[Sold] W H Smith and Mudie’s fountain pen

This fountain pen celebrates the beginning of books becoming more accessible to the common man and woman. Until the advent of circulating libraries, such as W H Smith and Mudie’s, books were extremely expensive to print, and therefore to own. Hence they were luxury goods limited to the wealthy class, and it also meant that if a middle class person bought a book, it needed to be something that could be read many times over. Once circulating libraries came into being however they pushed the price of publishing books way down and they enabled publishers to print a much wider variety of titles, hence they signalled the start of the democratisation of book reading. Hanna Farmer has paid tribute to this fundamental change in this beautifully illustrated painting … and I cannot begin to count how many books she has managed to include in her artwork.

This pen was made by us at Stanford Pen Studio, illustrated by Hanna then coated in a clear resin by ourselves and given its final shape, polished, and buffed. It has a bronze section ring, cap band and a logo medallion in the cap finial, and we have added a grip section in a custom-made shimmery bronze resin.

Each of our hand-painted fountain pens is a 1/1 original work of art, hence no-one else will ever own an identical pen.

Nib:

Available in Jowo #6 in polished steel. Please select Fine, Medium or Broad at the check-out.