Tag Archives: Conklin

Mark Twain’s Conklin Crescent

By Nathaniel Cerf on May 27, 2024

Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, owned this house with his wife Livy in Hartford, Conn.

Way back in 2013 I wrote a post called “Was Mark Twain the First Pen Pitchman?“. It was the oft repeated story about how author Samuel Clemens, who wrote under the pen name Mark Twain, advertised his support for the Conklin Crescent back in 1903. Clemens is best remembered for his novels “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” Plus there is the more relevant-than-it-has-been-in 100 years “The Gilded Age.”

I wouldn’t normally revisit an old post, but I just went to the Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, Conn. It is a beautiful house that he had custom built with his wife Livy (Olivia). Although Clemens was a noted writer and wit when they married in 1870, Olivia was the source of their wealth–the daughter of a prominent timber and coal baron. Their house in Hartford was built soon after their marriage. Remarkably, the young man who painted their foyer was none other than Louis Comfort Tiffany!

Clemens would write both Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer in that house.

At the bottom of the photo you can see the Conklin Crescent fountain pen that Mark Twain called his “profanity saver.” Above it to the right is his inkwell.

Among the many artifacts on display was the great author’s actual Conklin Crescent fountain pen. I am not sure what model it is. Yet, I was a bit appalled by its condition. Chunks of black hard rubber were missing from the barrel threads. It definitely isn’t in a condition to be restored to working order and safely used. Nevertheless, it was great to see the actual pen that is so frequently written about and rarely photographed.

If you find yourself in Connecticut, it is worth the visit to this museum. The house is very well preserved, and I certainly learned a ton about the author and his family.

Plus, his next door neighbor was Harriet Beecher Stowe who famously wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a critical look at American slavery that helped to promote the abolition movement. Her house is now a museum you can explore, too!

Resurrecting Vintage Pen Brands

By Nathaniel Cerf on June 24, 2023

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When I first started ThePenMarket.com, I also worked part-time at a brick-and-mortar pen shop in a mall. I was far more familiar with vintage pens than modern, and I was very excited to see that the Conklin Pen Company had been brought back to life at around the same time.

I had no idea who was behind the new Conklin, but I was thrilled to see the return of newer and bigger Crescent pens that were much more comfortable to hold and use than the often tiny originals.

Lo and behold, roughly 20 years later, a Facebook post brought me in contact with not only the genius behind the resurrection of Conklin, BUT also Esterbrook, LeBoeuf and the ubiquitous pen of office workers everywhere in the 1990s—Sensa! He also was a founding member of the major American pen distributor called Kenro Industries in 1993!

Robert Rosenberg is the inspired entrepreneur who has resurrected the vintage pen brands of Conklin, Esterbrook, LeBoeuf and the modern brand Sensa!

His name is Robert Rosenberg, and he has kindly agreed to talk with us here at ThePenMarket.com to tell us a little about his adventure in pens and his products moving forward.

ThePenMarket: Welcome to our Drippy Musings! It is an honor to be able to talk with you about your impressive successes bringing back beloved pen brands of yesteryear. Please tell us a little about how you got into pens.

Robert Rosenberg: My father was in pens. I grew up in the pen industry. When I was a little boy, my grandfather became the exclusive U.S. distributor of Pilot pens. My father joined him. At the time, Pilot had only one pen: the Razor Point. It became a great success. [Pilot eventually broke their distribution contract, and his dad worked out a deal where he remained a consultant and helped establish Pilot as a much larger company in the U.S. His father also was the first to help bring Sailor pens to the U.S. in the early 1980s]

My father was now in the pen industry, and he formed another company to distribute Waterman pens in the U.S. [At the time Waterman was an independently owned French company, not a part of Newell-Rubbermaid, as it is today.] After their initial success, Waterman then tried to set up its own company in the U.S. and Dad became the president of that subsidiary in the United States in 1986.

TPM: Did you have any interest in vintage pens brands when you were younger?

RR: My father and I used to go to flea markets as a kid. We’d go to flea markets to look for old Waterman pens. We bought a lot of them.

TPM: How did you come up with the idea to first bring back Conklin?

RR: I was very familiar with the pen business when I decided to go to law school. I took a course about trademarks. And it taught the law regarding what you do with abandoned trademarks. I wondered if there were any pen brands that fell off the face of the earth. I did the research, and I found Conklin.

TPM: How do you bring back a dead company? Do you have to pay someone for the rights to it? Who would you even pay?

RR: In trademark law, if there is brand that is no longer around any more and a certain amount of time has passed, you can file a trademark application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark office. It is a long process and it doesn’t always work. It isn’t easy, but I was able to acquire the rights to Conklin.

