[rhr]

Waterman's Knock-Out Block

Here's an interesting repair tool I found some years ago. It came from the last effects of a pen repair shop here in my city. At first I thought it was just a generic knock-out block that the local repairman made for himself.

http://img.photobuck...rpen/tools1.jpg

It's made from a nice block of shellacked or varnished golden oak that's been drilled out with 3 holes, and reinforced with a top metal plate. On one side it has a lead plate attached, and one corner of the block is shaped into a protruding stem. I'm only guessing, but the soft sheet of metal and the rounded stem seem like they would serve perfectly as a nib anvil.

Well, the golden oak wood looked so good, despite the fact that the wooden side was scorched by a cigarette burn. The repairman must have forgotten his cigarette butt on the wooden side of the tool one day, I guess. So I decided to take the lead plate off and refinish the surface underneath, and use it as my own knock-out block, but then I made a fascinating discovery. Look at what I found underneath, on the underside of the plate.

http://img.photobuck...rpen/tools2.jpg

I removed the plate very carefully, saving the nails, and trying not to damage the plate. To my surprise, there was an image engraved on the underside of the lead plate. It was part of a Waterman's pen advertisement! This lead sheet was part of a printing plate for a very recognizable Waterman's ad, the one with a row of various styles of nibs at the bottom edge with various widths of ink lines extending up from the iridium points, and an eyedropper pen placed diagonally across the ink lines. If someone has a copy of the ad, please post it in this thread. I seem to recall that the ad might have used the ad line, "Personal Nib Choice", or "The Army of the Dip-No-Mores". Someone really should publish a comprehensive book of early Waterman's ads.

Waterman's must have had a stack of these types of lead printing plates kicking around in the warehouse and decided to pull them out of storage and put them to good use. I have since restored the piece and replaced the plate, even to the extent of taking great pains to replace the nails in their original holes. Each nail head had a distinctive shape and left its unique imprint in the lead.

Does anyone else have any other interesting pictures of repair tools with a story?

George Kovalenko.




-- Edit Sept 5, 2007 --

I finally found a copy of that ad again. It appeared in the August 1910 issue of The Busy Man's Magazine, page 1.
-- GK.

[Free Citizen]

Hi George,

An interesting report. I wonder why you have decided to insert the images as a link instead of a IMG SRC as a more direct approach. Anyway, a good post and I look forward to seeing more .

Lim

[rhr]

Hi Lim,

I'll reply here to both your queries concerning my posts with the repair tool pictures.

I found these tools in 1993 when I was researching old theaters in my city. Along the way I got to know an old jeweler who sold me some old unrepaired pens from his old business, including a Moss Agate Patrician. I was looking for a lathe, and he told me about the son of another jeweler who still had his father's lathe. The son sold me the lathe, and when he found out that I collected and repaired fountain pens, he mentioned that his father's jewelry shop was one block away from a pen repair shop that was called Speciality Repairs. I quickly went over to an archival library that deals with the history of my city, a library where I have now been working since 1994, and located the address of the shop. I found that he was in business from 1945 to 1965, and when I contacted the surviving son I was pleasantly surprised to discover that they had a box of his repair shop effects. As well as the repair tools, there were long pen boxes and envelopes full of mint repair parts, and I mean mint, straight from the various pen company repair-part departments, some in little envelopes with the part numbers written on them, a cigar box full of little boxes with 200 gold nibs in them, a few hundred rubber sacs that are still good to this day, and the carcasses of many broken pens and pencils. It was my great fortune to be first to find this treasure trove, and they felt that the box had found a good home, so they let it go. I kept most of the boxes and envelopes of mint parts intact and have only very sparingly dipped into them.

So, do you think that this qualifies me as a sumguy, at least for that year?

I took the photos in 1998, and they were just kicking around, so I thought I'd share them. I scanned the photos this year, and they're not the best quality images. I know how to size images for inclusion within a post, but I chose not to include them at all within the threads for a few reasons.

These are just the first three in a series of five threads that I plan on completing in the next few weeks. In some of the posts, an element of surprise helps out, and if I were to include the images within the text, then that surprise would be ruined. I also wanted the whole series to be of a piece and to resemble one another. You can also see the first two in this series on The Fountain Pen Network in the Pen History forum. There I included the images within the first one, but hid them in the second one, and I didn't like the inconsistency, so here I decided to hide them all to make all the threads look alike. Last of all, they take up less space on the board as URLs, rather than as images. Adding the numbers to the images is disfiguring, and too much like hard work. Life is too short.

Thanks for your comments.

George Kovalenko.

[Free Citizen]

Life is too short.

This I agree. Carry on .