My handwriting in school was rather poor, and so it remained as I grew into adulthood. By the mid-1980s it had deteriorated from semi-legible script into an execrable scrawl. So I took it upon myself to reinvent my style, the idea being that if I had to concentrate on making different letter shapes, I’d have to be careful enough to produce legible results. The exercise worked. Fifteen years later, most of it has stuck.
I dabbled with fountain pens more than once over the years, including a period during my retraining effort, until 1998, when I meandered too close to the Maelstrom and was finally irretrievably sucked in. I came to the hobby through a succession of pens that began with a Cross "Solo" and culminated with a Bexley Fifth Anniversary. As I gained experience, I gradually became a firm adherent of vintage American pens, and I’ve developed a special fondness for Sheaffer’s Balance pens of the 1930s, which I consider as a class to be rather underappreciated in the world of collecting. As of this writing, my relatively small collection comprises 24 vintage pens and three modern models. My “regular carry” is a Marine Green Sheaffer’s Lifetime Senior Balance from 1931 or ’32. Both the Cross and the Bexley have gone on to other homes.
Once having come to love vintage fountain pens, I soon found that the next obvious step was learning to work on them as well as with them. As a result of that discovery, I have the pleasure, as the proprietor of a small but growing business, of being paid to play with fountain pens. Initially, I intended to sell pens that I’d purchased and restored, and I do sell a few pens, some here on my Web site and some on eBay; but my business rapidly decided without my help that it was going to be based primarily on high-quality repair and restoration for clients. I depend primarily on repeat clients and word-of-mouth advertising.
