Wednesday, November 18, 2009

A Quite Neat 1931-ish Parker so-called "Thrift" pen



After the recent mayhem with my hospital group (sparing me, at least), I'm starting to catch up with couple weeks of email and with work on the next website update.

I shot the following pen, a neat find at the Ohio Pen Show.

Often lumped under the "Thrift Pen" label, this one is of the same style shown in the inspiration for that term, a Parker ad that offered affordable sets- more or less- "in these thrifty times". That set showed cream-and-bronze. This one is black-and-bronze, a color used also for the scarce Parker Combo. Parker also issued some pens in a Conklin-like black/bronze (with more bronze)

This one is in superb condition, with code/pirce  sticker. Given how few of the (usually) un-catalogued "thrift" pens are found  with stickers, perhaps purpose would be served examining catalogues from that general era for code correlations. But, I don't have time now ;)

regards

David

1 comment:

  1. David,

    A very nice find indeed.

    I was also lucky at Ohio to latch on to a bright green with black cracked ice effect Premiere. It's the second pen down from the top right in your nifty long photo montage.

    I'm giving a brief talk to the Dallas club on "thrift time" pens. It has forced me to think about them a bit more and I had to come up with some kind of grouping for easy reference. What I came up with is five groups: Premieres and Modernes, of course, followed by Doufold-ish (which I toss your stickered example into along with any others with Duofold like clip topper and blind cap), pre-Challengers (for the ones with the early Challeger clip and look) and finally Step Ends. I think this captures the bulk of what I've seen that doesn't have official names. Of course there will always be some exception like the rare combo. I'll just have to live with them.

    Regards,
    John Jenkins

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