As May showers batter the ground into yielding up June flowers (it’s Canada, folks– our seasons are no respecters of old lyrics), a few fresh updates appear.  The first, and in place long enough that this is now a late announcement, I have put together a page for a pen which I’ve have for more than a year, the Retro 51 Tornado.  What was the delay?  Dragging my feet, mainly, because I to do that page I also had to do a very little bit of research into Retro 51 itself, and I’ve been devoting my powers to other mental challenges (I can barely tie my own shoes, so much am I thinking of other things).

Thanks to a new client, I have a plethora of other new things; a page for the not-quite-Duofolds that Parker was offering in the latter part of the 1920s, a Waterman pen which in the case of the specific example is a source of identification headaches, and a new photo of the top-end Parker 45 (which is not an oxymoron).

Another person seeking repairs also gave me a chance to take a picture of the rather uncommon Peacock Blue Snorkel, which my picture fails entirely to really capture, but you can see that it’s different from the Pastel Blue, at least.

The Pelikan which I mentioned in the previous notice has arrived– it’s a Pelikan 25, the mysterious ur-cartridge pen (sort of) of my favorite* German company.  As a result, I’ve been able to run up a page for it and its fraternal twin, the 15.

Also new, thanks to a local source beginning to stock Pilot products, I’ve got a page for the Pilot Parallel, which may be on this site under false pretenses.  Read the profile, decide for yourself: is it REALLY a fountain pen?

I have also made a small poke at the giant backlog of photos I have for the site, and added… two.  They’re good ones, though!  There’s a very well-preserved Waterman 01852½V on that company’s page of Hard Rubber Pens, where I also fixed some errors of pricing information I’d made, and a handsome metal-derbied example of an Eversharp Skyline, both of which are there to be gandered at.

For those who enjoy comedy: I’ve only just noticed that it’s possible to apply LIKE and SHARE buttons to the pages here, after {mumble} years of working through this interface. If you’re a regular visitor, surprised at this sudden development… well, welcome to the club.

*over on my blog, I’ve begun to reveal my true inward feelings about some pen brands.  If you care about an even more subjective view of these things than I offer here, well, there you go.

In anticipation of the arrival of a Pelikan I have never met before, I was doing a little preliminary research for a new page. I discovered while doing so a few small facts that made me revise entirely the page for the “New Pelikans” of 1965 (until they weren’t really new anymore). The result has been a serious telescoping of the information, leaving only one page where I used to have six.

This sounds like a removal of valuable data, but it’s actually a removal of unnecessary repetition, unwanted errors, and a few examples of outright foolishness I’m shocked I had let stand. It also knocks a level out of the menu tree for Pelikan, which may make the mobile reader a little happier with things here. Possibly.

I’ve just added a page for the Pilot Myu, having had one in the shop to have its flow sorted out.

Also, there’s now a sample of Waterman Florida Blue on the page for that company’s inks. If you’re thinking, “What, you’re only getting around to that now?!” I can only hang my head in acknowledgement of an unlikely lapse. What can I say? It wasn’t locally available, and it wasn’t an ink I was on fire to get a bottle of– it’s only a kind donation of some slightly elderly cartridges that sees the current situation into place.

I’ve just produced a new little surprise, and hidden it away at the bottom of the page about cartridges where no one will ever look– a chart which, with some caveats, shows what cartridges will fit in which pens.  It won’t change the world, but it might make it a very little bit easier to live in.  If it saves one person from trying to cram a Platinum cartridge into a Waterman, then the work will have been worth it.

On Saturday next, which will be 14 May, I’ll be conducting another free pen tuning clinic at Paper Umbrella, from 11am to 3pm.  If you’re in the area and have a pen that’s being sub-par,  come on down!

This is not an announcement of a spacecraft maneuver, alas; my delta-vee remains as ever at zero.  However, the arrival into my hands of a Delta Fusion 82 called for the creation of a page for it, which moved me to get cooking on the long-fallow page for the company itself.  Why “long-fallow?”  Well, the only reason I had to get moving on it previously was the rather morally-troubling Indigenous Peoples line I had been studiously ignoring for several years after my first contact with it (yes, a bad joke; worse non-jokes await on that page).  There is also a page for their Isaac Newton, which came to me at about the same time as the Indigenous Peoples, and which got stuffed into the same box of don’t want to deal with that.  I’ve overcome my cowardice, so the site gains a bonanza of pages.  Four in one blow!

Also, there is a slight update to the Parker Duofold page to reflect my own acquisition of a really beat-up English Duofold AF, and a new picture on the Kaweco Sport page thanks to a brief encounter with an aluminum member of that breed.

That’s nothing to do with the proverbial April showers, but rather an increase of the Waterman content here.   There is a page for the Charleston and the L’Etalon, both of modern production.  This has also seen an updating of the family album.  There have also been some updates to the main Waterman page and a few of the models to slightly correct dates based on newly found primary sources; the wrongest of these was the Master, while two or three others were only about a year off.

In less watery news, there is a page for the Platinum #3776, the Pilot Custom 74, and the Pilot Custom 742.  A veritable cloudburst of new pages!

There has also been a small amendment to the page for the TM Snorkels, which you probably won’t notice without me mentioning it– the picture for the Saratoga has been replaced with one which is in focus, to scale, and actually shows a good representative of the model, all of which are sort of desirable on a page which purports to describe the thing.  That’s another family album that gets an update, too.

That deadline being the highly artificial one of adding an update post before the end of January.  The news to report is three-fold:  First, I’ve finally added an entry for the modern Parker Duofold, thanks to someone deciding they wanted the point amended slightly.

In actual new news, there’s a couple of extra profile pages at different ends of the economic spectrum.  At the lofty end, we have the Waterman Exception, which manages to be both stylish and square.  Down here with us groundlings, the TWSBI Eco has come into my life with its simple joys.