Tag Archives: Mont Blanc pens

James Bond’s Montblanc from Octopussy: The Sequel

By Nathaniel Cerf on September 20, 2018

Two years ago we identified the sterling silver Montblanc 146 used in the 1983 James Bond film “Octopussy.” The film starred Roger Moore, Maud Adams and Louis Jordan…and a certain fountain pen that was modified by Q. The pen in the film holds a very potent acid ANNND a secret listening device.

A sterling silver with a barley design Montblanc 146 fountain pen that was used in the movie Octopussy rests on a table.

This is one of two pens used in the James Bond film “Octopussy.” In the movie the pen holds acid and a secret listening device. More recently, this one looks as if it held blue ink.

Among the pen’s other notable features is that it does not have the traditional Montblanc branded black dome with the 6-point star or snowy mountain top at the top of the pen. Montblanc got credit for the pen, it just seemed weird it branded the pen differently for the movie.

As fate would have it, the current owner of that pen read our blog post recently and sent us a photo of the original pen.

Jeremy F. is the pen’s owner, and he said there were two made for the film—his and one that has since gone missing. (Perhaps they shouldn’t have filled a plastic pen with potent acid.)

Jeremy got it from the one-time head of Dunhill, who got it from someone at Montblanc. He has since had it authenticated by Jens Rösler, grandson of Montblanc’s founder.

DC Pen Show Was Din-O-Mite!

By Nathaniel Cerf on August 14, 2017

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ThePenMarket.com just celebrated its 10th birthday in style at the Washington DC Pen Show! I can’t believe we have never gone in the past. Despite some organizational hiccups, it was phenomenal. So many pens! So many collectors! So many new and old friends!

This is a Neuport 28 fighter plane used by the Americans against the Germans in World War I

My four days at the show were my four hardest working days of the year. Surrounded by so many great folks, it was all pens from sun-up until well past midnight some nights. It was especially great meeting several long-time Mid-Atlantic customers for the first time in the flesh.

So many pens, supplies, ephemera…

Working my table, I don’t have time to shop much at the show, so my one real show purchase for myself was my long-desired Mont Blanc Boheme with the rarer emerald clip stone. I’ve always loved these modern recreations of the “safety” fillers. Who doesn’t love retractable nibs on fountain pens?

Three WWI planes rest side-by-side when 100 years ago they would have been in a desperate fight to the death. Please note the excessively frail design of the twin-engine observation plane on the top of the photo.

For me the trip to and from is also part of my vacation time. On the way down to DC, I stopped at the Civil War battlefield of Antietam. It is breath-taking to stand on the site where more than 23,000 Americans were killed or wounded in a single day of combat. Sept. 17, 1862. The battlefield has been beautifully preserved by the National Park Service, which tries its best to recreate exactly the way the battlefield looked on the morning of Sept. 17. Kudos to them for their efforts. I won’t bore you with all the bullets and history this time around, but I learned so much from the rangers that most books seem to leave out.

It was a far more political battle than normally gets described, and while the soldiers basically fought to a tactical draw, the North crushed the South’s political goals and ambitions with its incursion into Union territory.

On the way home, I visited my other historical obsession: aviation! I went to the new branch of the Smithsonian’s Air & Space Museum out by Dulles Airport! This was absolutely fantastic. From an only-one remaining and phenomenally frail looking twin-engine World War I trench observation plane to the Space Shuttle Discovery, it is truly impossible to grapple with all of the rare planes that broke myriad records and the gear from some of the most famous people in aviation. I loved seeing the uniform of America’s top WWI ace Eddie Rickenbacker. Seeing one of Amelia Earhart’s flight jumpsuits was great. There are even items from Charles Lindbergh.

Okay. It isn’t that disappointing. The P-40 is easily my favorite plane from World War II, although this is not a genuine original used by the famed Flying Tigers. It still looks pretty nice hanging from the ceiling!

World War II aviation is my favorite, and the museum did not disappoint. Okay, I was actually really disappointed that they mocked up a P-40J Kittyhawk to look like a real plane used by the Flying Tigers when it never saw that actual action. BUT, the collection of insanely rare and limited German and Japanese planes was especially mind numbing. Many were the only remaining examples.

It is difficult to imagine any such museum where an actual space shuttle is just not as impressive as the rest of the collection. Nevertheless, I was surprised at how huge the space shuttle is. Plus, looking into the restoration hanger means that even more great rarities will soon be on their way.

