My Modest Collection Of Late-Production American Swans

[MarcShiman]

I think that in the thirties, when MT USA was circling the toilet bowl, they weren’t large enough anymore to machine their own cap bands or clips. I think the were just buying them from parts manufacturers. If there was an OEM run of pens to be private labeled by some retailer, I’m sure the retailer flipped through suppliers’ parts catalogs to pick the hardware they wanted on their pens.

 

Also, MT typically did not use the same hardware on pens that were to be branded by someone else. Back in MT’s heyday, they usually had the good hardware, and the private branded stuff got the cheap hardware.

 

Heck, I’m not even confident that the Burrows pen had anything to do with Mabie Todd. Rather than saying they used Mabie Todd plastic, the correct phrase would be they used the same plastic Mabie Todd was using. The presence of a Mabie Todd branded nib is telling, but I also have a big Burrows nib mounted in another pen.

 

One last point - all of the MT pens I have in that plastic pattern came from assembling parts. I never found one in the wild whole. And, they aren’t properly branded (MT had been fastidious about branding). What does that say? I dunno, they never massed produced them? They were caught with a lot of those parts when they went under? Maybe Burrows bought what was left of MT and assembled these pens and hot stamped them. We will likely never know.