ex-mancave upgrade

[Bo Bo Olson]

Yep, the wife retired and 600 books hit the trash....she wanted my inkwells out of her living room.....so wished, so was, so is.

Their use to be tribes of ink bottles hiding in the shade of pewter capped beer mugs.

 

 

 

 

 

More detail pictures of the ink wells follow.

Starting behind the door bookcase.

Art Nouveau (1895 to early 1920'swith major overlap of Art Decco from 1915 to mid '30's. ) this is Art Nouveau 1905-10?.

The inkwell to the right is  Art Nouveau.....'95-05 I'd guess. 

1920s-early 30's sort of Bauhaus..with red leather covered traveling inkwell.

Tip of a vintage Stanley screwdriver back when they were the best int he world and not the crud of today. My screwdriver of choice, which is why it is not in the tool box.

Plastic topped, glass bottomed Traveling red leather covered ink-well....no WOG to how old it is.

 

Plastic topped, black glass bottom ink well (20-30's) came with a 146 on it...was willing to take a 146 for it. Pewter shoe inkwell , more later on it. Stirling silver cap that is tight enough for long term use, crystal. bakelite pencil sharpener.

Under it, two sterling silver ink wells on mahogany (30's because of pen holders my guess), the black pen is a Shaffer Touchdown, the feather....well it don't do no harm and would hurt to just throw it away.

 

My favorite MB a Pelikan 450. I had so hated MP's that I had the 450 for some 8 years before I grabbed it to scribble something. 6 weeks later I ran out of lead and had not used fountain pen in that time.

Then comes the beer mugs, with short bottles of ink in the brown cases. Taller bottles ended up on the other side and is not worth photographing.

Two different marble pen holders...50's-60's holding my NOS W.Germany

200 set.

Above it.....1850-70 French inkwell.

 

Shelf above.

and

And

 

1895-1900 Art Nouveau

W.Germany NOS Mutschler Reform set with Reform ink...'

 

 

 

Next post comes the other side of the door.

[sansenri]

some lovely memorabilia there Bo Bo!

(and you're so right about the Stanley screw driver! besides the wonderful steel, do you have one of those with the wooden ergonomic shaped handle?! I cherish one of those...)

[Bo Bo Olson]

No just that one....I do have some German good tipped and more comfortable handled ones, in some sort of good grip plastic and a couple wooden handled ones.

Way back in these days, my AF toolbox had Stanleys. Old pre-AWACS Navy Model EC 121 (super Connie) , much prettier than the dull gray AF ones I worked on.  My tool box in '67-71 was worth $360...in silver dollars!!!!

A real fortune back then.

Like Ford and Chevy folks there were Stanley and Craftsman folks....back when they were world class and not being squeezed into a third world product. So sad good screwdrivers have to be imported.

 

Starting on the other side of the door.

A nice pencil/pen wooden box.

Tables are for when we go to the flea market....our mini-cellar in this apartment house is still rammlel full with flea market boxes.

There is a blue leather massage easy chair before them, but that has nothing to do with inkwells.

KPM is a major German porcelain maker up there with Meissen.

I'd guess Historismus, when the Germans searched for status roots (like the family always had money and not that they were new rich) ,and brought back old, old styles....1870-1900.

 

Coffin shaped pencil box and a softball sized '30's crystal with bubbles tight topped ink well.I can put a world of ink in there but really need a pin back-light.

Coffin shaped pencil box.

 

 

 

A joyful inkwell, would guess just after Art Decco, late '30's, no marking. mallorca stone-good, not Karlshrue which was and still is the big name.

 

Big brass one on black glass.....too ornate for Bauhaus or Art Deco. Is flowers, roses and such.Could be the last gasp of Art Nouveau, tinged with Bauhaus with the simplicity of the holder and spitefulness of the black glass.. from Art Decco. Art Decco started knocking on the door in 1915 so I think this early 1920's.

Bauhaus style.

Early to mid '30's as folks went to newer styles than Art Decco. Malloca was made in hundreds of pottery shops all over Europe.