This modern Conklin Nozac was one of the very first pens Rosenberg released with help from Visconti.

TPM: I love how you redeveloped a successful Nozac filler and the Crescent filler. I, honestly, think that was the key Conklin’s incredible success. How did you manage to go retro when the world was locked into cartridge and converters?

RR: That was probably the smartest thing I did, and it was not totally my idea. I worked with Dante Del Vecchio at Visconti. He was very eager to work with me. We worked out a deal and he made it for us.

TPM: With Conklin seemingly really roaring along, why did you sell the company?

RR: I didn’t want to sell the company. My father had come on as a partner. And we ran it; we built it. Then one morning I found him at my desk. He had a brain hemorrhage and passed away. We sold it to YAFA due to estate issues that arose from my father’s passing.

TPM: In 2015, you breathed fresh life into Esterbrook. What inspired you to go back and revive that brand?

RR: I had been looking at that brand for a number of years. It was still trademarked by somebody, and I was keeping my eye on it for a long time. Eventually the trademark had been cancelled. I wasn’t even aware of how big the history of the company was. I think I made some missteps in the beginning. We had some backlash from the pen community. [The pen community wanted the return of its J-model pens from the early ’50s and the original replaceable screw-in Esterbrook nibs. But, as Mr. Rosenberg pointed out, even if Esterbrook had not gone out of business, they wouldn’t be still making pens just as they did 70 years ago.] We did have some nice pens. I had worked with Kenro for a year really getting Esterbrook running, again, and then I eventually sold it to them.

The Conklin Mark Twain was the first really big hit Rosenberg’s resurrection of Conklin had. It was based on the original pen from the late 19th century. The old company had paid the author Mark Twain to be its first spokesman.

TPM: Clearly, you weren’t done, yet, bringing back the iconic LeBoeuf in 2019. How did that come about. Unlike the other two brands, which had died out decades earlier, hadn’t there already been an attempt to bring back LeBoeuf in the 1980s or ’90s? I have one of their “Greg Norman” pens on my website.

RR: Yes. They did a horrible job. I remember when LeBoeuf was brought back. I shook my head at the time, and I didn’t understand what they were doing. They had nice boxes, but that was it.

At the time I also got Sensa. After the company’s roaring success in the 1990s, Newell-Rubbermaid had bought it for $25 million. The reason that they bought it was for the patents on the grips. It never worked out for them, and they just dropped it and let it go. It is crazy. They had a huge following. We still get calls from people to replace their grips. [The original Sensa Plasmium grips started decomposing, leaking and getting sticky.]

The grips are very tricky to make. We spent a lot of time to get the Plasmium grip just right so it won’t have those problems as before. However, we had to redesign the pen to make these new grips work better, which is why we can’t replace the grips on the old pens.

TPM: For readers who don’t know this, LeBoeuf was founded in 1919 in Springfield, Mass. It was the very first pen company to manufacture fountain pens made of celluloid. Robert, you’ve brought back some beautiful recreations of some of those early designs in modern acrylic pens. Are there plans to keep bringing back more of those stunning early designs?

RR: Yes. The thing with LeBoeuf is that they didn’t have a lot of different models. They had a brief history. They had this Pilgrim, and we are going to continue with that. We do have some other designs and productions. We’ve sort of made a name for ourselves with our limited editions. We just came out with a Winston Churchill this week, and we’ve almost already sold out of it. We’ve got new releases planned through 2025. People have really gotten into the limited editions and themes. Edgar Allen Poe was probably our best seller. Next month we have a Herman Melville. It is a nice business model.

TPM: Given how vintage filling systems really seemed to be key to the success of reviving Conklin, is there any hope for the classic sleeve fillers once used by LeBoeuf? In truth they were basically very simple aerometric fillers under the sleeve.

RR: We’re trying. We’re working on some designs now. We do have some other vintage inspired pens that we are working on. They will be out in 2024.

TPM: How about a solid-gold nib?

RR: We tend to have stayed away from the gold because of the pricing.

TPM: What can we pen devotees expect from you in the future?

RR: We are working on a new Sensa fountain pen. I think it will be more acceptable to fountain pen users.

TPM: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today! Best of luck in all of your inky endeavors. To see more about modern LeBoeuf or Sensa, please go to their websites:

LeBoeuf

Sensa

How Do I Restore a Conklin Crescent

By Nathaniel Cerf on May 30, 2020

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We are by no means done with the Decameron 2020 Project. However, I felt like getting back to pens for a posting. If you’ve been mostly coming for the storytelling, who knows, maybe you’ll get a kick out of a deeper dive into old fountain pens.

