A Pen with a Story

Once upon a time, Lamy was a German brand... and Japanese tourists in Germany would buy Lamy pens to bring them back home as souvenir (omiyage, おみやげ) for coworkers, friends, and family members.

That was the case of the following pen.

A boxed Lamy 37.

And this pen's story is told through the contents of the box: what looks like a wrapping paper, and a hand-written text in Japanese.

The wrapping paper. Note the faint writing around the circular FVS logo on the upper right area of the paper.

The hand-written text.

The wrapping paper likely belongs to the shop “Julius Vaternahm” in Frankfurt (am Main) in Germany. A quick research online tells us that the publishing company Julius Vaternahm had also been very successful through the business of station bookshops.

There is also a faint annotation in Japanese made with a pencil on the paper. It reads something like “Uehara-sama”, 植原様.

The handwritten text inside the box is a lot more informative. It says that (the pen) had been a gift of the Governor of Osaka Satô after his trip to Germany between February 3rd and 13th 1962.

So here we have a Lamy pen that found its way from Frankfurt to Japan in the luggage of a prominent Japanese politician in 1962 to be given away to friends or political supporters. And that Mr. Uehara on the wrapping paper was possibly one of them.

It would be interesting to know how many pens the Governor --and his entourage-- had purchased during his time in Germany, and whether all of them were Lamy or some other brands were also included.

The Lamy 37 is surprisingly absent from the usual sources of information (*), and nothing very specific can be said about it. It certainly shows some similarities with the very popular 27, but the 37 does not match any of the numerous documented variations. A very comprehensive document on the Lamy 27 was published in the Fountain Pen Network in 2017 (thanks, Christof!).

The Lamy 37.

The Lamy 37 is a piston filler with a semi-hooded nib, made of 58.5% gold. The feed is clear and transluscent.

Gold nib, clear feed.

The cap is made of steel, and has the brand name engraved on the clip and on the cap lip. There is no logo on the cap jewel, which seems to be a feature on 1962 models and beyond.

The body is made of plastic and includes four ink windows. The brand name, in a rounder font, is imprinted on the barrel. The model name and the nib point are declared on the piston knob.

The rounder font of the "LAMY" imprint on the barrel.

These are the dimensions of the Lamy 37:

Length closed: 133 mm
Length open: 123 mm
Length posted: 146 mm
Diameter: 11.8 mm
Weight: 15.9 g (dry)
Ink deposit: 1.4 ml

And about 60 years later, Lamy became Japanese.


(*) The video on this link is the only source of information specifically on the Lamy 37 I have found online so far. Note it refers to a newer version of the model which includes a logo on the cap jewel.


My thanks to Poplicola-san.

Parker 75 – Diamine Bilberry

Bruno Taut
March 25th, 2025
labels: Lamy, Alemania, Japón

Nib Sizes, Feed Diameters

Few elements in a pen are really standardized. Each maker created –still creates– many of the components and they only had to match the other parts of the pen without any regard to other manufacturers.

The closes one could get to normalization was in the area of nibs, where at some point there was a consensus about their sizes. In that environment, sizes 6 and 8 were quite big; sizes 10 and 12 were huge, rare, expensive and highly desirable.

And half the world away, Japanese pen makers had their own life to live. Sure Pilot numbered their nibs in a similar fashion --from 0 to 8--, but the consistency in the size was far from exemplary. Sailor, on its side, used some crazy numbers—sizes 30, 80, and 200 for some of the nibs that, in actuality, were rather small.

An old Sailor nib labeled as size 30.

Nowadays, Japanese makers are very consistent in the sizing of their nibs, but the naming is very arbitrary.

Pilot, on its more common line of nibs, calls them as 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 50. These numbers, however, do not mean much.

Platinum has three basic nibs—the 3776 with two and three tines, and the President. There is no indication of size.

Sailor, finally, has three basic sizes called medium, big and superbig.

And in the West, German nibs –third party nibs—tend to follow a more systematic approach. Bock nibs, albeit having their own number, follow a relevant pattern—the diameter of the feed. And the same happens with JoWo nibs: the feed diameter sets the nib size.

