A bumper crop of new pages!  From familiar makers, we have the somewhat unfamiliar Waterman Master and the nearly anonymous Sheaffer Award.

Two makers not previously heard from are now represented, too, by some rather wee instruments.  From Stipula, I now have the sub-decimeter Passaporto, and from Kaweco (a company with a strangely convoluted history), there is perhaps their most famous small fry, the Sport.

Despite the pressure of the season to go out and get into impromptu wrestling matches with strangers over toys, I’ve gotten a heap of little gifts for the pen-chasing public wrapped and ready to go.  New maker’s pages, for relatively new makers: Franklin-Christoph and Italix now both appear here, and I must acknowledge assistance in both cases from the management of each.  Because of my self-imposed rule of not delving into a maker unless I’ve sampled their work, these new developments are thanks to the presence in my life of a Model 27 and a Parson’s Essential, respectively.

But that’s not all!  I’ve also added profiles of the Sheaffer 100, the Cross Aventura, and the probably-misnamed Waterman Ligne 60.  I’m now going off for a long winter’s nap.

No technical enhancements, but thanks to a few interesting client pens passing through the shop, there are new pictures in the Targa, Duofold, Parker 45, Swan and Hundred Year Pen pages.  This swarming of real-world work is keeping me from some expansions in the makers’ galleries; look forward to several modern Italian makers, a couple of modern Americans, and one from England.

Eventually.

It’s a year since the site re-opened, and I’m being a very stereotypic web-based self-promoting sort by mounting a contest to celebrate.  One need only put a (publishable) comment of some sort on this blog entry, and one has a chance at a rather nice little Parker “51”.  How might one resist?  Winner to be chosen 30 November, at noon CST.

…because I’ve added the TWSBI Mini to the ranks.

Two new pages, for pens whose existence I find slightly perplexing.  For Parker, I have the 95, which seems to have been developed to compete with the contemporary Parker 88, and for Sheaffer there’s the Sentinel whose point seems mainly to undermine sales of the contemporary Sheaffer Fashion.  These are all from the late 1980s; perhaps cannibalism was the done thing in the pen world then.

A foolish idea I can call my own is the addition in the Repair Department of a brief explanation of how to turn a cartridge pen into an eyedropper-filler.  This is foolish in as much as there’s nothing like enough pictures, and because the consequence of not getting the job right is ink everywhere.  Well… everywhere at someone else’s house.

I’ve also added some pictures to the original run of the Parker Duofold and have a new pattern to show in the Wahl metal pen.

There must be something about the number 300 that is subconsciously attractive.  There’s a graphic novel and film of that name (and the event they relate stands as an example too; three hundred guys is a lot for a stroll, but it’s a strange number for a military unit); there’s a couple of automobiles that have used it; and there is, more to the point of my site, a pen from Sheaffer which used it, and for which a write-up now stands.

In addition to that page, I’ve also added a new entry in the ink profiles for Organics Studio.

Today’s new page is for one of the victims of the 1980’s delight in excessive thinness, Sheaffer’s TRZ.  There’s also a new picture on the Waterman C/F page, for those who have been curious to see what the lowest end sub-model of that pen looks like.

I have been extemporizing on the publishing of a page for the Sheaffer Imperial VIII.  No, that’s not the admission.  The reason for the delay is that I was trying to discover what they cost, and within minutes of confirming that data (a photo of an original price sticker!), I published.  However, that confirmation has proved to me that I fell on the wrong side of the fence when choosing between two conflicting sources regarding the original cost of the Imperial VI; the one I had gone with is generally right, but since it indicated that it cost as much as the Imperial VIII, I had to accept that it and thus I was wrong.  The error has been expunged, and I apologize to anyone who has used me to settle an argument about what a pen cost in the early 1960s… for all that arguments like that occur.  It’s important to me, so I assume someone else will be concerned about it, too.

Three new pages, two of which are marginally floral: the Waterman Garland, whose name needs no explanation; the Sheaffer Targa, which has flowers somewhere behind it, it seems (based upon my conversion of Italian to half-remembered Latin and a little help from Google Translate); the Wing Sung 233, which has no blossoms about it but which is blooming interesting.