Here is a Conklin Crescent 2NL fountain pen in need of restoration.

Let’s look at one of the oldest “self-filling” fountain pen filling systems. In the earliest days of fillable fountain pens, any pen with a bladder or ink sac was considered self-filling. Before that you had dips and eyedroppers. Conklin invented the crescent filler in 1898. For as cumbersome as it looks, it was an insanely simple design. The pen is hollow like an eyedropper, but there is a rubber ink sac affixed to the nipple of the section. A crescent is fitted to a flat steel bar, and when the safety ring is rotated into the proper position, the crescent can be depressed, flattening the rubber ink sac within. The rubber ink sac wants to re-inflate, which fills the sac with ink and pushes the crescent back out of the barrel. Way less messy than an eyedropper, it was an instant hit. Even the famed American author Mark Twain was hired to be an advertising spokesman for the pen.

Don’t soak a Conklin hard rubber pen for very long, as it will discolor the old hard rubber. Be sure to get the water over the end of the section and on to the barrel threads.

If you already read our “How Do I Re-Sac a Vintage Pen” article, this isn’t very different. However, most of these pens are made from black hard rubber more than 100 years ago, and they are very brittle. You want to make sure you are pretty comfortable with restoring plastic/celluloid pens first. These early Conklins are getting much older and harder to find, and they break much more easily.

As with before, you will need some ink sacs, a pair of spark-plug/section pliers, a long dental pick, sac shellac or rubber cement, scissors that can cut through rubber ink sacs, a jar or cup, clean water, polish, a cloth rag, paper towels, a hairdryer, a razor blade and an ultra-sonic cleaner.

Always start by soaking the nib in room temperature water over the threads of the barrel. Now the trick with old hard rubber is that water discolors it quickly. A shiny black will quickly turn to a chocolate brown haze. Don’t soak it for long, just enough to start to leech out old ink and maybe lubricate the friction fit of the section into the barrel. I certainly wouldn’t soak it for more than an hour. I’d probably soak it for much shorter a time.
Next, remove the nib and section from the water and dry them off.
Warm them up just a little with the hair dryer or heat gun. You only want them to be warm to the touch. Heat will also discolor the hard rubber. Plus, it can melt it.
Scrape the dead ink sac out of the barrel. Be sure to be especially careful shaving the ink sac remains off the section nipple.

Using your section pliers, gently grip and twist the section counter clockwise in an unscrewing motion. Sometimes it takes nerves of steel, patience and experience to discern the difference between the old ink sac inside the pen cracking and the barrel of the pen cracking. If the barrel cracks, you’ve likely killed the pen and made it nothing more than a parts donor.
Once you get the section to start coming out, gentle, small wiggles can work it out without further stressing it from twisting. Very small wiggles. You can easily break the barrel, especially when the section looks as if it is almost out of the barrel. The more the section wiggles, the more it can act as a lever to crack the barrel. Some people choose the give the nib and section a sonic cleaning and others don’t. The sonic action can destroy the part if there is a crack already starting in it. More than 30 seconds to a minute will start discoloring the rubber. However, I’ve also found that pens this old often are filled with sediment-based inks that need something special like a sonic cleaning to remove the caked-in old ink.
After the section is out, the rest is fairly easy. Scrape out all of the old ink sac from inside the barrel and very gently shave off the remaining sac on the nipple. Your razor can easily cut the nipple or cave in a wall of the nipple. Go super slow and easy with only small motions.
Polishing old hard rubber is difficult. You can wear away a lot of rubber very quickly, ruining imprints and chasing.

With everything cleaned out and disassembled, that is when I like to polish the pen and parts. You cannot go as rough on century-old hard rubber as you can plastics. I like to use MAAS metal polish on a soft terry cloth rag. Mostly I just give a light going over of the pen and cap with the polish and rag because both strip away the top layers of the rubber and can remove chasing and other imprints. It also removes some of the chocolate hazing. Using a Q-tip, I also polish the nib and crescent.
Reinstall the crescent filler and lock it in place with the safety ring.
Dust the ink sac in talcum power to help preserve it.

Size and trim an ink sac that isn’t too snug inside the barrel. If you don’t have the crescent filler with the bar reinstalled first, you won’t get the proper fit.
Use orange shellac to attach the sac to the section nipple.
Dust the sac in pure talcum powder
Very gently and slowly reinstall the sac and section into the barrel. This is another high-risk move that can crack the barrel so take it easy. You might even want to warm-up the barrel a bit.