So, the question is how all these nibs –Japanese and German—compare. The following tables show the diameters of the feed of some manufacturers:

Pilot-Namiki

Nib description	Feed diameter (mm)
5	6.0
10	6.2
15	6.4
20	6.5
30	7.6
50	9.0

Pilot and Namiki nibs. From left to right, sizes 5, 10, 15, 20, and 50. Sizes 20 and 50 are implemented currently only on Namiki pens. However, the examples here shown are still Pilot (::1::, ::2::). Missing on the table is size 3. And from the picture, sizes 3 and 30.

Platinum-Nakaya

Nib description	Feed diameter (mm)
3776 old model music 2-tined nib	6.0
3776 new model	6.5

Two 3776 nibs. These are the nibs implemented on Nakaya pens, the "alter ego" of Platinum. On the left, the feed and the nib of the old version of the regular nibs. This feed is still used on the music nibs of Platinum and Nakaya. On the right, the modern nib and feed of the 3776 series of pens and of Nakaya pens save for the cases of music nibs. Missing on the table and on the picture, the President nib.

Sailor

Nib description	Feed diameter (mm)
Medium	5.8
Big	6.4

Sailor nibs and feeds of sizes medium (left) and big. Missing on the picture and on the table, the "super big" size of the "King of Pen" models.

Bock

Nib description	Feed diameter (mm)
060, 076, 180	5.0
220, 250	6.0
380	8.0

JoWo

Nib description	Feed diameter (mm)
#5	5.0
#6	6.0
#8	8.0

From left to right: Bock model 250 (6.0 mm in diameter), Bock model 380 (8.0 mm), and JoWo nib of size #6. All the feeds on the picture are made of ebonite.

The following pictures show how some of those nibs compare across brands.

Japanese nibs with similar external sizes. From the top left, clockwise: Sailor nib size big, Platinum 3776 Century (current model), Platinum 3776 (previous model), Pilot size 10.

Assorted pens whose nibs are about the size of a size 6 nib. From bottom left, clockwise: Pelikan M800, Clavijo with a JoWo #6, Senator pen with a Bock 250 (6.0 in diameter), Eboya with a Bock 250, Romillo with a Bock 250, Pilot with a size 20 nib, Pilot with a size 15 nib, and a Montblanc 146.

Assorted pens with nibs of about a size 8. From the bottom, clockwise: Romillo with a Bock 380, Eboya with a Bock 380, Montblanc 149, Pelikan M1000, and Sailor King of Pen.

The conclusion is interesting: Japanese follow their own systems and the actual sizes are very different to those of the German manufacturers.

Montblanc 149 – Platinum Black

Bruno Taut
Nakano, July 13th 2018
etiquetas: plumín, Japón, Alemania, Pilot, Platinum, Sailor, Bock, JoWo

Spheres

For my friend Kugel 149.

Kugel is the German word for sphere or ball, and it is also a label associated to some nibs of, to my knowledge, German manufacturers: Montblanc, Pelikan, Lamy. The idea behind a Kugel nib was to enlarge the “sweet” spot of the nib and to make it easier and more pleasant to write with those fountain pens.

Kugel nib of a Montblanc 149 from the early 1950s. It is a KOB.

These nibs can easily be spotted—the nib point is a small sphere that clearly sticks out over the nib’s upper side. Kugel nibs are usually labeled with a K before the actual nib point—KM, KB, KOB… However, there are a number of nibs sporting this same feature that are not labeled as “Kugel”. Does that mean these were not Kugel nibs?

I see a big ball here. Parker Falcon 50, from ca. 1980.

This question would be irrelevant might not be that German Kugel nibs, labeled as such, reach much higher prices in the second hand market that those not labeled as such. So, what do stylophiles value? The rarity of the label or the actual nib, labeled or not?

Another sphere. A Pilot Capless nib currently on production.

Modern nibs tend to have larger tips, as can be seen on the pictures. I can think of two reasons to explain this: The first one is the current lower price of the raw materials –mostly Ruthenium alloys in modern nibs— with respect to the labor costs of producing smooth and material-efficient points. The second is the lack of use of fountain pens—for people raised in the era of ball-points and keyboards, fountain pens with larger sweet spots and smoother nibs might be arguments to attract new users.

Anyway, that is just a hypothesis. The main conclusion is that there are more Kugel nibs in the market that just those labeled with a K.

(Parker Falcon 50 – Sailor Miruai)

Bruno Taut
December 15th, 2011
[etiquetas: Alemania, plumín, estilofilia]