7 Old Fountain Pens In British Desks Worth Serious Money

7 Old Fountain Pens In British Desks Worth Serious Money A man in Kent cleared his father's desk in the summer. The bottom drawer had an old tobacco tin in it with eleven fountain pens rattling around inside, most of them dry, two of them cracked. He took them to a car boot at Detling and sold the tin as a job lot for £20, and he was pleased, because he had expected to throw them away. One of those pens was black with a small painted scene on the barrel in coloured lacquer and gold dust. It was catalogued at a London saleroom nine months later and made £11,000. There is a trade running in every town in this country buying old pens purely to snap the gold nib off and weigh it in. A nib holds fifteen or twenty pounds of metal. The pen it came out of can be worth two thousand. That trade exists precisely because nobody knows what they have. Before the countdown starts I show you the fastest sorting tool there is. Check every nib for 14ct, 585, 18ct or 750, and a tin of eleven pens becomes a shortlist of three in about a minute. This is a countdown of seven kinds of pen sitting in British desks right now, from the Platignum and Osmiroid school pens that genuinely are worth a few pounds up to the London-retailed Japanese lacquer pens that have passed £25,000. Parker from the Newhaven factory, Swan by Mabie Todd, Onoto by De La Rue with its plunger filler, Conway Stewart in the patterns that were only made for a season, and the hallmarked silver overlay pens where everything from the hallmark video applies again. I also cover the five mistakes that destroy value, including why you must never fill an old pen with ink, why water permanently ruins hard rubber, and why swapping caps between pens to make one look complete costs you more than leaving them broken. All figures come from realised saleroom results and completed sales, not dealer asking prices. If you find something on this list, get it valued properly and sell it through a saleroom or a specialist. Never sell a tin of pens as a job lot, and never to a cold caller.