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."
One might think that a book written by the Sheaffer corporation about the Sheaffer corporation might be a definitive history of the company, but one might be wrong. This is the book cover to “100 Years of Sheaffer.” It is a very attractive coffee table book that seems to get some of the facts and…
Happy New Year! Let’s start the year right with a fresh look at some lesser known inks. De Atramentis is the Latin word for ink. The company is based in Germany. It specializes in a series of specialty inks, including perfumed inks. We obtained 13 colors from a collection and decided to test them with…
Everyone involved with ThePenMarket.com wishes you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy Hanukkah. However, we understand the holidays aren’t always happy for everyone. It can be a difficult time of year for many. Thoughts of happier times and missing loved ones or health concerns or a non-existent gift budget make for a really difficult…
Cross sold the Sheaffer Pen Company to a company in India called William Penn. “Pen World” magazine asked me to get to the bottom of this news event by interviewing the owner of William Penn, a smart, hard-working entrepreneur named Nikhil Ranjan. If you ask me, Sheaffer is in better hands than it has been…
Some days you just never know what you will find. Someone reached out to me with a collection for sale, and they told me the original owner was an avid Montblanc collector. Naturally, I was curious to see it. It didn’t take long to assess that this person had a huge collection of fakes. Sadly,…
Time and again, I’ve mentioned the fountain pen that got me hooked into this crazy lifestyle. It was my mother’s father’s Sheaffer Balance Lifetime. Yet, I have another grandparental pen that never gets much publicity. It is a Parker 51 from my father’s side of the family. This Parker 51 once belonged to either my…
A good friend recently asked me why some pens cost more than others. The cheeky, glib and true answer is supply and demand. But, it is more than that. Sometimes it is marketing. Sometimes its trends in the marketplace. This is a “Big Red” senior Parker Duofold made of orange Permanite. However, he was asking…
Swiss pen maker Caran D’Ache is most famous for its precision engineering on its line of ballpoint pens. They make nice fountain pens, too, but it is the company’s ballpoints that the world knows best. Yet, as so many pen makers now do, it also decided to enter the lucrative fountain pen ink market. Here…
You can see a Pilot G2 refill next to a Pelikan standard rollerball refill in this photo. Look closely, and you can see that a G2 will fit most rollerball pens that take standard RB refils. Quite possibly the most popular disposable pens on earth are Pilot G2 gel pens. They are so incredibly smooth…
Staring at a shelf full of pen books, it struck me that I ought to share with you some of what these great tomes have to offer. As such, I would like to start with a pen-collecting classic. Here is the cover to “Waterman Past & Present,” a definitive guide to Waterman pens spanning 1883…
I am happy to announce that “Ink CT” magazine just profiled ThePenMarket.com and my friend and Master Penman Hong Nhat Nguyen, owner of Rose Art Creative, for a story about vintage pens and handwriting styles. Publisher Jeff Lilly has given me permission to share PDFs of the story here, but he says you can read the…
No one should be surprised by the meteoric rise of Iroshizuku inks on the fountain pen scene. Japan’s finest ink makers have created dozens of colors and hues that offer vibrancy and shadowing while never clogging a vintage or modern fountain pen. We picked up 24 bottles of this amazing ink and have submitted them…
