So about a year or so ago

So about a year or so ago I found a box with about fifty or sixty Parker Vacumatic nibs at an antique shop. Now Vacumatic nibs aren’t worth a whole lot—there’s just so many of them out there and they’re all pretty much the same—but the idea of having fifty or sixty nibs to play with was so compelling I had to buy them. And I did get a pretty good deal on them.

So of course the first thing I did was to try them all out and “grade” them both by size and feel. There were seven excellent nibs in the box—smooth, a little bit of flex, just very pleasurable to write with—and I used three of them right then to upgrade Vacumatics in my personal collection. Two of them, in fact, were better than the Mottishaw nibs I have, and the pen folks out there know that’s saying a lot. There were about twenty that were very good—better than your average Vac nib, but nothing to get really excited about. Five were absolute crap, and I tossed those. The balance were average, ordinary Vacumatic nibs.

I have since used the four other excellent nibs to upgrade pens I have bought for my own collection, and consequently probably have one of the nicest-writing collection of Vacs out there. As other pens have passed through my hands in the past year I have upgraded them when required so that all the Vacs I have sold in the past year have had very good nibs—good enough that this one guy has bid on (and won several of) every Vac I’ve put on E-bay.

The problem is that now I’m out of the very good nibs. I’ve still got my box of Vac nibs (fifty-one, at last count), but now they’re all average. And having a box of fifty average Vacumatic nibs isn’t terribly exciting. I could sell them off, either one by one or as a lot, but it is handy to have spare nibs around—even if they are only average. And I got so much pleasure out of grading the box when it was new, I would feel like I was cheating whoever I sold them to.

So they’ll probably just stay in the drawer with all the other crap I should probably get rid of.