 

 

Next bookcase, just it.

1915 celebrating some Victory on the Eastern Front. Worn silver plated. Stands alone, with no books in a book case,  for of room was needed.

These pictures were taken from the buying....so is lighted so it looks golden which it don't.

Simplicity of Bauhaus 1920-30. Full set but the letter opener...letter weight in the back.; same color. Bauhaus '20-30's...

1890-95 Historismus.

 Common lower middle class brass trimmed lined 1930's inkwell set, stained wood.My very first inkwell, much less set.

 

Hard Rubber carved tray, did not hold inkwells.

Will put up a close up of that later on...nice and fancy.  Worth clicking for a larger view.

Next bookcase. My new pen case, have a bigger one in the living room. For next post.

 

Could be Bauhaus, in it's simple enough but I think '30's.

Black glass tops and stand, crystal, was once fire vergolded/gilded, now just brass to be polished. @ 1925 Bauhause/Art Decco.

Set in a corner of the book case like the French Birdseye maple one...in I neglected to take a picture of it, use an older picture.

also @ 1925, French. Birdseye maple

 Next and last book shelf.

Hard Rubber.

Meissen.....1860's-1923, (pre-Peiffer time) by the sword mark. I got it at a second hand shop where they didn't know what they had....I didn't even bargain. 3rd quality by the scratch throughs of the Meissen swords, which sells much higher than what I paid.

 

A red marble, '20-30's.Shelf above the lonely one...

 

My Pelikan double Pen holder, in the closest holder to the bottle goes an 800 or 1000, in the oft side one, 200/400/600's.

In it now my Hunter Toledo and an Artis Ballit, a pen I'd forgotten how well it wrote. Both regular flex.

 

That is all that is in my room. I have 6 or 7 in the hall, one 1850's one on my other glass topped cherry wood pen case in the living room.....for another day.

I do have to learn how to use my wife's modern handi, in my camera made garbage pictures of my pens.

[sansenri]

that is quite a collection, some are really interesting, the hard rubber one is incredible!

I also like some of the porcelains, the Meissen may be worth some value.

 

I actually like majolica, some of the German ones too, Karlsruhe, also some of the modern ones... mid century fat lava... Ruscha... but these might be too modern for you...

 

one of my Ruscha vases (excuse the OT!) btw this looks big in the photo but is only 10 cm tall

 

 

 

[Bo Bo Olson]

How much ink does that hold???

 

Wife favors Rosenthal, so she's in charge of Vases. That  is not a direction my wife goes.

 

She collects demi-tasse = moccacups and other Porcelain. Has a full Rosenthal coffee set from 1895 on our sideboard and other show off storage units. I'm glad I didn't know how much some of those small cups cost...until decades later.**

40 years of collecting gives her some real good stuff.

 

** Can't complain, she was the main buyer of my beer mugs, and a couple of them were pricey. Like that reddish one on the right of the second to bottom shelf. 

A shelf up in the middle, the hung over cat is from 1895. I have a few @ 1900.

 

The market for pewter topped beer mugs is in the Keller, now that the American's have left.

Had I space there were a hell of lot of once costly beer mugs I could suddenly afford....if I had space for them.

That would be just more beer mugs I'd not drink out of regularly. Like having too many pens to use.

 

The new generation, either don't drink outside, or have an app that keeps the flies and bees out of the beer.....always drinking out of a bottle does narrow, but not eliminate the problem.

 

 

[Bo Bo Olson]

So many views and.....next to nothing....no -----....no nothing.

Thinking about taking it down in it is of no interest to any but one. Will ask him for his advice in it lacks interest.

[Mike B]

Please don’t do that. The collection is eclectic and interesting. Westerns and espionage and Cicero, all together, all mixed with German and English titles.

I hope you make it a point to use each of the steins at least once a year.

Your pens are fantastic. The other things, well, I leave that to more knowledgeable types.

