Liberty Fountain Pens

This week I came upon a Liberty Fountain Pen. It is a lever filler from somewhere in the 1915 to 1925 period. As you can see below, the pen arrived in quite good condition. The sac inside was merely dust as I removed the section. It had a standard jbar which can be reused. The section was friction fit and came off after using a heat gun to loosen it up.

After removing the sac remnants, I polished up the clip, nib, lever, and gold section on the barrel. The 14K gold parts cleaned up well and were not cheap gold plate or brass, found on many vintage pens. The material of the pen is Black Chased Hard Rubber, and I do not touch this. Fortunately, the BCHR on this pen is still crisp and black. Many vintage BCHR pens have discoloring problems and the owners have the option of leaving them as they are, or reblackening using various procedures. Personally, I prefer to leave the pens alone, but it is a personal decision.

The pen takes a size 16 sac and I attached one to the section and reassembled the pen – the results being the photos above and below here.

There is not a lot of historical information on Liberty Pens. What information I was able to find was obtained at the Lion and Pen website (link provided at Blogroll to the right). Liberty Pen was a Company that existed in New York in 1915 (see the Manhattan Pen Maker Project for this information) and there is a listing in the New York Times for their existence in Bayonne, NJ in 1916 and in New York at 380 Canal Street during 1923 (see Lion and Pen for this information).

Here are closeups of the clip and crisp imprint.  Not shown is the lever which has a large capital “L” on the circular end.