News — Vintage Parker pen

The pen that Parker referred to as the '51 Standard' is one of the least well known of the 51 variants and is a very rare pen. This example is in American Burgundy:   From the picture the pen is indistinguishable from a Parker 51 Classic (the American pen was actually called a De Luxe).  It has a Lustralloy cap and a 14CT. Gold nib, suppled by a 'normal' Parker 51 collector and feed arrangement.  The material, finish, and build quality are the same, as is the cap and end stud.  So, what makes it a Standard and not a Classic,...

Parker were late comers into the rapidly growing ballpoint pen business, the Parker Jotter was launched in 1954, 13 years after Lazlo Biro's first offering, the 'Birome'. When criticised for their apparent lack of interest by Time Magazine, Kenneth Parker replied with a rebuttal.  In essence, he said that the current ballpoint pens were  rubbish and Parker would only offer a pen to the public when they were sure it was a great product.  Designing and testing such a product took time and Parker simply were not ready until they unveiled the Jotter, it was revolutionary and  orders of magnitude better...

Kenneth Parker had something of an obsession with flying.  In 1949 he produced an all metal version of the Parker 51 which he called a 'Flighter', the metal tubular shape bore a passing resemblance to an aeroplane fuselage. The name resonated with the pen buying public and all successive all steel bodied Parker pens were known as Flighters.  Strictly speaking, to be a Flighter, a pen must have been made by Parker, although it is not uncommon to see other makes referred to as such. The Parker 50 Falcon Flighter was probably the most 'plane-like' of the pens, it has...

The design of the Parker 51 was inextricably linked with the development of a new fast drying ink that Parker had developed in the 1930s. The ink was, indeed, fast drying, and did away with the need for blotting paper but it was also strongly alkaline and contained chemicals that could damage the plastics used for the manufacture of most pens at the time.   Where most companies would have rejected the ink on those grounds, Parker saw it as a bonus in that they could make a pen from an ink resistant material and market it as the only pen that...

The Parker 51 Vacumatic is a great pen, IMHO, as they say.  I like everything about them, including the quirkiness of the filling system.  In the Parker repair manual instructions are given for the filling of a 51 Vacumatic compared with the Parker Vacumatic pen: There is one major difference in the filling methods of the Parker «51» and the Parker Vacumatic. The difference is that after the Parker «51» has been completely filled (usually after ten strokes of the plunger), the excess ink must be withdrawn from the fins of the collector. To accomplish this, the filling instructions of the Parker...