One question, though. Now that your things are evicted from the living room and have to be stored elsewhere, do you have any place left open to write anymore, or are you now restricted to “keyboards and the kitchen table?”

[bsenn]

I enjoyed this post. Out of my normal pen area, but very interesting. 😀👍

 

Thanks!

Brian 

[Bo Bo Olson]

The Westerns needed in some day I'll get back to the last chapter of a three book saga. Then got to chop like a Tasmanian Devil with two machetes.

I have no idea when I'll get back to the spy book, that as been slumbering. It was supposed to have been second, but the darling little murderess of the saga elbowed it out of the way.

 

I try to use most of the beer mugs, the real expensive ones are, one beer and wash. I tend to use the top 4 shelves most, depending on which mood I'm in. Middle shelves most with the various hunting scenes; one set game, the other birds.

But as I said, there are others that support or help set a mood, on the top two shelves.

 

I have a light oak desk made for computer, with the screen just far enough away to be comfortable, with one column of drawers. And it is big enough for my 'writer's notebook. A small bookcase matching beech file cabinet with mostly drawers and file drawer ...along with a blue leather massage chair takes up it's space.

 

There are only a few books I've not read in my library....40? I had to cull from 12 bookcases to 7 1/2 when we moved into the apartment near twenty years ago, The wife culled down to 1 1/2; not counting the 40 cookbooks in the kitchen, and a couple small book cases in the bed room.

 

So the last 600 books that were trashed for the inkwell space,  had made it through a few of culls. That hurt....and there was no where over here in Germany to get new homes for books in English. Not that I'd want to spend months on Ebay for 2 cents a book.

 

The books you see are full of dog ears, where there is a nifty sentence, a great description or something else a touch of philosophy or smooth body language hints all is not Kosher with the character under observation.

A writer can steal. We are allowed to steal retail, just not wholesale. A book with out dog ears is worthless.

Some folks call dog ears a sin, but they aren't busy stealing from their betters. (Not that I really go back and use the info dog eared. Don't have time.)

 

Shakespeare, stole Hamlet from Kidd....and who knows from whom he stole it. Hamlet and King Lear are like Beowulf the 5-6th century. The Saxon/Germanics were not allowed to kill madmen, so his madness is explained.....but listening to ghosts is not the sanest thing to do.

The BS that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare  is wrong. He was reading Virgil  in latin at 7, would have gone to Oxford or Cambridge had his father not been caught smuggling wool. (A great love story his father and mother.)

London had all the books necessary to do the research, (some twenty book stores if I recall correctly)  along with merchants from around the world to get details.

[inkstainedruth]

I read a book when I was a kid about codes and cyphers, and there's supposedly one that decodes to "Francis Bacon, author author author".  But someone else took the SAME cypher and decoded it to "Really, Francis, I wrote those plays -- Shakespeare"....  

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[sansenri]

On 7/23/2021 at 11:52 PM, Bo Bo Olson said:

How much ink does that hold???

 

Wife favors Rosenthal, so she's in charge of Vases. That  is not a direction my wife goes.

 

She collects demi-tasse = moccacups and other Porcelain. Has a full Rosenthal coffee set from 1895 on our sideboard and other show off storage units. I'm glad I didn't know how much some of those small cups cost...until decades later.**

40 years of collecting gives her some real good stuff.

 

** Can't complain, she was the main buyer of my beer mugs, and a couple of them were pricey. Like that reddish one on the right of the second to bottom shelf. 

A shelf up in the middle, the hung over cat is from 1895. I have a few @ 1900.

 

The market for pewter topped beer mugs is in the Keller, now that the American's have left.

Had I space there were a hell of lot of once costly beer mugs I could suddenly afford....if I had space for them.

That would be just more beer mugs I'd not drink out of regularly. Like having too many pens to use.

 

The new generation, either don't drink outside, or have an app that keeps the flies and bees out of the beer.....always drinking out of a bottle does narrow, but not eliminate the problem.

 

 

 

but as I said, the vase looks big in the picture, but I've probably seen bigger ink bottles!

