Inkograph

. . . I started collecting fountain pens as a joke. I reported to the CIO of a large, midwestern bank and he regularly used large, impressive, and expensive, fountain pens to make notes during staff meetings. I noticed my peers started, one-by-one, to use large, impressive pens in those meetings and thought them "suck ups".

One day, while wandering the stationery aisle at Wal-Mart, I noticed a blister-packed A & W Marquis fountain pen for $2. Thinking I'd have a bit of fun in the next staff meeting, I bought it, took it home and popped in an ink cartridge. Next staff meeting, everyone pulls out their impressive pen and I pulled out my Marquis and began to take notes. I was sitting to the immediate left of the CIO, who noticed my new pen. At meeting's end, he asked to see it, wrote a few lines, handed it back and said "nice pen".

It was a nice pen, wrote so much better than the cheap stick ballpoints the company provided, and I began to use it continuously. After a while, I began to think "if a $2 pen is this nice to use, wonder what a $40/50/100 pen would be like, so, I bought a few and they were very nice. Then I discovered vintage pens - so much better than contemporary; so interesting, so much variety, so many to choose from. Somewhere around 200 pens, I decided I needed some discipline; I couldn't buy every pen I came across and liked. Among my favorites in my collection were Conway Stewart (models 58 and 60 only) pens from Great Britain, Rexall house-brands and Lipic, a local company and I decided to concentrate on those.

As luck would have it, I bought a "lot" of 8 pens on eBay to get one for my collection and intended to resell the rest. But, one of them was this odd little Inkograph that I couldn't help but keep and use - I loved it. Soon I became interested in the company and the range of pens they produced over their near 40 year history and decided to learn more about them. Sadly, in the pen collector community, not much has been written of the company and, upon retirement, I decided to rectify that. I have begun to research the company, its products and officers with the intention of writing the definitive history of Inkograph. That leads to collecting ephemera and, given that I have more than demonstrated I have the "collector gene", while I'm collecting ephemera on that brand of pen, I may as well collect it for the other pens I collect.

Wonder what new collecting interest my ephemera collecting will lead to?