James Bond Has No Ordinary Mont Blanc

By Nathaniel Cerf on September 12, 2016

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Between the ages of 7 and 10, I set out on a quest to watch every James Bond movie made up until that point. Over the course of several summers, I was in a state gadget and spy bliss. I’ve keep up with Agent 007 ever since then. When an opportunity too good to pass up arrived, I was able buy each of the Bond movies in a mega collection on Blu-ray this summer for an insanely cheap price.

Satisfying my inner 10 year old over the summer has been tons of fun. Bond has a history of awesome pens, but the easiest one to identify was a sterling silver Mont Blanc 146 Solitaire in the 1983 classic “Octopussy.”

Roger Moore plays Bond, and it is one of his better Bond films. Not as good as “The Spy Who Loved Me,” it is still better than most of his others. This time a fake Faberge egg leads to a ring of jewel thieves led by a mysterious Maud Adams in the title role. Yet, her backers are really using her as a cover for their own nefarious nuclear attack. Louis Jourdan (of “Gigi” fame) is the evil villain.

As the infinitely clever Q outfits Bond with his gadgets for the film, he hands him the sterling 146. Unlike a traditional fountain pen, it is loaded with a very potent acid instead of ink. The acid is strong enough to melt steel bars. Yet, it is mild enough not to eat through the plastic (oops, we mean “precious resin”) base of the fountain pen under the sterling silver. This is why Q gets paid the big bucks.

Spoiler alert: The pen comes in handy as Bond uses it to bust out of a prison cell in India.

The pen also holds an amplifier that allows Bond to hear conversations through walls. A very hand device for a super spy.

Mind you, I absolutely love Bond movies. But the big question I always have is simply, once the villain identifies Bond is, in fact, Bond and captures him, as he invariably will, why doesn’t he take all of Bond’s stuff. By now they always know that Bond is a super-star assassin/spy who kills every bad guy he comes into contact with. Why do they always–ALWAYS–fail to take his watch, pens and other possessions. Even the ones who used to be spies themselves always fail to thoroughly search him for every possibly possession.

Anyhow, the one really unique thing about this pen in “Octopussy” is that Mont Blanc fails to brand the pen. Instead of their traditional snow cap star, they put on a sterling topper. Mont Blanc even gets special thanks in the credits. It seems odd they wouldn’t want to take advantage of the Bond sales bump.

We have a sterling silver Mont Blanc 146 LeGrand fountain pen that is very similar to Bond’s. Unfortunately, it only holds ink. DO NOT load it with acid!

We are more than happy to take advantage of it. We have one such sterling silver Mont Blanc 146 LeGrand fountain pen on our preowned luxury pens pages. It is in great working order and a helluva bargain compared to a new one.

We’ve Struck the Motherlode!

By Nathaniel Cerf on August 18, 2015

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Witness more than 300 vintage and modern fountain pens and writing instruments we have recently acquired for the website! If anything catches your eye, ask and we’ll tell you all about it.

It has been a while since we updated these pages, but we’ve been extremely busy putting together 3 huge acquisitions of vintage and modern pens. We have tons of vintage Sheaffers, Parkers, Conklins and Waterman fountain pens as well as preowned pens by Mont Blanc, Parker, Caran d’Ache, Pelikan, Waterman and many others.

You will soon see more than 300 writing instruments available…once we restore them all to their former glory. We have great pens ranging from a Parker 20 1/2 Jack Knife Safety pen to red Wahl-Eversharp Dorics to early wide-bodied Sheaffer TouchDowns to half a set of oversized Sheaffer Balance Lifetimes with their original nib stickers including Extra Fine, Fine, Medium and STUB!

The Mont Blanc pens include a Writer’s Series Agatha Christie and many bargains on the standard Meisterstucks!

Keep checking in to see what is new every day on our vintage pens pages and pre-owned pens pages. Enjoy!

Name that Logo

By Nathaniel Cerf on June 1, 2015

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It isn’t uncommon for folks to write in asking what type of pen they have. I look at it as a fun challenge to i.d. the pen. Unless it is an old Victorian era pen, I usually do okay figuring out who made it.

For a brief period in the 1970s, Mont Blanc changed its logo in the Saudi Arabian market to a white triangle, as seen in this photo of a Noblesse.