 

Now, your wife's Rosenthal collection could be interesting!

For sure she can't complain about your pen collection... , not a secondary advantage!

 

[Bo Bo Olson]

What are those two Tortoise pens in your Atvare ?

 

1938 The Boehler brothers split their firm, Osmia. Boehler used the same model numbers as in Osmia.

Mine is a Boehler Gold mdl 54. @ 1938.

Nib a gold plated Italian one, in Hitler stole the gold, but as an Allie Italy was able to export gold plated nibs into Germany.

 

[ParramattaPaul]

On 7/24/2021 at 11:45 AM, inkstainedruth said:

I read a book when I was a kid about codes and cyphers, and there's supposedly one that decodes to "Francis Bacon, author author author".  But someone else took the SAME cypher and decoded it to "Really, Francis, I wrote those plays -- Shakespeare"....  

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

I suspect this is an urban myth associated with the 19th Century 'conspiracy theory' (a falsehood) that Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays.  Part of that debate is an underlying effort to discredit Shakespeare who evidently was a recusant Catholic in Elizabethan England.

 

There have been numerous books written on the subject (I have one or two here somewhere if I can find them), and there are several websites devoted to the subject to peruse.

[ParramattaPaul]

FOR RUTH:  More about the cyphers -- (Reference: Why Not Bacon, Marlowe, or Derby? | Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship )

Bacon

Sir Francis Bacon (late in life made Baron Verulam and Viscount St. Alban)

Though possessed of much learning, sophistication, and keen intellect, Bacon expressed these qualities in a manner very different from Shakespeare, whose work has been described by many commentators as charged throughout with imagination, passion, and idealism. Though both Bacon and Shakespeare had wide knowledge of the law, Shakespeare’s usages of legal terminology, unlike Bacon’s, are richly metaphorical.

The known verse of Bacon that has come down to us, such as his metrical settings of the Psalms, is stilted, as unlike Shakespeare as it could possibly be. More importantly, it is difficult to imagine how Bacon, with the full life he led and his many other literary and official preoccupations, could also have found time to compose 37 or more plays, 154 sonnets, and two long narrative poems of the quality these works exhibit.

Supposed ciphers or cryptograms some claim to find in the works of Shakespeare, said to support Bacon’s authorship, were long ago debunked.

[sansenri]

5 hours ago, Bo Bo Olson said:

What are those two Tortoise pens in your Atvare ?

 

1938 The Boehler brothers split their firm, Osmia. Boehler used the same model numbers as in Osmia.

Mine is a Boehler Gold mdl 54. @ 1938.

Nib a gold plated Italian one, in Hitler stole the gold, but as an Allie Italy was able to export gold plated nibs into Germany.

 

 

Nice pen, I've always heard of Boehler but never managed to find one of their pens.

 

Mine are much more modern.

They are a set of two pens made by Stipula for Mercury, a Dutch stationary store, using the same celluloid, one smaller one larger.
They were produced in very limited run, both of mine are no. 4 of total 8 pens, probably in the early 2000s.

The celluloid is a Tibaldi celluloid (a honey colour with blue streaking inside, which over time has been called different names), and the pens themselves have a Tibaldi style (it is likely that Stipula made some pens for Tibaldi, just before the second incarnation of Tibaldi closed sometime in the 90s - the first Tibaldi had stopped activities in 1965).

 

here the two pens

first

 

second

 

but only here you can see they are not the same size

[Bo Bo Olson]

Wheee....great looking pens!!!

 

Boehler pens....were once cheap until I started bragging them.....

Of course 5-6 years ago I stopped haunting The Bay, buying in live auctions.

Full tortoise Boehler Gold mdl 54

BCHR

 

Got a '60-70's school pen that surprised me by having a semi-flex nib. It wasn't worth sealing a picture of it or making one. I take such bad photos that I take the picture along with the pen I won. May have been a flea market buy.

 

......

I had forgotten to add the rest of the pewter shoe inkwell.

[sansenri]

nice pens! that's why I can't find any... you've cleared the table...

[Bo Bo Olson]

13 years....starting With Oh My God E-20 is too much.....and creaking through one physiological border after another....E-30.....E-70 came next then I dropped back down to a Whole 40 to eventually 50 Euros!!!

 

Was a member of the The Weekly Pen in the Mail Club.

Then Pen of the Month. ...The Boehlers were all from the Pen of the Month time.

 

My first E-99 pen was new...a 605 from famous for pen sales.... Galleria Kaufhaus....and I was a foolish gold snob then, for E-30 I could have gotten a yellow 200....still don't have a yellow pen.

[Anne-Sophie]

As you know, I always enjoy the picture of your eclectic collection of inkwells and other pens' related items.

 

Some days, practical stuff take me away from the computer, only checking the weather and email.

 

Please post more detailed pictures of some of the inkwells.

 

But first, is the black bottle next to the set below a vintage Montblanc bottle or another brand?

 

"Bauhaus 1920-30. Full set but the letter opener...letter weight in the back.; same color. Bauhaus '20-30's..." 

What is that set made of? Marble?

 

Black glass tops and stand, crystal, was once fire vergolded/gilded, now just brass to be polished. @ 1925 Bauhause/Art Decco.

I would love to see a close up picture of this one.

 

 

 

 

 

[Bo Bo Olson]

21 hours ago, Anne-Sophie said:

Please post more detailed pictures of some of the inkwells.

Which ones?

21 hours ago, Anne-Sophie said:

But first, is the black bottle next to the set below a vintage Montblanc bottle or another brand?

No marking on the cap....will take a close up. I'm not knowledgeable on such ink bottles but think it late '30's-late '40's, when such shoe bottles were common. Could have 5 or more of various brands but I collect inkwells not the rabbit hole of ink bottles.

 

21 hours ago, Anne-Sophie said:

Bauhaus 1920-30. Full set but the letter opener...letter weight in the back.; same color. Bauhaus '20-30's..." 

What is that set made of? Marble?

Yes, Anne-Sophie there are at least 50 types of marble...and once one gets that white marble out of mind, some are very beautiful.

 

I have five, the first black and light brown with the screwdriver bit in it.

 

The Black and brown under the Meissen Inkwells,

It unfortunately is missing the glass well inserts. I have a few inkwells missing them or chipped or are half broken. Some day I'll have to see if there is still a Glasshutte/glass blowing factory in the near by Black Forest or drive to Chech Republic. One tries to buy only full inkwell sets, but some times one gets them incomplete.

 

the reddish marble one next to the Meissen set,

Forgot the letter opener and stamp are not quite a  full set.

 

and black and gray one piled up with dip pens,

Is this pure Bauhaus? Or is the steel holder more Art Decco? Hell if I know. Pure function either way.

 

other reddish one...

Paper weight

Letter holder and stamp....hum just saw I could polish the brass on  that.

 

The gray one, just the inkwell set.

 

One tends to call them all Bauhaus or Art Decco, in there is not much one can do with stone.

 

The problem with all but two of my inkwells be that marble, glass or porcelain, you have to dedicate your pens to what you put in your  inkwell and write a lot...in the water in the ink will evaporate and make for thick ink. (I see using only one well of my double well inkwells. Ink evaporates faster than you'd expect. I guesstimate how much of a syringe of water I need to add.

 

Somewhere I have a twist on capped glass inkwell, and the two following ones seal air tight.

The glass well insert holds some 74 ml, the inner well is 128 ml. I need to get a pin back light for it. A 400nn holds @ 2.0ml, a modern 400 1.27ml....Softball sized holding a honking big amount of ink.

This sterling silver topped one seals also.

Not measured  yet. Looks to be two shot glasses of ink.

So with either the question is which ink will be my main go to inks, if I was to bring either of those inkwells to my desk. ...AH HA!!!! I don't have to fill them up.

Didn't the last time when I used the round one.