Flea Markets, Garage Sales, Etc....

[amk]

After Cambridge pen show I wandered round a few antique shops - a grey Parker 51 with a hole in the barrel for five quid? Nib and cap in quite lovely condition... How could I resist!

 

Wondering if I should try using a faux kintsugi technique to repair it.

[mana]

Find of the day, this time I was the "sumgai". Twice actually.

 

First was a black Parker 51 Aerometric with a lovely stubby nib. Cap was a bit beaten, dents and scratches but the pen itself is fully functional and in very nice condition. So not bad for 3€... And that nib, ooooo...

 

Also found a first edition and print copy of Tove Jansson's "Småtrollen och den stora översvämningen" in very good condition for... 7€. "Moomintrolls and the Great Flood" was the book that started it all (first ever Moomin book published in 1945). My jaw was floored when I had a look online to find out what first edition copies of that book cost. They move from around 450€ onwards (found one plenty more tattered copy that sold for 4000 swedish crowns > 428€).

 

All in all, a very, very nice day at a fleamarket.

 

 

[amk]

Wow! Moomintrolls! *and* a sumgai. That qualifies as a really good day out.

[RogerRamjet]

Last Wednesday, I took a day off to go to a town about an hour away with 3 Flea Markets. They told me of 2 other "shops" 20 minutes away. Went to both of those and one was a "mom and pop" antique store that had a couple of sheds full of stuff. I go in and ask about fountain pens. The place is so full that they tell me to go to the restroom and they will bring me some pens to look at since that is the only place in the building with some space. They bring me 5 boxes of pens. I look and mostly 3rd tier and many with problems.

 

The "pop" walks buy and asks me how I am doing. I say I am finding some and ask him the prices. He says we will see when he sees them. I pull out some cracked Sheaffers, a couple Esterbrooks, a ringtop Wahl-Eversharp and a cocoa colored Parker 51 in very nice shape. I take these few pens to him and he looks at the Sheaffers and gives me a price that I feel is too high for cracked pens but he insists on the price because "they have gold nibs." Quotes me $20 for each of the Esters and I pass. He looks at the Parker 51 and since "it does not have a gold nib" (it had ink on it), he quotes me $8. With tax, it cost me all of $9. I have since cleaned it and it writes beautifully. Date code puts it at 1951.

 

Edited May 24, 2016 by RogerRamjet

[amk]

Heh heh that *is* a nice deal. Funny how often you find a real sumgai in a lot of overpriced meh pens, isn't it?

[inkstainedruth]

Heh heh that *is* a nice deal. Funny how often you find a real sumgai in a lot of overpriced meh pens, isn't it?

 

That kinda happened to me over Thanksgiving. We were sort of taking the scenic route home, and there was a place just east of Chambersburg, PA that had a few pens in one case in the back, mostly Sheaffers. I thought they were a bit pricy, but there were a couple of Snorkels -- the green one had a gold nib but just an F, but the black one.... The black one had what turned out to be a Palladium Silver Factory Stub! It was less expensive too -- and then the guy at the counter said "Oh, this tag is faded, the pen must have been sitting here a while. I can let you have it for twenty bucks...." Before I even had a chance to try haggling (it had been marked at $42 US (the green Snorkel with the gold F nib nib? $65...). I had thought the price on the tag was decent, BTW, especially given the nib.

Nine bucks for a cocoa 51 is a heck of a steal (although personally I don't like that color at all). Sort of a tossup, though about whether RogerRamjet or mana gets the "Sumgai of the Week" award, because mana's -- while not a rarer color -- does have that lovely nib on it. And I just checked an exchange rate website, and 3 euros equals a little over $3.34 US. Which is an awesome price.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[Runnin_Ute]

Last Wednesday, I took a day off to go to a town about an hour away with 3 Flea Markets. They told me of 2 other "shops" 20 minutes away. Went to both of those and one was a "mom and pop" antique store that had a couple of sheds full of stuff. I go in and ask about fountain pens. The place is so full that they tell me to go to the restroom and they will bring me some pens to look at since that is the only place in the building with some space. They bring me 5 boxes of pens. I look and mostly 3rd tier and many with problems.

 

The "pop" walks buy and asks me how I am doing. I say I am finding some and ask him the prices. He says we will see when he sees them. I pull out some cracked Sheaffers, a couple Esterbrooks, a ringtop Wahl-Eversharp and a cocoa colored Parker 51 in very nice shape. I take these few pens to him and he looks at the Sheaffers and gives me a price that I feel is too high for cracked pens but he insists on the price because "they have gold nibs." Quotes me $20 for each of the Esters and I pass. He looks at the Parker 51 and since "it does not have a gold nib" (it had ink on it), he quotes me $8. With tax, it cost me all of $9. I have since cleaned it and it writes beautifully. Date code puts it at 1951.

 

Parker 51 - Cocoa.jpg

Never been a huge fan of that particular color, but that is a very nice example. Great pickup Roger!

[Invictus Maneo]

I'm off on the hunt this holiday weekend. Good advice on passing any sale with baby clothes. The odds of the folks having or even knowing what a fountain pen are slim to none, at least in my experience. I suppose theres always the rare oddity that will prove me wrong.

As of two years of half hearted hunting I have yet to find much. About my best find were a couple of Wearever Sabers, still in their original packages with cartridges that are full but the ink has dried up. I paid $1 for each both them and I suppose with a bit of water the ink will reconstitute . The original price tags still affixed to the pens inside the packages is $1 so I'm hoping that over the years the price has risen a bit considering they are truly NOS.