Ferme (I)

Ferme was a minor brand of fountain pens and other writing tools about which not much is known. Andreas Lambrou and Masamichi Sunami, on their Fountain Pens of Japan (2012), simply say that this company had been founded in 1928 in Tokyo, made some good quality pens, collaborated with the company Ishikawa Kinpen Seisakushô, struggled with a small production of pens by the late 1960s and 1970s, and went out of business around 1985.

This W was the logo of the brand Ferme.

On the graphic part, Mr Sunami (who was the actual author of most of the book) shows a Ferme pocket pen with a beautiful three-tined music nib among half a dozen examples of this brand, all of them dating from 1969 on. All of them are cartridge-converter fillers.

The Ferme 59.

The JIS engraved nib. It is probably made of steel, but I have not been able to disassemble it from the section.

But it is possible to find older Ferme pens, although there are never common finds. The following is a Ferme 59, a regular size, aerometric filler. It uses a (presumably) gold plated nib imprinted with the Japan Industrial Standards (JIS) logo. The size and the general structure of this pen is half way between the Parker 51 and some Pilot Super models of the late 1950s.

The filling system is aerometric. The pressing plate is engraved with the brand name.

These are the dimensions of the Ferme 59:

• Length closed: 134 mm
• Length open: 124 mm
• Length posted: 144 mm
• Diameter: 11 mm
• Weight (dry): 16.0 g
• Ink deposit: 0.7 ml

Pilot Custom 742, falcon nib – Sailor 土用 (Doyô)

Bruno Taut
Yokohama, January 21st, 2014
etiquetas: Ferme