 Description
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“ Fountain pens were invented in last quarter of the 19th century and have evolved since, both as writing instruments and as collectibles.
The first 20 years of their existence were devotes to the concerns of getting a constant and regular flow of ink from the reservoir to the nib. In this period, American manufacturers dominated the market.
Once the flow of ink was regulated, manufacturers started to think about ways to improve the practical use of pens, concentrating in filling mechanisms, ways of keeping the pens secure in the pocket, and how to increase their reliability. Precious casings were produced for fountain pens, originating what some collectors consider the most beautiful pens ever produced. The European fountain pen market started to grow, with important manufacturers appearing in England and Germany. The First World War had an important role in the expansion of the fountain pen. In fact, fountain pens were regularly used by a large number of soldiers to write home.
After the war, a high technological level was reached in the production of fountain pens. It led to the “golden age” during which high quality pens were built amidst strong competition between manufacturers.
In the mid 1920s plastic began to be used in the production of fountain pens. This originated a wave of bright colored pens. The taste for the streamlined form of the late 1920s led to the introduction of streamlined pens and, shortly after, all pens manufacturers adopted this new shape.
The stock market crash of 1929, and the depression era that followed it, threw a first blow on the fountain pen industry. Many manufacturers went out of business in the 1930s, leaving the market for the strongest. The Second World War added to this negative effect. Many important European manufacturers saw their factories destroyed, and their American counterparts had their plants used to produce war materials.
After the war, the industry started to rebuild, but a new threat was on the horizon, the ballpoint. During the 1950s the dominance of the law price ballpoint market gradually caused fountain pens manufacturers to go out of business and in the 1960s this trend continued, weakening more and more, the market for fountain pens.
Today, fountain pens are going through a new golden period.
People are discovering the joy of writing with them, new models appear at an incredible rate, and there is a continuous, growing interest in vintage models.
Many books have addresses the history and development of fountain pens, typically looking at the evolution of individual manufacturers. This approach, however, leaves out an important aspect of this evolution, the interaction between different manufacturers and the influence of the world events on their evolution. This book shows the evolution of the fountain pen in a wider perspective, discussing how political and social events influenced their design, the trends in their evolutionary process, and the competitions, the fights, and the merges among manufacturers.
Finding exact dates for the events that occurred in the fountain pen scene proved to be an extremely difficult task. Different sources list slightly different dates for many events. After studying several sources, we used our interpretation to “fix” some of these dates. We admit that some of the dates presented may not be absolutely correct, but they correspond that what is currently known. No doubt further research will shed more light in the future."
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