Why two pen desk sets?

[Ghost Plane]

My dad had a double with F nibbed Shaeffers. Black for drafting correspondence, blue for signatures so the original could be found among the carbon copies.

[Ernst Bitterman]

For my part, I've got the "regular" pen (blue-black) and the "highlighting" pen (was red, but after clogging issues is now greed) in my desk-mount. As far as why there's never three-- one runs out of hands, perhaps?

 

 

What is the color of greed?

 

Day-glow moss with a marbling the colour of ill-refrigerated chicken meat.

 

Blast! I thought I'd edited my typo before anyone had seen it!

[Johnny Appleseed]

This my my personal experience only and is not intended to be a generalization. I have seen pre-1950's desk sets with color coded inserts for different color inks. I have seen a large number of post 1950's sets with a FP and pencil or BP. I have also seen desk sets with no color coding and FP's that have different sized nib points, e.g. a F or M for general writing and a B or stub for signatures. I do not recall if the later were pre- or post 1950's. I am trying hard to remember for sure, but I think I do recall a three piece desk set from the 1960's or '70's by Cross that accomodated a FP, BP and pencil.

 

That seems to fit with an albiet brief ad scan I did. It seems like pre-war sets are usually red & black, wheras post-war sets seem to be more for appearances and pair a pen-pencil, fountian pen-ballpoint, or two different sizes of nibs.

 

Some of the more modern 2-pen desk sets have to be simply for show, or for bank/hotel use - they include two different ballpoints.

 

John

[PAKMAN]

Roger,

 

Looking through some old posts in the Sheaffer Forum, I also noted a couple of threads where people had Snorkel-era double-pen sets where one pen was an M5, and the other an F5. Maybe by that era there was also a market for two sizes, in cases where people were not doing accounting functions.

 

John

 

 

My Snorkle set at work is set up like this with a Medium nib and a fine nib.

[Merrib]

From what I can remember is that one pen was red and the other was black as needed by bookkeepers

or accountants.

 

Bob