In my continuing research of Inkograph Co. Inc., I discovered that much, if not all, its advertising from 1921-1949 was produced by D'Arcy, MacManus & Masius and D'Arcy's archives were donated to Univ. Ill. Urbana. My local library placed an interlibrary loan request and I'll be viewing the Pen section of the microfilm for the next couple of weeks.

By reviewing the advertising of the period, I hope to better identify when design changes occurred. Some Inkograph models are nearly identical for decades, with changes only occurring in the clip design. On models such as the 70-200, the best I could do to place one in time was by a nozzle design change that occurred in 1944.

In addition to Inkograph, D'Arcy produced the advertising for several other pen (and ink) makers over the years, including the big 3 as well as others, such as Dunn, Moore, Stratford, Venus, Wearever, etc.

If you are researching a pen company, you might want to take a look at the list of contents of the D'Arcy archives and see if your library can get it for you. Because my local library is not part of the same lending network as UIUC, I have been asked to pay an $18 fee, your library may have a different arrangement.
Click for D'Arcy Collection - products starting with the letter P, such as pens

Thanks for posting the link. It sounds very promising at first, but as I recall Len Provisor posted on Pentrace a few months ago about taking a look at all the Parker ads in the microfilm version of the D'Arcy's archives, and he said the ads are all b&w, and that he found the image quality on the microfilm reels quite crude and disappointing. Please give us a progress report and let us know what you think of the microfilm ads. Mind you, if you visit the archives located at the Univ. of Ill., you could probably see the originals of the ads in color. ;~)

George Kovalenko.

I spent a couple of hours today going through the film and can confirm that the images are black and white and are typical of microfilm quality - passable. Of the ads of interest to me, it doesn't matter that they are black and white, most, if not all, would have been that way in the source documents. The quality is such that the text is readable and the pen renderings fair; I'll be able to accomplish my goals of gleaning information and noting all but the most subtle design changes. If no other benefit is found, I'll have a handy list of source documents to seek out for quality images; most images I've looked at identify the date and publication in which they appeared.

I have printed a number of the pages I'm interested in and will now try to scan them; I don't expect much, but perhaps a bit of image manipulation will improve the result. There is also a set of images I will post here or Lion and Pen if the scans are usable; 1923 ads for John Hancock cartridge filler (Pollock Pen Co. Boston).