CARPENTER #2: A fountain pen that refills like your lipstick
The Lady Sheaffer
Hi, folks! Happy holidays. I hope you’ve been doing well, however you celebrated. For my partner, dog, cat, and I, that was right here in Massachusetts. We had a quiet Christmas — video called with our families, then settled back into our ongoing Top Chef marathon.
Of major note, though, is a fountain pen I ordered for myself as a gift — my very first vintage fountain pen, a Lady Sheaffer. It’s a pen that was first manufactured in 1958, specifically for women. I saw someone talk about Sheaffer pens on YouTube, and I went looking for more information. That’s when I stumbled upon the Lady Sheaffer, these outrageously extravagant, clipless fountain pens. Now, what makes a pen specifically for a woman? Here, let a Sheaffer salesperson tell you:
It refills like her lipstick! Of course!
Walter A. Sheaffer started fiddling with a new pen filling system in 1907, and by the 1930s, Sheaffer — the pen company — was a “leader in the luxury pen market,” according to the brand’s history. Filling a fountain pen requires a user to dip a nib into an inkwell, to totally submerge it. From there, there are a bunch of different ways to suck up the ink into the pen, and Sheaffer tried a lot of them — lever, vacuum, and its own propriety “snorkel” mechanism.
Cartridges existed, but they became popular when they became easy and convenient to use, somewhere in the 1950s. Sheaffer’s first cartridge pen was created in 1955, the Fineline Cartridge pen. A few years later, it seems, Sheaffer realized that the cartridge could be a selling point for women. The Lady Sheaffer line first debuted in 1958.
When the Lady Sheaffer line was first released in 1958, it had a variety of different finishes to choose from, all of which were designed with some sort of fabric or jewelry in mind — corduroy, paisley, tulle, or tweed. They are all very flashy, in golds, silvers, and reds, and some even have a little decorative band where the body meets the cap, like a diamond ring for your pen. They’re beautiful, and marketing in the '50s and '60s played off that; “What women doesn’t enjoy fine things?” But marketing for the Lady Sheaffer also focused on how women simply aren’t interested in the messiness of a traditional fountain pen: “Give her the lady-like pen that never goes near an ink bottle.”
Ads from the time proudly displayed this tagline: “So lady-like to fill!” That’s because you simply had to drop in a cartridge, and the pen would do the rest — puncture the cartridge and start moving ink down into the feed. It was in direct contrast with Sheaffer’s PFM, the Pen For Men. (Who were pens for before? No one knows.) The PFM used Sheaffer’s “snorkel” filling mechanism, used to fill from ink bottles. It came in serious colors, like green, black, and eggplant purple, and it had a clip so you could tuck it safely into your suit jacket pocket. The PFM was a tool. The Lady Sheaffer was an accessory.
I assume the idea here is that tools are meant as being messy work — masculine — which is why a woman would never want to go near an ink well. The irony, though, is that Sheaffer has always seemingly been so obsessed with a clean filling system. That’s what the “snorkel” system was designed for! It appears men, of that time, didn’t want to get ink all over their hands, either.
Brands are definitely not as opaque with their marketing as they once were — at least with fountain pens. The luxury fountain pen market, at least, does have a masculine overture — fancy pens for powerful men — but I can’t remember the last time I heard someone actually say that out loud. And it’s ironic, because most of the people I know who use fountain pens are women. But really, that’s just an anecdote; I haven’t done any research on modern fountain pens and gender. (Though I did read a paper in the Journal of Gender Studies about fountain pens: “A pen that ‘looks like a CEO in a business suit’: gendering the fountain pen,” by Harun Kaygan, Pınar Kaygan & Özümcan Demir.)
Either way, I find these pens beautiful and also hilarious. And I had to have my own. I ordered it from eBay, from a random seller who took a horrible picture and provided almost no information. It came in a very dirty and also ugly orange sleeve, with a stained blue cartridge inside. I immediately refilled that cartridge with Platinum’s Sepia Black iron gall ink, which is one of my favorite inks of all time. When I went to put pen down to the paper, nothing came out.
I’ve spent enough time fiddling with my Noodler’s and TWSBI pens that I’m relatively comfortable taking a pen apart, but I was nervous with this one. But after a little tinkering (and probably just patience waiting for the ink to move), it started writing. I love her.
It’s a shockingly small pen, compared to the modern ones I have. (It’s thinner, but longer than the Sailor Pro Gear Slim.) It’s also very light in the hand. I would call it delicate. The nib is slightly upturned, which I assumed would create a “fude” pen-like feel. (Fude fountain pens have dramatically bent nibs used to create a variance in line width.) It’s not like that at all; there’s no real noticeable line variance. The ink flow is fairly smooth, but there is some skipping occasionally. I’m not sure if that’s just user error, though, as I get used to the slightly upturned nib.
The exact model I purchased is the Lady Sheaffer Skripsert IV in Paisley Gold on Black. According to Sheaffer Targa, a website that lovingly details Sheaffer fountain pens for identification, it’s a “black enameled finished with engraved paisley pattern.
My pandemic lockdown hobby is watercolor painting, so, of course, I painted my new pen.
Now that I’ve held a vintage Lady Sheaffer fountain pen, I have this terrible urge to collect them all.
If you want to learn more about Lady Sheaffer fountain pens, or about Sheaffer in general, I’ve linked the sources for this information throughout the post. But here are some extra links:
Sheaffer fountain pens from 1953 to 2003
Sheaffer PFM (Lots of great fountain pen history on this site!)
Lady Sheaffer restoration blog post
Three incredible Lady Sheaffer ads
Before I go
As always, thank you for reading. It’s such a delight to write about fountain pens and other stationery. I posted this on Twitter, but I plan on sending these out twice a month, every other week. Maybe some bonus content in between, if I feel inspired, but I want to make these posts special, and that times a bit of time — especially since I already write so much for my job. (For those who don’t know, I’m a reporter at a video game and entertainment website called Polygon, part of Vox Media.)
Please feel free to reach out with any comments, questions, or suggestions. I’ve loved chatting with folks about pens.
You can email me at: carpenternewsletter@gmail.com, if you’d like to say hello! Otherwise, I’m on Twitter @sweetpotatoes, where I am continuing to document all the fountain pens in Netflix’s The Crown. I’m somewhere in the middle of season 2.
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