Since I have written with fountain pens for about 40 years, I’ve ended up with probably half a dozen, which constitutes my “collection.” The only one in the past that I had any problem with was, of course, the most expensive pen I have purchased. The pen would start to come apart, a rather inconvenient habit to deal with, so I did what one should never do when repairing pens – I just used super glue to make the pen stay together. Problem solved. Obviously, at least in my mind, this made me capable of any kind of fountain pen repair. This turned out to be a huge mental overstatement.

Several years after my successful pen repairing exploit, I purchased a Conklin crescent filler fountain pen, not the expensive one with a gold nib, just a regular black one with a steel nib. The nib is the metal part that actually touches the paper, it’s what the ink flows from. Below the nib is the feed, which is a usually black piece with fins on it. Anyway, the Conklin is similar to the one used by Mark Twain, so it has his signature on a nickel-plated band that is at the base of the cap. A crescent filler pen has a semi-circular ring protruding from the pen’s body. By pressing this ring in, it compresses a rubber bladder inside the pen. So, you stick the whole nib down into a bottle of ink, push in on the crescent, release it, and ink is pulled up (or more accurately pushed up due to external pressure) into the bladder. Then turn a small locking ring under the crescent so that it is not inadvertently pushed in, which would expel the ink in the bladder. A relatively simple and easy to use method of getting ink into a fountain pen.

I filled my new pen with ink and then discovered that it wouldn’t write. Can the ink get to the nib? I pushed the crescent in and found that ink could indeed not only get to the nib, but ink could also spew out in a circle several feet in diameter. After cleaning up that mess, I examined the nib and found that while a functioning nib has a very small slot running from the end up toward the pen itself, this nib had a slot but there was no space at all – it was closed. I ran a razor blade along it a few times, then decided that a sharp object coupled with my ever-decreasing patience was not the best combination, so I put the nib on paper and carefully pushed down until the nib flexed upward. That flex opened up the slot. A refill later and I had a working pen.

Then I noticed that the crescent on the pen’s body didn’t line up with the top of the nib. While a relatively minor thing, it kind of irritated me. The threads holding the body to the front of the pen were no help as they were tight, but the nib and feed assembly wasn’t tight, so I rotated it out until it was aligned with the crescent. All fixed. Until I put the cap on, because since I’d turned the nib and feed outward, when the cap went on, the nib would now run into the screw holding the pocket clip to the cap. I discovered this when I removed the cap to investigate and found the nib covered in ink, which coincidentally matched the ink that was now covering my fingers. I removed the screw in the cap, cleaned it off and reinstalled it using a significantly greater amount of torque than what was used when the pen was originally assembled. That gave me the clearance for the nib. A working, aligned, correct pen. There were, however, some operator errors to discover.

Another refill was in order so I positioned a bottle of ink, started to dip the nib and feed assembly into the ink just before I pushed the crescent. Unfortunately, there were some timing issues and I had the crescent in before the nib went in. Yes, this resulted in quite a bit of ink spraying out of the feed assembly and across various books, papers and desktop. At least I was becoming quite fast at cleaning up ink. After correctly refilling the pen, I used a paper towel to wipe any remaining ink off the nib and proceeded back to what I was writing. I did intend to continue writing in an understandable language, but the pen thought otherwise as it belched a great deal of ink out onto the paper, and continued to leave ink droplets wherever it went. Now an expert at refilling, I completed that task but this time, I used my paper towel to wipe off both the nib and the feed to get any excess ink that was on the outside of the feed itself.

Finally, the pen could be used to write something. Its other problems had been corrected. This should mean that this all worked out. No. Do you know how you can irrationally give human characteristics to inanimate objects? I know I can, because I now don’t really trust the Conklin pen. There it sits on my desk, waiting, I’m sure, to attack me with a spray of ink or misalign itself or stop writing. I am too stubborn to give up on it, but nevertheless it is a challenge. If Mark Twain did indeed use one of these Conklin crescent filler pens, then I know exactly why he cursed so much.