This pen was made in the late 1870s by the A. T. Cross Company, the same company that is still in business today. It is a sylographic pen, having a hollow tube instead of a nib to transport ink to paper.
Here is another interesting stylographic pen we have in our collection.
Even older than the Cross set are the dip pens. We haven't gone out of our way to collect them, but somehow several have made their way into our collection. Especially interesting are the telescoping pens, some with pencils. They fold into small elegant charms, often worn by ladies around their necks. The pen point slides out for use.
Our first Conklin was a black hard rubber crescent filler that was missing its crescent, we thought. When we got it home, we looked inside, and there was the crescent and all of the parts needed to put it back together. That pen was the first of our "sumgai" stories. We paid around $4 for it and of course it is now worth a great deal more. ("Sumgai" - that person who bought all the good ones just before you arrived - as in "I had a box of pens but some guy came in an hour ago and bought them all.") Here are some of our Conklins.
Recently we added this lovely Conklin crescent overlay to our collection:
Ann had her latest "sumgal" experience with this next Conklin. We were visiting our great pen pals, Don and Tricia, in Salem Oregon, and were of course out and about looking at antique stores. Our last stop was in Springfield as the dark was settling in and our visit was about over. We almost didn't stop at a small "junk" shop. As we were looking around, Ann spied the tell-tale shape of a pen poking from a pile of stuff. She extracted it and discovered it was one of the biggest Conklins she had ever seen. It was marked "$5". Ann could not hide her excitement as she whipped a $5 bill from her purse and paid for the pen. It was a senior Conklin Duragraph, a very rare pen as Conklin only made that brand for one year, before the Parker company sued them and caused them to change the name to Endura. (They also shrank the size when they changed the name.) Arvin cleaned up the pen and it came out looking almost mint.
Here are a few to catch your eye. Have you ever seen a gold filigree pen that is green? We hadn't either until we came across this Eclipse set. Just had to add them to our collection.
And how about this little beauty. It's an Edward Todd pen. It's hard to tell from the photo, but this pen is very tiny, around three inches long. It is very elegant and would have been used by a lady. This pen now belongs to a close friend and fellow pen collector who specializes in miniatures. We made a trade so that he could add this special one to his collection.
