PenHero 365: Postal Reservoir Pen
by Jim Mamoulides, January 21, 2010
Postal Reservoir Pen nib detail, note clear barrel showing breather tube
I find the best things randomly in antique store trips. One year we decided to take a trip to the North Carolina coast and discovered that New Bern is an antique hunter's haven. There are several nice shops downtown, and nearly every one of them had pens. One shop must have been the drop off point for a collector, because almost everything they had was in the original box, in very nice shape, and priced accordingly. Although there were some nice items there, I was not in the mood to pay retail for something I might have to fix up later. Most of the other shops had pens in the more usual way I find them, in a display case either laying on a shelf tray or in a cup.
One store looked like it had previously been a grocery or large five and dime, with a big, all glass storefront, drop ceiling and bare fluorescent lighting inside. The aisles were laid out in grocery fashion, front to back, with lots of shelves chock full of stuff along with locked display cases with the smaller or more valuable items. This was one of the stores where pens were in several places and so I wandered it first and then had one of the clerks bring the keys to the cases where I saw something interesting. This particular store was a goldmine, with many interesting pens that you will see this year and at very cheap prices. Part of the reason is that most of the pens were just caked over with dried ink, sticker glue and other things that hid the fact that many were actually very unusual finds.
Postal Reservoir Pen closed
A pen you just don't see every day is a Postal Reservoir Pen. This gigantic pen (think size between a Pelikan 800 and 1000), was made in the 1920s, and according to Frank Dubiel's Fountain Pens: The Complete Guide To Repair & Restoration, this is the first bulb-filling pen to use a breather tube. The pen is filled by removing the blind cap from the end of the barrel and repeatedly squeezing the rubber ink sac until ink filled the barrel. The breather tube runs the length of the transparent barrel and just into the opening of the ink sac. The breather tube regulates the flow of ink and air into and out of the pen, facilitating a complete fill.
Interestingly, Dubiel points out in his repair guide, that this system is essentially the basis for the later Parker Vacumatic and Waterman Ink-Vue pens, which draw ink into the barrel, regulated by a breather tube, and use a rubber sac or diaphragm that is manipulated by a lever or plunger unit instead of a manually squeezed bulb, as in this pen.
Postal Reservoir Pen open
There are two principal issues with bringing one of these pens back into service. First is a clogged breather tube, since it is the ink pathway through the feed into the barrel. If the tube is clogged, the pen won't fill, nor will it write. A thin wire has to be used delicately to clean out any blockage, and even that can be tricky. The second problem, as seen on this example, is getting the inside of the barrel clean. Since the section is sealed onto the front of the barrel, it's not simple to get off and the clear plastic barrel is fragile. Don't be surprised to see hairline cracks. If you can get the pen operating, eventually the process of filling and expelling the pen should work most dried ink problems out and the barrel should start to clear up. Early clear plastics often amber with time, as seen here.
There is not a lot of manufacturer information on Postal Reservoir Pens, but print advertisements dating from 1926 indicate that the pen was primarily sold direct through the mail, and was much cheaper than top brand pens, selling for $2.50, at a time when the Parker Duofold sold for $7.00, and was advertised as holding as much as four times the ink as a regular pen.
Postal Reservoir Pen open with blind cap removed
This Postal Reservoir Pen is a large, yet lightweight pen, weighing 0.7 ounce and being 5 11/16 inches long with the cap on and 6 7/8 inches with the cap posted on the end of the barrel. This is a really big pen for the 1920s, a little longer than a Pelikan 800. The uncapped pen is plenty long by itself and fits the hand nicely unposted.
If you have used a Parker Vacumatic, then this pen will remind you how long it takes to fill one of those. Basically, remove the blind cap, dunk the section in the ink, and start squeezing the ink sac, watching the ink gradually fill the barrel. It takes a LOT of squeezes to get this done. The large 14 karat gold nib is a slightly flexible fine and writes nicely, but is not finished at the same level as the major brands. This is a pen for someone who does not want to refill very often. I see it more as a novelty than a daily user, especially as the plastic is fragile and I don't want to further stain the already ambered barrel.
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