About Penchantment

I discovered vintage fountain pens in a rural college town antique store. When first that humble, black Esterbrook caught my eye, I was suddenly reminded of a friend’s advice about how fountain pens might improve one’s penmanship. In my case there was much room for improvement. To the complaints of professors despairing to decipher my chickenscratch exams there was added the embarrassment of my handwritten notes, which were fast becoming illegible even to me! For the price of a hamburger I brought that Estie home. Only then did I learn that some fountain pens, like people, had bladders. And my pen was decidedly incontinent. An order from Pendemonium and a couple late nights on, my Esterbook lay inked and ready for service atop my desk alongside an assortment of pen repair tools, supplies, and a signed copy of "Dabook" by the late Frank Dubiel.

In a century disposed as never before to the heedless business and busyness of life, the fountain pen endures as relic of times bygone, when the pace of one’s writing was keyed to the mindful, single-minded pace of one’s thoughts. Against the grain of disposable culture and hasty communication – of BIC-sticks, AI-generated images, and text messages – it offers itself up as an occasion to slow down, tune in, and get a feel for the process of expression in whatever we use it to express. Insofar as unaccustomed fountain pen users learn to loosen their grip and ease up on the nib, so too do they release themselves from the grip of that business and busyness of life, from all the pressures it entails. Over time and with some concentrated effort I got a feel for the nib in its effortless glide across the paper. With a fountain pen in my hand the process of writing became for me a sort of joyful refuge. Not only did that process improve my penmanship as I dabbled in calligraphy, it brought my writing and even my thinking into clearer focus.

In the decades since I restored that Esterbrook, I have used and collected vintage fountain pens from around the world. In the process, and thanks to fellow pen historians, I have gained an admiration for their diverse designs and a deep appreciation of their historical development against the backdrop of history more broadly. Over years of study and guidance from expert pen mechanics I developed a repertoire of advanced repair techniques, which I honed on thousands of pens of myriad materials, designs, and filling mechanisms. The lion’s share of these I’ve found homes for in the last 20 years through Reddit, FPN, FPGeeks, and Pentrace. The popularity of my sales on those platforms inspired me to create a website of my own at long last.

I approach every restoration as a work of salvage. It is my own modest effort to reclaim in some small way the quality, beauty, and durability of the past from the injection-molded disposability of the present. As a collector with a discerning eye for condition, I take utmost care to revive the original appearance of each pen while preserving its distinctive features: from chasing and plating to imprints and personalizations. But fountain pens are also tools designed to be put to use, every day, in some cases for a lifetime or more. As a longstanding fountain pen user and booster, then, I strive with no less effort to restore each pen’s filling system to factory reliability while preserving all original, non-perishable parts. And even as I ensure the nib of each pen is smoothened and tuned to perform like new, I always seek to preserve its original writing characteristics.

Of all the inkstained joys this hobby has afforded me over the years, none is greater than the gratification I’ve derived from breathing new life into an old pen and passing it on to be used for another lifetime or else preserved for generations to come. I hope you find something here that you might fill with your favorite ink, something that fills you with joy in turn.

Happy Ink Trails!

Wesley Mattingly