However, when Nigel wrote to me last October, we were both at a loss. He sent me a photo of a pen he had inherited. It looked like a Mont Blanc Noblesse. It said Mont Blanc on the pen. However, instead of a 6-pointed snowcap like the traditional Mont Blanc logo representing the mountain after which the company is named, his pen had a black field with a white triangle on the cap and a white circle on the tail.

Clearly, it wasn’t a Sheaffer. At first I thought it was a knockoff, but I didn’t think knockoff Mont Blancs were an issue in the 1970s. They didn’t instill their various trademarked hallmarks to verify authenticity until the 1990s. Plus, this looked like an authentic Noblesse from all of the other marks and design signatures of the pen.

It was time to do some serious sleuthing.

As it turns out, this is an authentic (and fairly rare) Mont Blanc. In a move that was embarrassingly insensitive, and particularly suspect for a German company then only 30 years removed from World War II, Mont Blanc altered their logo to appeal to a niche market. The company’s thought process went something like this: 1.) We want to break into the ballooning Saudi Arabian market and its rampant oil wealth. (Nothing wrong with that.) 2.) We want to be seen as the ultimate luxury writing brand. (They are brilliant marketers. Today they are instantly recognized all over the world as the authority in luxury writing instruments. Nothing wrong with that.) 3. Saudi Arabia and Israel are bitter enemies. 4.) Maybe our 6-point snowcap logo looks too much like a Star of David and will ruin our chances for cornering the Saudi market? (What?!) 5.) We will change our logo for the Saudi market. (Bad! Bad! Bad! I can’t imagine any multinational company today publicly announcing that they think a particular country is bigoted and then altering its products to satisfy that bigotry. Plus, it isn’t as if the world was so isolated in the 1970s that Saudis would never have known Mont Blanc’s logo was different every place else.)

It was a move that was seen as both derogatory toward Jews and the Saudis, and Mont Blanc stopped making the white triangle logos for the Saudi market after a couple years.

It should be noted that the modern Mont Blanc corporation has gone to great lengths to distance itself from its less savory past. It also is been bought and sold by new owners a couple of times since the 1970s. It was bought out by the British pen and luxury goods company Dunhill in 1977, and they were in turn bought by Richemont, who is presently the parent company for Mont Blanc, Dunhill and Cartier.

Quirky Pen Collections

By Nathaniel Cerf on March 7, 2015

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One of the coolest parts about owning a pen business is learning about people’s “other” pen collections. Every pen collector has their collection of daily users and museum pieces often built around brands such as Sheaffer, Parker, Mont Blanc and all of the others. But many collectors have special side project collections, too.

I love collecting pens inscribed with some reference to Christmas 1926, such as this senior Parker Duofold. Please let us know if you have any. What quirky traits do you collect in pens.

Mine is built strictly around a single day. I love keeping an eye out for pens that were given as gifts on Christmas day 1926. Why that Christmas? I have no idea. I just found myself one day with a curious handful of pens that all happened to have some inscription on them from 12-25-26. The photo is of my favorite, a black senior Parker Duofold. The full inscription reads, “P. M. Curtis 12-25-26.” There was an Eversharp Doric that read “X-mas 1926.” Ever since acquiring those two pens, I’ve been on the hunt for more.

Friend of ThePenMarket.com, Elizabeth J., has two odd-ball collections. One is for any sterling filigree pen with an engraving. The other, my favorite, is a collection of pens with really weird names engraved on them. “Sam Jones” will not impress her. “Gladys Oleander Gardner” or “Aloysius P. Frankenheimer Jr.” will win her over every time, even on a junker Wearever.

Keith L. loves green pens. Vintage, modern doesn’t matter, as long as it is a clean, distinctive green.

Francis B. zeroes in on pens made in the Minneapolis / St. Paul area in the 19teens and ’20s. Tommy U. does the same with oversized pens made in Chicago during that time period.

What quirky collection do you have? Please tell us, so we can help you keep an eye out for those pens.

And please, let us know if you have any of the pens listed above. We’d be very interested in buying them!

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Tag Archives: Mont Blanc pens

James Bond’s Montblanc from Octopussy: The Sequel

DC Pen Show Was Din-O-Mite!

James Bond Has No Ordinary Mont Blanc

We’ve Struck the Motherlode!

Name that Logo

Quirky Pen Collections