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Definitely-green pens & pencil, detail.jpeg

Mercian

By Mercian

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A picture to show the detail of these green pens’ caps & nibs.

 

The 1990/91 M800 has an ‘M’ nib that is marked with the ‘Eagle’s head’ French assay mark for 18k gold, and the Swiss(?) ‘PF’ stamp too;

 

The 1954 400 has one of the ‘script’ nibs, marked ‘F’
It has a beautifully-crisp italic grind, which is very similar to that of the ‘F’ nib on my modern Pilot Plumix - except that it also flexes a bit :wub:

Pelikan has not made nibs like this for decades now :( - so anyone who asks to borrow this pen or nib is, in essence, testing my fool-pitying skills ;)

 

The 450 pencil is how I am confident that the 400 (& it) date to 1954.

I bought them as a set. Various elements on the pen indicate that it is from late 1953 or early 1954.

I assumed that the pencil would take leads of 1.18mm calibre, so paid a lot of money for some hand-made leads from Yard-o-Led, only to find that they won’t fit in to my 450! :doh:
I then bought some cheap 0.9mm calibre leads, and those do fit in to my 450.
I have downloaded a copy of the 1953 Pelikan catalogue. Only 1.18mm calibre leads are mentioned in it. So I doubt that my 450 dates to 1953.

I also have a downloaded copy of the 1955 Pelikan catalogue. That one mentions that there are two versions of the 450; one that takes 1.18mm calibre lead, and one that takes 0.9mm calibre leads.

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Mercian

Since saving this photo and the description above, I have learned that the 'PF' stamp on the nib of my M800 is not a Swiss stamp - it is a mark that was once required by French law in order to identify the importer of these nibs, back when they were still items whose precious-metal content was required to be assayed by the French Assay Office.

Had it been the mark for a manufacturer (based in France) of the item that was Assayed, the line surrounding the 'PF' stamp would have been inside a losange - a straight-sided polygon.
The fact that it is surrounded by an oval indicates that it is a mark for a registered importer of the assayed item into France.

 

E.g. if you find my close-up photo of the 14k gold nib that is on my made-in-France Parker 75, you will see that the manufacturer's mark for Parker is "P↑P", stamped inside a losange that is a five-sided polygon that looks like a rectangle except that, instead of having a single flat line at its top, it has two lines that make an 'inverted-V', so that it looks something like the outline of a house with a pitched roof.
i.e. the "P↑P" for 'Parker' is stamped inside an outline of this → ⌂ shape.

Beneath the "P↑P", still inside the losange, is stamped "585", for the millesimal fraction of the alloy that is required to be actual gold in order to pass Assay as "14 Karat" gold.

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