darker blue diamonds and 1110 Blue is good for lighter blue diamonds. I used the 1110 Blue on the Vac…
One of the coolest parts about owning a pen business is learning about people’s “other” pen collections. Every pen collector has their collection of daily users and museum pieces often built around brands such as Sheaffer, Parker, Mont Blanc and all of the others. But many collectors have special side project collections, too. I love…
Here is the view of Hong Kong from Victoria Peak, after the lights have come on at night. This is on Hong Kong Island looking over Victoria Harbour and Kowloon, the mainland part of Hong Kong. This is the night view of the colorful lights on Hong Kong Island as seen from the deck of…
Neil Simon is one of my favorite playwrights, and I wasn’t 3 minutes into the film adaptation of his autobiographical “Biloxi Blues” (1988) when I spotted an Esterbrook LJ in the hands of Matthew Broderick, the star of the film playing Eugene Jerome (a.k.a. Neil Simon) as a young, wise-cracking soldier from New York experiencing…
Here is Santa peddling Parker button fillers in 1900. These were the “safety sealed” precursors to the Duofold. A close friend of the blog sent us a card that is ideal for a pen collector. It is the 1900 Parker advertising campaign, and we thought you might get a kick out of it. It would…
Tish, a pen collector in Canada, also takes painstaking measures to recreate battle scenes such as this one from the War of 1812. Here is the Spanish Succession at Blenheim. British warriors take on the Roman army in this stunning recreation. Not all pen collectors are famous, but they might still have vast talents that…
We’ve done it! ThePenMarket.com is now a fully licensed and authorized dealer of Lamy and Yard-O-Led writing instruments! When we first launched this business, we figured we’d have a complete assortment of every brand-new modern pen available on the market within 6 months. We also didn’t know jack about anything. Yet, after 7 years of…
It isn’t often we get to see Yard-O-Led inks on this side of the puddle. Luckily for all, ThePenMarket.com now carries these fine bottled inks. Check out the new bottled ink we carry. Yard-O-Led inks come in four colors: Jet Black, Blue, Blue/Black and Claret. Look closely to see great shading in the Jet Black…
See the difference a 1.5mm Lamy nib can make for your handwriting? Not only do the letters take on more distinctive shapes, the ink, itself, provides shadows and highlights on every letter. It is far more interesting than a boring old fine-point nib. It should be noted that my handwriting is terrible. Some of my…
Since letters have been invented, people have looked for ways to write them more swiftly. Scribes writing on clay tablets developed a more fluid form of writing that served as an early cursive in Mesopotamia. The cursive writing we recognize today started developing in Europe the 16th century. Connecting letters with loops and tails seemed…
As we ponder the start of a new school year, did you know most schools are no longer teaching children how to write in cursive? This fact first came to my attention by friends, who are parents, telling me their kids aren’t learning cursive. Recent documentaries that address the phenomenon have also been brought to…
