I have a particular fondness for this company, having discovered it in my tender teenage years. Up to that point, I had known nothing but Sheaffer cartridge pens, and for a young closet anglophile the prospect of a British-made fountain pen with interchangeable and diverse points was extremely exciting.
Because of this personal history, I would like to make a direct connection to the venerable Perry & Co., a maker of steel dip-pens established in 1824 and a colossus in that field to rival Esterbrook. However, it seems that the connection is indirect, since Osmiroid pens started as E.S. Perry & Co., the founder being Edmund, a grand-nephew of the dip-pen magnate James. He set out on his own in 1918, although as he had been a director of the older company he was hardly new to the pen game. It seems that it was the traditional dip-pen game his company stayed in, too, at least until 1939 when the company switched from making pen-points to making little fiddly bits for various weapons.
During the war, Edmund died and the company was taken over by his widow and their daughter (can I find their names? Of course not) as his sons were engaged in the military. Upon their return at war’s end, the sons stepped into the driver’s seat and the company returned to pen production. Somewhere between 1948 and 1952, production began on the Osmiroid 65, the company’s first fountain pen. The name stems from a line of dip-pens the company had previously offered– at this point, the company was still E.S. Perry & Co., and it would technically continue to be known as such until 1987 when it officially elevated Osmiroid from product brand to company name.
In 1989, the company was bought up by Berol (whose name we have seen before). There is some small irony to this, as it put them into the same barrel as the erstwhile operations of Esterbrook, once a major competitor in dip-pens and maker of interchangible points which would fit Osmiroid pens. The name continued in use until at least 2000, but the Osmiroid factory was closed in 1991; production was initially moved to one of Berol’s other UK factory, and then (likely after Berol was gobbled up by Newell-Rubbermaid in 1995) to China.
Models I’ve examined:
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