Good Marks for Gold Sheaffer Pens
Question: My mother has a fountain pen made by the Sheaffer Pen Co. in the early 1920s. The tip is 14-karat gold. A friend of hers told her these pens are worth quite a bit of money. She would like to know if there is someone who could tell her something about it.--M.A.
Answer: Cliff Lawrence, who founded the Pen Fancier’s Club in 1976, said if the Sheaffer is in fine condition, it could bring more than $300 in the collectible marketplace--but added that it should still be a practical writing pen to enhance its value.
There are about 5,000 pen collectors in this country, many of them belong to the Pen Fancier’s Club, 1169 Overcash Drive, Dunedin, Fla. 34698; telephone (813) 734-4742. Lawrence said about 2,500 subscribers worldwide take the club’s monthly magazine for an annual fee of $30.
Lawrence, 56, a former lab technician-turned writing-instrument dealer, said he also publishes a mail-order list, which generates sales of up to 200 pens a month.
“Most people who collect in this country are professional people,” he said in a recent telephone interview. “Dentists are big collectors.” So are residents of Italy, Japan and France, he added.
Just writing a letter was an adventure until the 1880s, Lawrence said, when Lewis Edson Waterman developed the first fountain pen that could carry its own supply of ink and write without gushing all over the paper or, indeed, running dry.
“He started everything,” he said.
Eventually, along came W. A. Sheaffer, a jeweler by trade, forming a fountain pen company in Springfield, Mass., along with a factory in Fort Madison, Iowa, where he lived. He prospered after he patented a pen filled by use of a lever in 1908.
By 1912, Sheaffer was successfully mass producing pens. By this time he had modified a process marketed by another firm, the Conklin Pen Co., which allowed him to be the first to succeed with a pen that pumped ink up through the nib from a bottle.
Then, during the 1920s, Sheaffer “introduced the lifetime pen with a white dot on the top of the cap,” Lawrence said.
“Sheaffer took a lot of pride in the points. The number (on the point) gave the pen an individuality to keep track of when the pen was made.”
What’s more, Lawrence said, “any old Sheaffer pen is collectible. A good Sheaffer in a large size can be worth $350.”
As for his passion for fountain pens, Lawrence said he became interested in pens during World War II when he was growing up in Lansdowne, Pa.
Pens and watches, he recalled, were about the only things of value being marketed during the war. The reason, he said, was the general lack of restrictions on products using gold and silver content, in contrast to a dearth of brass, aluminum, tin and other strategic metals being utilized for the war.
“You can imagine a 13-year-old kid going to the drugstore for soda and there were velvet-lined boxes with some of the most beautiful pens and pencils you ever saw,” he said.
Lawrence had about 30 pens, he said, but during a tour in the Navy during the Korean War, his collection was lost.
“Then, in the early 1970s, my mother found one of my pens, a Sheaffer lifetime pen,” he said. “At the time, I was collecting radios. I dropped the radios and went back searching for pens.”
Although collecting fountain pens was “an addiction like any other collecting,” Lawrence said he no longer collects them, but rather concentrates on the sales of collectible pens.
“I’ve gotten pens no one could have found,” he said.
He vividly remembered, for example, selling for $4,500 in 1986 a Parker snake pen. It was so called because a French jeweler had wrapped the barrel with a solid sterling silver snake with emerald eyes along with a similar snake around the cap.
Soble cannot answer mail personally but will respond in this column to questions of general interest about collectibles. Do not telephone. Write to Your Collectibles, You section, The Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053.
