| Richard Binder | |||
| Biography # 237 | email: richard@virtualcrate.com | ||
| I grew up in the Rocky Mountains of western Montana, the third son of a college professor and a medical technician. To them, insofar as I can remember, a pen was a thing to write with. Period. And the elementary school into whose care I was consigned had an ironclad rule forbidding the use of fountain pens, perhaps to avoid scenes reminiscent of that between Penrod Schofield and the hair of Victorine Riordan, the little octoroon girl who sat in front of him in school (Penrod, © 1914, Booth Tarkington). But my mother’s father, the well-known pictorial photographer and writer Paul L. Anderson, knew what writing was all about. When he used a pen (at least from the late 1920s until his death in 1956), it was a red rippled hard rubber Waterman’s Ideal No. 7 with a Blue nib, a pen which I now own and cherish. | |||
| My handwriting in school was rather poor, and so it remained as I grew into adulthood. By the mid-1980s it had deteriorated from semi-legible script into an execrable scrawl. So I took it upon myself to reinvent my style, the idea being that if I had to concentrate on making different letter shapes, I’d have to be careful enough to produce legible results. The exercise worked. Fifteen years later, most of it has stuck. | |||
| I dabbled with fountain pens more than once over the years, including a period during my retraining effort, until 1998, when I meandered too close to the Maelstrom and was finally irretrievably sucked in. I came to the hobby through a succession of pens that began with a Cross "Solo" and culminated with a Bexley Fifth Anniversary. As I gained experience, I gradually became a firm adherent of vintage American pens, and I’ve developed a special fondness for Sheaffer’s Balance pens of the 1930s, which I consider as a class to be rather underappreciated in the world of collecting. As of this writing, my relatively small collection comprises 24 vintage pens and three modern models. My “regular carry” is a Marine Green Sheaffer’s Lifetime Senior Balance from 1931 or ’32. Both the Cross and the Bexley have gone on to other homes. | |||
| Once having come to love vintage fountain pens, I soon found that the next obvious step was learning to work on them as well as with them. As a result of that discovery, I have the pleasure, as the proprietor of a small but growing business, of being paid to play with fountain pens. Initially, I intended to sell pens that I’d purchased and restored, and I do sell a few pens, some here on my Web site and some on eBay; but my business rapidly decided without my help that it was going to be based primarily on high-quality repair and restoration for clients. I depend primarily on repeat clients and word-of-mouth advertising. | |||