Parker 41/debutante

[twieleba]

Hi everyone,

I've never seen or heard anything about these pens beyond what's on parkerpens.net which says they are fairly rare. I'm kinda interested in getting one because I really like smaller pens and anything parker. Does anyone have a good idea/estimate of what kind of price these usually fetch? Particularly one with a fishscale cap? I would also be interested in some photos if anyone here happens to own one.

Thanks!

[icardoth]

Debutantes with fishscale cap are hard to find. I've got mine three years ago for $120, boxed & uninked. Normal Parker 41s can be found cheaper, in the $60-$90 if properly described or between $25-$40 if described with a generic "Parker pen".

[twieleba]

Thank you for the info! Would you be able to post a picture of it in hand if its not too much trouble?

[pajaro]

The last time I bid on one of these, NOS coral red with a fishscale cap, I got outbid and it went for about $125. That was a few years ago. I'll bet they are more now, say about $200?

[twieleba]

Thank you for the info! That is sadly more than I was hoping but around what I was expecting. I also didn't realize this thread posted twice, is there a way to merge them?

[richardandtracy]

Yep, get a Mod to do it.

 

I'd agree about the price of a P41. I think I have an example of most of the other Parker hooded nib pens, but P41's are just too much for me, particularly with that lovely fishscale cap. Come to think of it so is the 2002 release P51 SE. Oh, and I need a Lady Slimfold.

 

Regards,

 

Richard.

[pajaro]

Yep, get a Mod to do it.

 

I'd agree about the price of a P41. I think I have an example of most of the other Parker hooded nib pens, but P41's are just too much for me, particularly with that lovely fishscale cap. Come to think of it so is the 2002 release P51 SE. Oh, and I need a Lady Slimfold.

 

Regards,

 

Richard.

 

I would like the 2002 P51 Special Edition also, beyond my budget these days. I gave away a lady slimfold a while back. I didn't think they were valuable, and the nib was too medium for me.

 

I really, really liked the fishscale cap. Losing out on the auctions of the coral and turquoise 41s with the fishscale caps was the heartbreak of a lifetime. I shouldn't have been such a cheapskate. I would gladly have forgone my eventual purchase of a plum 51 set to have had the turquoise 41 with fishscale cap. GAH.

 

Oh, those two 41s were NOS. Gaaaaaaah!.

Edited May 1, 2015 by pajaro

[mitto]

Yep, get a Mod to do it.

 

I'd agree about the price of a P41. I think I have an example of most of the other Parker hooded nib pens, but P41's are just too much for me, particularly with that lovely fishscale cap. Come to think of it so is the 2002 release P51 SE. Oh, and I need a Lady Slimfold.

 

Regards,

 

Richard.

Yeah , a lady slimfold ! I have one that I call my 'Parker Queen'. I love it a lot.

[icardoth]

Thank you for the info! Would you be able to post a picture of it in hand if its not too much trouble?

 

Not in hand, but this is my Debutante. Its length is 13.40 cm.

 

[inkstainedruth]

Resurrecting this thread, since I appear to have done a bit of a sumgai today.

I just picked up a Turquoise 41 at an estate sale, for the princely sum of 50 cents US-- it was in a box of mostly pencils, ballpoints, Sharpies and highlighter pens, and the entire box was marked as "$5.00 for all. And while digging, I spotted that iconic arrow clip and said "HMMMM...." Expected it to be a 21 but it turned out to be a 41. So when I went to pay I told the woman from the estate sale company where I'd found it and asked how much *just* for the pen.

Haven't even tried flushing it out, but the nib looked decent. A quick Google search gives me dates between 1950-51 and 1956-58 because apparently there's some confusion. But the cap and the squeeze bar both definitely say "Parker 41" on them, so I'm guessing it's not the later Debutante model.

So I gather I did reasonably well on the purchase -- even if it's *not* a "rare" color. I'm taking some pens to an Appraisal Day at the Heinz History Center tomorrow morning, and this one is getting added to the selection, just for giggles, to see what gets said (if anything -- I have a bad feeling that there won't be anyone who knows anything about pens and will just refer me to Ebay "recent sale" prices).

But anything folks can tell me about the model (other than what I've already read on Tony Fischier's site and a tiny bit on Richard Binder's site) would be really welcome. Sorry, no pix yet -- I literally bought the pen an hour and a half ago....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[Beechwood]

Thats how I picked up my Parker 41 Ruth, as part of a job lot, if you can recognise the rest of this lot then you have done well.

 

I seem to recall that the 41 suffered from poor quality brittle plastics.

[inkstainedruth]

Don't know third tiers all that well. The burgundy one looks a fair amount like a blue Wearever that a guy at an antiques show gave me a couple of months ago (on the grounds that he "couldn't sell it"). The skinny black one below it I think says "Arnold" on the clip (I have a few Arnolds, but not one that looks like that pen); can't read the other clips well enough.

I must say that your 41 cap is much snazzier than mine -- I seem to just have the "basic" cap. And mine is a really bright (and much lighter) turquoise barrel.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[Beechwood]

The skinny black one says Akron, an Ohio town where it was made, the snazzy 41 cap has a Grand Canyon crack, only the Salz brothers Black and White made it out of the repaiers, the rest were too far gone.

[oneopentrail]

 

Not in hand, but this is my Debutante. Its length is 13.40 cm.

 

 

Fantastic looking pen!

 

Pricey pens though. I'd go for a 21 if funds are tight.

[inkstainedruth]

Well, I went to the appraisal thing yesterday. Met with an appraiser from a local auction house who wasn't entirely clueless about pens (although I was fairly skeptical when he thought the no-name pen with a music nib might be a Parker... but I digress). And he didn't freak about the fact that I use the pens, and have had a number of them repaired and inked up.

