THE “MAJESTIC” HAUL OF VINTAGE INDIAN & FOREIGN FOUNTAIN PENS

The Majestic area in Bangalore is one of the busiest areas in the city.  It is a warren of lanes and by-lanes with a number of old and new shops from where one can buy almost everything from pins and needles to clothes and shoes; and added to the bustle in and around these shops are the crowds in front of numerous eateries and cinema theatres.  Someone unfamiliar with the area could easily get lost here and end up in a different area altogether. Whenever I am in Bangalore, I pass through this area through one of its main roads and go quickly to Gandhinagar to browse in the bookshops there.  A couple of years ago, I made brave to enter this bustling network of lanes to see if I could find some old stationery shops and also see if I could find some old pens.  I went in and out of a number of small shops and was able to put together a small haul of three Indian pens and four foreign pens.  I found the Indian pens in one shop and the foreign pens in another.  The ones I picked were the good ones among the pens in old boxes.

I found a Clipper and two Plato FPs and very surprisingly found a Cross, a Pilot, a Parker, and a Sheaffer…

Here are the photos of the pens…

All three Indian FPs…the two blue ones are Platos and the black with metal cap is the Clipper…

This pen is called CLIPPER AIR FLOW and along with ‘MADE IN INDIA,’ these letterings can be seen on the barrel…very faint… initially, I wondered what AIR FLOW meant and then out of curiosity, I opened the barrel and discovered that this pen has an aerometric filling system… the clip too is interesting…it kind of rolls into a very small cylinder towards the end…a ‘roll clip?’

The nib on the Clipper is interesting…a kind of eagle is engraved on it, apart from the brand name and IRIDIUM…the surface of the nib is not smooth and it is kind of rough…I tried to remove the roughness, but it remained and I felt the roughness is the natural texture of the nib and left it at that…

The writing on the barrel says…PLATO 66; REGD.; MADE IN INDIA; 1974 … the paint on the lettering has faded away and one can make these markings out if only one looked very carefully…this pen is almost 40 years old…!!!

The Plato No. 111…REGD.; MADE IN INDIA … again these letterings are very faint … and in this pen, there is no year of manufacture … 

The ends of the Clipper and Plato No. 111…

The tops of the Clipper and Plato No. 111…

Aaah…the foreign pens…CROSS, PILOT (B nib), SHEAFFER and PARKER… all these pens are in various states of repair, but I didn’t have the heart to leave them back and bought them anyway…and I didn’t have a Cross FP…

The nibs of these foreign pens…

Here endeth the account of the ‘Majestic’ haul…

POSTSCRIPT: My friend Hari had written a post on The Fountain Pen Network on his haul of vintage Indian celluloid FPs that he found in a shop in Kalasipalya in Bangalore (http://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/index.php/topic/269605-the-kalasipalaya-haul-of-vintage-indian-celluloids/) and that post reminded me of the pens I found in ‘Majestic’ area in Bangalore and inspired me to put up this post…thanks Hari…!!

SOME OLD INDIAN FOUNTAIN PEN BRANDS - 11 - MHATRE WRITER

The pen under review here is again different from the ones described before...for one, it is an ebonite FP and it came as a pleasant surprise when I realised that it was an ebonite FP only recently...I was taking photos of this pen and I was unscrewing the section and maybe the slight resistance I encountered suggested that it was not the usual plastic FP and I thought I should smell and decide...it IS ebonite...and, then this pen doesn't have an obvious name, only a 'P' on the clip...nothing on the cap, nothing on the barrel...and the nib has 'MHATRE' and 'WRITER' engraved on it...

The other straightforward features are…it is a screw cap, ED filler…and yes, it is black in colour!!  A nice black, in fact…and it has a very nice arrow clip…and as usual, here are the pictures…

 

And as usual, I posted this first on FPN and my friend Hari responded thus..."Dear Jai, the "Writer" from Mhatre was a very popular inexpensive pen, even as far as in Madras in the late 50s-60s.  My mother had told me about how they used to buy a "writer" 'pena' (the Tamil word for 'pen') at the start of the school year for a grand sum of one rupee from the neighbourhood grocer.

She also told me an interesting anecdote, it seems the grocer used to sell a fill of ink for 3 or 5 paise.  So the kids would go to the shop on the way to school and get the grocer to fill their one and only pen with a 5 paise dose of ink.  If the ink ran out in the middle of school, a drop of water on the nib would last a couple of pages more.  Those were the hard days.

I would also like to recall the comments of Mr C G Bhargav who responded to my PLAZA post here and said that he has been living in Chennai for the past 50 years and he says (I quote from his response)..."and I remember Writer (I think in later years it was known as Mhatre Writer or something like that)..." If Mr Bhargav happens to see this post, he'd be happy to see pictures of a specimen of the Mhatre Writer... 

SOME OLD INDIAN FOUNTAIN PEN BRANDS - 10 - EVERLAST

I post reviews of my FPs and other FP-related information on the Fountain Pen Network (FPN) and later post them here on my blog…My friend Hari, who is IMHO very knowledgeable and passionate about FPs, usually responds with his comments and his comments have been especially useful for me w.r.t. to this series on Old Indian Fountain Pen Brands…he has a keen eye and is able to spot the influences that these Indian FPs incorporated into their design from other well-known international models and he also gives information about manufacturers, if he is aware of them, and has these interesting anecdotes to share and above all, he supports and encourages my interest in documenting these long-forgotten pens…

As he always does, Hari responded to the PLAZA post on FPN and said that the shape and features of PLAZA, the squarish cap top and barrel end, are inspired by Sheaffer Imperial… Now that I know from Hari the inspiration for PLAZA, I realised that I had another pen in the lot with similar features…it is a model of the brand called EVERLAST…since the name is similar to Eversharp, I did a bit of surfing and realised that there existed a pen company called Everlast Pen Company in the US which “made low end pens in the 40s and 50s”…but this pen doesn’t look like it was made in the US…the ‘REGD’ on the barrel is I think a typical Indian FP feature…I could be wrong though…

The pen has a bluish (teal?) plastic barrel and a gold coloured metal cap…it is a slip cap…no names on the cap or on the clip, but EVERLAST (REGD) is pressed on the barrel and the nib too has the brand name engraved on it along with TIPPED FINE…like I said earlier, this pen is similar to PLAZA when it comes to the cap end and the barrel end…both are squarish… but, now I know where the squarish ends of this pen too comes from…here are some pictures…

And just for comparison, here are some group photos of PLAZA, EVERLAST, and my Sheaffer Imperial…

SOME OLD INDIAN FOUNTAIN PEN BRANDS - 9 - PLAZA

The next fountain pen in this series is an ED filler called PLAZA…it has a plastic barrel and a gold coloured cap…the name is emblazoned in gold along with an icon of a tree on the barrel…no marks on the cap or on the clip…as you can see, it has a screw cap…on the nib it says ‘Alloy Tipped Fine’…it is not a complete open nib, half of it is buried in the section…and as I had mentioned earlier, in each of these brands I found something interesting and unique…what I found most interesting in PLAZA was that the cap top and barrel end and even the section nib aperture all begin as squares and then flow down into circles…here are some pictures… PLAZA capped…name on the barrel PLAZA uncapped… The nib… Yeah…the squarish cap top, barrel end, and section aperture… Thanks for looking…there are three more single pens in this series…I will wrap this up soon…

SOME OLD INDIAN FOUNTAIN PEN BRANDS - 8 - TEKO

Here is an FP called TEKO…I found only one and it looks like one of those Parko pens showcased earlier in this thread…the pen has got a nice black and silver pattern on its barrel and cap…it looks like the material is celluloid, but is not…as we have seen earlier in the case of Parko pens, a thin plastic celluloid patterned sheet over a regular plastic body seems to have given this pen the ‘expensive exclusive’ celluloid look…the nib has ‘smoothglide’ pressed on it…and ‘TEKO FINE’ (meaning fine nib?) can be seen on the barrel…the arrow clip with a diamond shape at the top is reminiscent of the Vacumatic plain diamond clip…here are some photos…

SOME OLD INDIAN FOUNTAIN PEN BRANDS - 7 - Indian PILOT

This is an Indian PILOT which I found in the lot…looks neat and is an NOS I think…I have a couple of other Indian Pilots in my collection and I wondered whether I should showcase this pen here or have a different post for all the Indian Pilots, but then I thought, since I got this pen in this lot and Indian Pilots are not being made anymore, this pen also qualifies to be classified under Old Indian FP Models (alongside Indian Watermans and Indian Swans)…maybe sometime in the future I will have all the Indian Pilots in one post…for the present though, we have this Indian Pilot…

It is a burgundy coloured screw cap ED filler…plastic body with a gold coloured cap band and a similar smaller band at the barrel end…the name PILOT INDIA can be seen on the barrel…and a shiny open nib with Pilot Made in India –(2)– HARD GILT etched on the nib…I liked the nib, looks handsome…and it has got a square hole through which the groove on the feeder is visible…the feeder itself is flat with no fins…the cap is almost rectangular at the top and kind of ‘tapers down’ to become a circle…the clip is flattish and seems stuck right into the cap-top (one can see this kind of clip in one of the SEVIKA models too)…after the previous post on PAGODA, Hari suggested that Pagoda could be inspired by Pilot models, especially when one looked at the square nib hole and the angular clip…it then struck me that…yess…the Pilot India that I had had a square nib hole and an angular clip… and so, I thought of a comparison photo of nibs and caps of both pens…

SOME OLD INDIAN FOUNTAIN PEN BRANDS - 6 - PAGODA

This is an ED filler called PAGODA…it has got a plastic body with a metal slip cap…and lots of other interesting things about this plastic FP…the nib for one…it has a hooded nib with an unusual shaped nib door…and a square nib hole with ‘Pagoda Tipped Fine’ engraved on the nib…the name is also seen on the cap lip along with an image of the Pagoda…the name is also seen on the barrel…the end of the barrel has a hole and it doesn’t look like there used to be a stopper there…the cap and the clip have a different shape…

Here are some pictures…