Oxford Ink Window?

September 8, 2020

My Oxford has an (heavily ambered) ink window behind the section. I see pictures of other Oxfords without the window - or it is just so dark it blends into the section. Is there some system to this? Early vs late, that sort of thing?

September 26, 2020

Dunno how much I can help, but you made me dig out mine out of curiosity. In this one's case it's a twist-filler with a wide decoband on the cap, and the section appears to be ebonite. I could make out no ink window anywhere. Interestingly, Richard's repair page for the twist Oxford mentions an ink window in his example piece.

http://www.richardspens.com/ref/repair/ox_twister.htm

For lack of better info, I'd wildly speculate that ebonite sections were older, and thus the ink windows came later. But I'm just making this up as I go along.

September 28, 2020

I don´t know a thing about Oxfords, but the Skylines (I own a few of them and their sections look similar) come both with or without ink windows. What I don´t know is whether you could choose from the two versions or if one version succeeded the other (and if so, which one came first).

Probably there are also two versions of the Oxfords' sections.

October 1, 2020

My Oxford has an (heavily ambered) ink window behind the section. I see pictures of other Oxfords without the window - or it is just so dark it blends into the section. Is there some system to this? Early vs late, that sort of thing?

Eversharp catalogs show that the visulated section (section with ink window) is not yet present in 1935 but it is in 1938, including on the 1938 Oxford. So one could conclude that the ink window is a feature of the late 1930s-early 1940s Oxfords. This however may apply only for the lever-fill Oxford pens because some twist-fill Oxfords came with a semi-translucent barrel which makes an ink window in the section redundant.

The situation is opposite for the Skyline for which the ink window is thought to be an early feature (1942-43) that disappeared again later on. Exact dates are difficult to pinpoint as there are few (no?) early 1940s Eversharp catalogs. There are many Skyline advertisements but virtually none show an uncapped Skyline.