David,
Do you, or anyone know if there are any DM's and such in the Parker Archives? That would be something.
The colors and patterns are a very difficult topic to understand (at least to me) regarding the plastics in the pen world at the time. Or is it that the color spectrum for these pens are huge, and isolating every color, both Parker and other brands, would be daunting and impossible? hmmmm....
Regards,
George
It would be a huge, but fruitful, undertaking to map out all of the plastic patterns used at the time. We know that most pen companies bought celluloid stock from major chemical companies like DuPont. Larger companies appear to have obtained exclusive patterns for many of thier pens - think the Sheaffer or Parker striped patterns - but other patterns show up across multiple brands and manufacturers, and still other patterns show up in slightly different forms from differen manufacturer. Doing a photo-study of a few thousand pens to try to document which companies likely got rod-stock from the same source, and which companies used copy-cat patterns would be an interesting and valuable project.
John