When you enter E.B. Collinton, Ltd., in the Monadnock Building, be advised not to carry a Bic. The proprietors don’t take kindly to Bics.
Hamilton and Collins, who combined their names to create the English-sounding name of the store, have taken great care to give their establishment an 1890s feel. It features a nonworking fireplace with a white wood mantel, framed vintage magazine ads from the Parker pen company set against the blue-green walls, and gold-leaf lettering on the Dearborn Street windows.
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Oak-trimmed glass cabinets contain the pens, which begin with inexpensive Sheaffers and move up to the Waterman, Mont Blanc, and Pelikan brands. A proper pen can be had for under $100, but the cognoscenti often go for the $300 models. One favorite is the Parker Duofold, modeled after a pen popular in the 1920s and ’30s. The Duofold, with a patterned acrylic body, has a nib of 18-karat gold that’s burnished by being tumbled in a barrel of walnut chips for 15 hours (or so the manufacturer claims). The priciest pen in stock is the Pelikan Toledo, which runs $579. Each Toledo comes sheathed in silver, with a hand-tooled gold overlay, and is signed by the artisan who created it. Should you want the solid-gold Mont Blanc, for $8,000, Collins and Hamilton can order it.
“I’ve followed Ed around,” says Evelyn Lewis, a management consultant who has pens she uses for business and others for writing poetry. “You can tell Ed your nib doesn’t feel right, and he’ll give you another one. It’s not like at Field’s, where the salesperson will be in lingerie one week and pens the next.”
Bryski proved prescient. The fountain pen, invented in Kankakee in 1833 by insurance salesman Louis Waterman, saw its heyday in the depression, but with the advent of the ballpoint after World War II, it fell into near-oblivion. Fountain-pen sales now are climbing, however, according to the Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association–up 50 percent between 1987 and 1988, after flat revenues the year before. The nation’s leading pen stores, Fahrney’s in Washington, D.C., and Arthur Brown & Brothers in Manhattan, are reportedly flourishing.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Loren Santow.
