"the Winter In Which We Found The Old Mont Blancs"

[ancalagon]

For reasons unrelated to fountain pens, I've been reading a lot of Edsger Dijkstra's EWDs recently (he was a famous Computer Scientist, and the EWDs were unpublished writings of his that were distributed by mail -- initially written with a typewriter, and later handwritten with a fountain pen).

 

I ran across one that described finding an older model of Montblanc that was no longer made at the time (1985). He says, "The winter will, however, go down into the Books of History as "The Winter in which We Found the Old Mont Blancs". I love my Mont Blanc but for many years am painfully aware of the fact that the company stopped making this model about a decade ago: it is the model with the built-in pump that takes much more ink than its replacement, which accepts cartridges as well." He then describes finding one of the older model in a stationary shop, and going with some friends to another branch of the shop in another village, where his friends bought out the 3 pens of that model that the other shop had.

 

Is this enough information (Montblanc fp, discontinued about 1975 or so, piston filler) to figure out exactly which model is being discussed?

 

( http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd09xx/EWD951.PDF is where he talks about finding the fountain pen (on the second page in the fattest paragraph); http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1018.PDF is an example of one he wrote with a fountain pen; http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1008.PDF is an example of one written with what looks like a stub nib )

[provis]

It's probably a 50s Montblanc 144 with the fantastic telescopic piston, which was later phased out and replaced with a cartridge model.