Anyway, the guy's assistant in particular seemed really interested in the 41, which surprised me because I had brought about a dozen and and half pens, including the Lucky Curve I got for $12, my 51 Demi Plummer, and a couple of (for me) relatively pricy pens (50s era Pelikan 400 and the Red Shadow Wave I won in the PCA auction at DCSS a few weekends ago). But no; those pens apparently weren't "interesting" enough The *star* of the appraisal was the 41, and the assistant looked up recent sales/auctions for prices. Now he was looking at *all* 41 prices, and so that included sets, and ones with the fancier caps like on icardoth's Debutante (that pink is a nice color, BTW) and not differentiating between colors. But the price range I was quoted was $36-$150 US. For a pen I'd paid half a dollar for.... As a comparison, I have a 21 that was an antiques mall find for which I paid around $18 for a couple of years ago (and had the person opening the case for me pull the stuck-with-dried ink cap so *I* didn't break anything -- knowing from what I'd read that the 21 plastics were more fragile).

Spent a good chunk of today soaking the pen point down in ammonia solution with a little Dawn dish detergent (there was a ton of dried black ink in it). I didn't see any cracks or chips. I presume that the barrel material is a similar grade to the plastic on 21s -- or did Parker use, for the 41s, a somewhat better grade (i.e., between that and the lucite on 51s)?

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[pajaro]

Well, I went to the appraisal thing yesterday. Met with an appraiser from a local auction house who wasn't entirely clueless about pens (although I was fairly skeptical when he thought the no-name pen with a music nib might be a Parker... but I digress). And he didn't freak about the fact that I use the pens, and have had a number of them repaired and inked up.

Anyway, the guy's assistant in particular seemed really interested in the 41, which surprised me because I had brought about a dozen and and half pens, including the Lucky Curve I got for $12, my 51 Demi Plummer, and a couple of (for me) relatively pricy pens (50s era Pelikan 400 and the Red Shadow Wave I won in the PCA auction at DCSS a few weekends ago). But no; those pens apparently weren't "interesting" enough The *star* of the appraisal was the 41, and the assistant looked up recent sales/auctions for prices. Now he was looking at *all* 41 prices, and so that included sets, and ones with the fancier caps like on icardoth's Debutante (that pink is a nice color, BTW) and not differentiating between colors. But the price range I was quoted was $36-$150 US. For a pen I'd paid half a dollar for.... As a comparison, I have a 21 that was an antiques mall find for which I paid around $18 for a couple of years ago (and had the person opening the case for me pull the stuck-with-dried ink cap so *I* didn't break anything -- knowing from what I'd read that the 21 plastics were more fragile).

Spent a good chunk of today soaking the pen point down in ammonia solution with a little Dawn dish detergent (there was a ton of dried black ink in it). I didn't see any cracks or chips. I presume that the barrel material is a similar grade to the plastic on 21s -- or did Parker use, for the 41s, a somewhat better grade (i.e., between that and the lucite on 51s)?

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

That turquoise 41, gah. It's time to sell all the pens I don't use and get out of this collecting.

[richardandtracy]

Ruth,

 

I think the P21, P41 and P61 all use a similar type of polystyrene material. By the time Parker produced the P61 they had a bit more of a handle on the design problems associated with the material, but general material stability is not great even on the P61. The P21S was later than the normal P21, and seems to suffer a lot less than the other P21's. IIRC the P41 was a bit earlier than the P21S, which could explain the fact it also seems to have more problems.

 

I have noticed in the P61 range that Black seems quite stable, the Burgundy seems the least stable and the other colours in between. It is possible that in the P41 too, some of the colours are more fragile than others. I think it may be either a slow chemical interaction between the plastic & the colourant, or a problem with light frequency absorption causing the plastic to degrade. I wonder if the more 'pretty-pretty' colours are associated with extra degradation problems.

 

Regards,

 

Richard

[inkstainedruth]

That's a good question. I haven't seen any cracking on either the 41, the red [burgundy?] 21 (or a similarly colored late-model Parkette which needs other repairs) or the black 61 (and at the moment I'm using -- and liking -- that 61 a whole lot). I can believe that the 41 used a similar material, because when I first picked up the pen I thought it might be 21 from the shape and cap (except of course for the arrow clip) or possibly even a 51 Special (from the clip -- except of course the barrel wasn't a 51 color). I don't have a Super 21, so I can't compare. I *do* have a second 61, which is turquoise, but haven't used it other than when I was flushing it just enough last winter to get it writing, then flushed the capillary system out really well when the "recharges" got too pale and illegible (same trick I used with the other 61).

Have not tried using the 41 yet. It flushed clear -- eventually -- but there still seems to be a bit of dried black ink on the underside of the nib. I'm trying to wangle a trip to the Commonwealth Pen Show later this month, at least for a couple of hours, and may hold off inking it until I have someone look at it (and possibly pull the hood and stick it in an USC for a bit). I could pull the hood myself (I've done it on the 21) but next week is crazy busy for me and I don't want to futz with the 41 in a hurry, given the appraisal value; which is of course a LOT higher than a 21 would be, which is kinda ironic in a way -- I *paid* a lot more in comparison for the 21: around $18 US, with the sales tax, vs. half a dollar for the 41...).

My husband is completely convinced that I should be somewhat circumspect about what ink I should put in the pen, given its relative value (he's thinking potential resale). But OTOH, I paid many times more for my 51 Plummer than for the 41 -- and at the moment it's doing Just Dandy with Noodler's Purple Heart in it, thanks.... So, not sure about the 41 yet.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth