At the Long Island Pen Show last month, I bought a passel o’ Watermans for resale. The common point among them (pun intended) was their points, all of which were flexible.  (They still are, actually, but that would ruin the temporal parallelism of the sentence.) These pens were in various states of prettiness, some almost ready to flip and some not so ready. But one proved to be something of a problem. It had a crack in the barrel threads that I hadn’t noticed.

Now, here’s a how-de-do (with apologies to William S. Gilbert). The pen is hard rubber, so I can’t simply fuse the crack and restore things to their original state. I can’t sell it because I don’t want to inflict a cracked pen on someone else.

After the inevitable bit of agonizing, what I’ve decided to do is to bite the bullet and keep the pen. The pen in question is this pre-1927 Gothic 452 (shown here in its post-cleanup state).

The catch is that I bought this pen to sell. There’s some lost revenue there. And besides, I’m actually trying (in a casual sort of way) not to grow my collection. Not too much, anyway. So when I buy a new pen these days, I usually release at least one other pen back into the ocean for somebody else to fish out.

As it happens, in my Waterman 52 collection there was a similar pen, this pre-1923 452:

This is a lovely pen, in much better condition than the Gothic (even were the crack not in play) and fitted with an uncommon factory broad stub that’s nice and wet. Add that nib to the pen’s looks, and you’ve pretty well got the perfect signature pen. I bought it from a friend, and I’ve been reluctant to let it go. But everything changes, and it’s time to share the pleasure of this pen. So it’s been moved to the drawers that feed into the Nashua Pen Spa’s monthly “Pen Show” tray, and one of these days it’ll be winging its way to a new home. Yours, perhaps.

But that still leaves a question: what about the barrel crack in the Gothic? Well, the pen wouldn’t be much good with a cracked barrel, but I’m not in a position to replace the thing, so I did the next best thing. I bound the barrel up tightly with cellophane tape to keep the opening from spreading, chucked it up in the lathe, and did some ver-r-r-ry careful hand cutting on the inside, increasing its diameter enough to fit a 1/2" length of 11/32" brass tubing, and epoxied the tubing into the space I’d made. Turning the section down just a little enabled it to fit into the newly smaller (but much stronger) barrel opening, and although my new Gothic isn’t a perfect pen it’s a doggone nice one. I’m carrying it at the moment to welcome it into the fold.