Yellow Fellows...Celluloid fountain pens from Guider

I became an inadvertent recipient of some new celluloid fountain pens designed by Mr G Lakshmana Rao of Guider Pens, Rajahmundry. He was kind of asked to design a celluloid FP on the Duofold model. And I think all his red celluloid material was used up and so he used his yellow celluloid tubes to create these pens. He sent me four of these…these have no names, except that the 3 flat end ones are Duofold designs, and maybe called Guider Duofold … the one with the rounded end is the usual Guider celluloid design for that thickness and size…the red coloured one was the first celluloid FP that I purchased from Guider… and there is another brainwave design… the black ebonite with yellow celluloid bands…a kind of 'reverse' celluloid-ebonite design…

You can see the various design novelties in photo 1 …the first one has 2 metal cap bands…the cap on the second one is without any bands…the third one is the red acrylic with the usual Guider design with the flat clip…the fourth is the one with the reverse celluloid-ebonite design…the cap has a yellow celluloid band at the top where the clip begins and another yellow celluloid band at the bottom which gives the pen its reverse look…the fifth one has a black celluloid band at the cap lip…and the sixth one is a yellow celluloid in the usual Guider design with two metal bands on the cap and the arrow clip…

All these pens are ED fillers…if you notice all the celluloid pens have black cap tops and barrel ends…this design is an inevitability of celluloid pens manufacturing, at least, of what I have seen of celluloid pens made in India (Prasad, Guider, Wilson, Leader, Brahmam)…celluloid material comes in the form of tubes, unlike ebonite, which comes in the form of rods…therefore, while making pens, the celluloid tube ends have to be closed and ebonite comes in handy here…so, the black ends are actually ‘stoppers’… and what is unavoidable when it comes to making celluloid pens was converted into a ‘reverse’ design when Mr Lakshmana Rao made a similar Duofold design in black ebonite and put in those yellow bands at the top and the end… and these ebonite stoppers can also be strategically used to save celluloid material!!

I had asked Mr Lakshmana Rao to fix arrow clips for the Duofold celluloid FPs too… but for some reason, he decided to fix this elongated oval kind of clip, which I don’t fancy much …

These yellow fellows do look good, don't they?