About This Pen

This Parker 51 Vacumatic-filling is one of my favorites.  Not just because it’s a 51, proving with every fill why 51s are called one of the best fountain pens ever made, and not just because it’s a beauty, from 1949, in shiny India black, with a 10k gold-filled blue diamond cap with vertical chasing. This pen is being featured because it is one of my favorite examples of great pens finding their moment.

This pen was discovered at the bottom of a box of pens, by a champion picker at a rural Wisconsin auction.  It carried the grunge of long habitation in that box.  The picker sent me a couple of pictures, and I approved the purchase of the box for that pen.  Later that evening, I was told that the pen was mine, and that she had already sold the rest of the box to the second-place bidder, without learning what he wanted from it!  So, it was a win.  Then, after I restored and started using it, it became a double win because its wet B nib made it an extraordinary writer.  Some ten years later, it is used more often than all of my pens except my 149, and while I can never successfully list Tim’s Top Ten Pens in fewer than fifteen, it’s always in the first five.