Many collectors hope to find and acquire hefty pen collections and hoards. Not so many manage it. Whether buying a focused collector's holdings, or dealing with a casual picker in the wild, to be able to price a big bunch of pens in manner that makes good business but which also does not abuse the seller... takes practice. When spending 3 hours to look at 300 (or 3000) pens, one cannot indulge in the 30 minutes-per-pen that one might when examing a single pen on a dealer's table at a pen show. One must buy the chaff with the wheat, accept the 30 Parker 21's to get at the one Parker 51.
I admit... i love it. I've bought several collections the last few years. There was the 1000-pen Hoard from New York (I was splitting time between NYC and Syracuse, so was the family that owned the collection... fate) which mostly was Arnolds up to Eclipses, but then had one of just a few known of the vaunted Wahl oversize (Decoband) flat-top in Flamingo. Or the NJ Turnpike Hoard when Paul Erano and I met a retired Parker/Waterman distributor and bought his left over stock. Or the Gang of Five Pens hoard bought from Steve Overbury at the Ohio Pen Show 2012, for which I partnered with Mike Dvoretz, Jim Baer, Richard Binder and Rick Krantz (do a search on Facebook for Gang of Five Pens to find our page). Last year I pulled in Erano for the Lancaster Pen Hoard, after a fellow found me with plan to liquidate a 30 year holding of near moderns including choice Omas, Pelikan, Visconti, Parker and such.
I grabbed two collections just in the last month (will detail in another post the focused vintage pen collection found at Ohio last month).
Meanwhile, for the last 18 months, fate has taken me part time to Janesville, WI, home of Parker. I've long split time btween NYC (hanging out half the month not working in Manhattan) and half the month out of town in specialized Hospital Medicine position that offer certain perks. When my old group director left Syracuse for the mid west, we talked of my joining him out there to work, and I asked him what town? "Oh, said he, "I doubt you've ever heard of it. It's a small town in Wisconsin"...
The rest is history.
So last month someone found my website. Not so serious as a collector (not with books, mags, etc) he'd managed to salt away about 300 pens mostly Parkers, from 20 years of casual hunting. Time to sell. I noted we'd need to send images and/or pens or we'd need to get together. Where was he? Figure Janesville. Fate, again. That's how he casually was able to find so many Parkers. Flea markets out there are not like flea markets in NY. I met him and bought the collection. Lots of chaff. Also some nutritious wheat. 5-10 pens for my personal collection. Lots of good stuff for the website. Lots of... other stuff.
I'll start with a few key pics here of most of the really old stuff, also a link to some of the serious pens (off catalogue and prototype, no joke) of the sort that are found by casual hunters of Parkers in Janesville. That was a different thread. There will be more to follow after the first few pics below.
First. It seems he liked Red Parkers. Three of the Big Reds (Parker Duofold Senior) are quite nice. One has that off-catalogue nib with nearly no vent hole. Couple of the red Duofold Juniors are not bad. The early one in red hard rubber (vs later celluloid) seems clean at first peek. Still need to examine that further.
Here's the special nib shown above.
Link for Discussion of this Off-Catalogue NIb
regards
David
