What Were They Thinking - Eversharp (1946)

Time for a new feature, a little thing I'm going to call "What Were They Thinking". If you pour over old magazines you're bound to come across some ads that simply make you ask, what the heck were the ad execs thinking? These ads feature a range of products and they employ everything from psychotic looking children to self-mutilating animals to supposedly entice the consumer into, well, consuming. Personally, when I come across one of these insults to the advertiser's dark art, the only urge that hits me is a desire to turn the page as quickly as possible.

So, without further delay, let's jump right into the big bin o' rotten ads. Maestro, if you'll cue the kitsch fifties intro music...

Eversharp started in 1915 with a patent for a mechanical pencil and they continued successfully through the 1940's, finally being bought out by Parker Pens in 1957. Apparently, in 1946 when this ad ran, the execs at Eversharp thought they should cash in on the nearly continuous state of war that existed between the beginning of WWII and the end of Vietnam, touting their machine gun-like repeater pencil.

But, just in case the war references weren't enough, they decided to go with something that says pencils...a vapid, slack jawed model. I mean, what says smart buy like a model who can be amazed by the simple clicking sound? I mean that's the pencil I want! The Brain-Stunner 7000, stores a year's worth of lead and reduces your IQ by 120 points per click!

Parker Pens Lucky Curve

Here's another Parker Pen ad, this one from a 1912 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Parker's Lucky Curve was a design intended to address a fundamental problem of all fountain pens, how to get ink on the paper and not your shirt. Parker originally attempted to fix this problem with a plug that forced ink to run through a small hole and into the ink channel of the nib. By 1891 Parker rejected the plug and opted for a curved protrusion into the ink chamber dubbed the "Lucky Curve". You can learn a lot more about Parker Pens at the Parker Pens Penography site.

The Fountain Pen - Quink Then and Now

1936 Quink Ad

If you've read my musings on writing, you know I'm a fan of old fashioned, hands on pen and ink writing. There's something about applying ink to paper that helps my creative process and this has led me into the world of fountain pens. This past Christmas my dear wife gave me a Parker pen as a gift and I've been enjoying using it ever since. It's my weapon of choice when penning thank you letters, hammering out a story, or just journaling.
Early fountain pens were filled manually, and by that I mean using an eyedropper to top off the pen's ink reservoir. As you can imagine, that sort of process led to a lot of ruined shirts, stained desktops, and frustration and in 1901 the first self-filling fountain pens went into mass production. The years leading up to the introduction of the ball-point pen were marked by the introduction of various filling mechanisms and eventually ink cartridges like the ones I use in my pen.

Recently I decided to take another step toward becoming a Luddite and I invested in an adapter. Adapters let you to use a pen that's designed for cartridges with bottled ink. The mechanism's pretty simple, a screw plunger that draws ink from the bottle into a reservoir that fits in place of the pen's cartridge, and I'm looking forward to giving it a try when I've exhausted my supply of cartridges. Without thinking I went to my favorite pen catalog and picked out a color of ink I thought would be appropriate for my writing. The selection ranged from extremely expensive and colorful inks to every day black and blue. Without having any preference or recommendation to work with, I decided the best course would be to buy a bottle of Parker ink for my Parker pen - and that's how I came to buy an ink that's been on the market for over 80 years.

Before 1931 documents written with a fountain pen required blotting. This removed excess ink from the page and prevented smearing. Quink was Parker's answer to blotting, an ink that made use of isopropyl alcohol to speed the drying process. What Parker didn't bargain for at the time was the fact its revolutionary ink would essentially eat the barrels of the fountain pens in which it was used. It took ten years for Parker to introduce the Parker 51 pen with a barrel which resisted the corrosiveness of Quink.

My Nemesis

For the time being my bottle of Quink sits on the desktop, looking stately and important and urging me to write something of value. I'm not sure I'm up to the task. I mean if you're going to use a fountain pen and bottled ink you should write something important, right? A treatise or declaration, or maybe that next great American novel? Nothing like being intimidated by your own writing instruments...