Is it Plum?

[cossar]

Hi all,

 

i recently purchased this set not thinking much about it, until I took it to the Baltimore pen show and a certain vendor said that it was a plum. I had never heard of the Parker color varieties (I’m still pretty new to vintage pens), so did some digging online and not sure it fits the parameters. It’s an aerometric, date is third quarter 1950, “firmly 4 times”…certainly looks purple, and the vendor compared it to a cordovan brown and what he said was a burgundy. 

I’m attaching photos of the pen in a variety of lights. 

natural outdoor:

 

brown on left, my set in middle, burgundy on right:

 

 the last two, under LED, from left to right: brown,  burgundy, unknown:

 

thanks for all your help!

[FarmBoy]

If it is dated 1950 it is not Plum. 

[Paul-in-SF]

There's more than one 51 Aerometric color called Burgundy. The Burgundy on 51 Aerometrics made in the US is quite dark, and is easy to mistake for Cordovan Brown until you see them side by side. The Burgundy on pens made in the UK is brighter red, sometimes called "Bloody Burgundy" or "Blood Red" (by Richard Binder on this page -- http://www.richardspens.com/ref/profiles/51.htm -- scroll down and you will see samples of the "official" colors for 51 Aerometrics, as well as Vacumatics and later Mk III pens). Plum is at the bottom of the Aerometric list. 

 

Plum is unmistakably purple to me. It doesn't look like another kind of red, under any light that I've used (although we no longer have incandescent lights in our house). I'm sorry to say your pen does not look purple to me, in any of your photos. In the last two photos, the pen you identify as Burgundy looks more like British Blood Red Burgundy. If that is your pen, and if the barrel inscription is still there, you can see if it says "Made in England." In comparison to that, your mystery pen looks to be plain US Burgundy to me. 

 

And to support @FarmBoy's post above (not that he needs support), here is a page about Parker 51 colors that includes the years of production -- https://parker51.com/index.php/education/the-parker-51-colors/ -- Plum was only produced in 1948 and 1949, according to this source. 

[cossar]

Thanks @FarmBoy and @Paul-in-SF, this is the information I needed. I personally thought so too, and would have proceeded with the assumption it was burgundy of this vendor wasn’t so insistent that it was a plum. 

[inkstainedruth]

That's what I was thinking as well -- that the brighter color one was likely to be "British Bloody Burgundy" (which is not something to sneeze at, in of itself, BTW).

In my experience, Plum is a lot closer to Black unless you can do a side-by-side comparison in bright light.  Ironically, the weekend I got my Plum Demi, I completely overlooked another listing where the seller thought it *was* black and listed it as such.  And someone else on here got it for the minimum bid (just over half of what I paid for the Demi  ) , and it WAS Plum.  

And even MORE ironically, the same weekend I bid the minimum for a UK-production black 51 Vac that had turned out to have the cap for a US-production 51 Special on it (mostly just to get the ball rolling).  And did NOT get outbid....   Although I was able to trade the cap for a more correct cap at OPS that fall....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[cossar]

7 hours ago, inkstainedruth said:

That's what I was thinking as well

lol you called it Ruth. 
 

well, it’s a nice burgundy pen set at least. 

[inkstainedruth]

Yeah, but "British Bloody Burgundy" is not easy to find outside of the UK, I think.  So the fact that you probably have one is actually pretty awesome.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[Mercian]

On 3/25/2024 at 8:33 PM, inkstainedruth said:

Yeah, but "British Bloody Burgundy" is not easy to find outside of the UK, I think.  So the fact that you probably have one is actually pretty awesome.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

Similarly, here in the UK I have seen vendors list “51”s for sale as ‘Plum’ when they seem to my eye to be examples of the US Burgundy.

I would like to buy a US Burgundy “51”, but I am not willing to buy one at the UK asking price for a ‘Plum’! 😁

 

To be fair, I probably wouldn’t actually be willing to pay the UK asking price for a ‘Plum’ “51”, even if the pen in question were an echt ‘Plummer’ in my preferred ‘flavour’*

😔

That said, IF anyone reading this has a ‘spare’ one which they would be happy to sell to me, please PM me, and let’s negotiate! 😉

* a ‘minty’ full-size “51”, with a still-frosty Lustraloy cap with the shiny narrow band around its lip.

[jchch1950]

The prices of the Plum original 51 are too high. Now I'm waiting to find a good discount on the Parker 51 reissued to have the plum colour that I think is quite close to the original one.

[pen lady]

I've found that the best light  (other than direct sunlight) to identify "Plum" is an LED flashlight. Doesn't even have to be expensive, the dollar-store ones work just fine. 

[mitto]

On 3/24/2024 at 6:35 AM, FarmBoy said:

If it is dated 1950 it is not Plum. 

It has "Press 4 times" filler. It is not Plum. 😊

[mitto]

Here is a comparison picture. 

 

[Paul-in-SF]

That's a pretty good photo for the burgundies, but (on my monitor, at least) it makes the plum look a lot more blue than it does in real life. I would describe plum as a grape-y purple; the photo appears to me to be more of (what is sometimes called) a blurple, or blue-leaning purple. 

[Mercian]

To my eye, the white glare that is visible on the pens in @mitto’s comparison photo suggests that they have been illuminated by a bright-white LED.

Doing this un-naturally exaggerates/highlights the differences between these three colours of “51”, and makes them immediately obvious. Under indoor lighting, or even in poor natural light, I believe that the Plum colour does indeed look very much more like a dark-grape colour that is fairly hard to distinguish from the US Burgundy.
Especially when one does not have a pen in each of those colours to compare against.

 

For this reason, a bright-white LED is the quickest way to identify whether or not any pen is a ‘Plum’.

[Sheptonian]

This might help, too - taken in daylight.

 

From left to right: 1 and 3 = (American) Burgundy, 2= Plum, 4 = (English) Burgundy.

 

[mitto]

Two more Plums.

The two pictures were taken in different lighting conditions and, hence, a bit difference in shades. 

[cossar]

Thanks for the photos and criteria everyone. The pics above are very helpful for me since I’ve never seen one in real life. The hard constraints of production year and fill instructions are helpful too.