The 1920s. The ‘Roaring Twenties’, a decade of money, new invention, new fashion, new styles and…new fountain pens. Arguably, the most famous fountain pen of the Roaring Twenties was something that was just as bright and flashy as the decade which made it king: The Parker Duofold. While perhaps rather boring-looking today and a bit…bland…the Duofold was revolutionary back in the 1920s.

Pens of the Period.

In the early 1920s, the majority of fountain pens were still made of a material called hard-rubber, also known as ‘ebonite’. Ebonite was alright for making fountain pens with, but it had a fair few problems. It was brittle, it came in only three colours (red, black or black & red), and it was rather hard to make something so boring look appealing-enough for people to buy it. Back in the 1910s and 20s, pen-makers tried to jazz up black hard-rubber pens by having them wrapped in gold or silver patterns, or by ‘chasing’ them. ‘Chasing’ was a process whereby a really hot metal stencil was stamped onto newly-made pen-barrels. This process gave the pen a nice, wriggly pattern on it. But back then, these were the only ways you could dress up a pen.

Apart from that, most pens were still lever-fillers, or eyedropper fillers. The Parker Pen Company which came up with the Duofold, wanted something different. Something that didn’t have a lever sticking out of the side of the pen, something which wasn’t black, or chased or swathed in metal. It wanted something new, to welcome in a prosperous decade of jazz, bootlegging and skyrocketing crime-rates…

The Birth of the Duofold.

The original Parker Duofold was born in 1921. An employee at the Parker Pen Company in Janesville, Wisconsin, USA, came up with the idea that the company should try something totally different. Their newest pen would be big, it would be bold, it would have the newfangled ‘button-fill’ system and instead of being black, it would be bright, fire-engine red. Well…actually it was called ‘Chinese Red’ at the time. While the button-fill fountain pen (an invention of Parker’s) was not particularly new in 1921, it had the advantage over rival pen company, Sheaffer’s ‘lever-filler’ in that the filling-button could be capped by a ‘blind-cap’ at the top of the pen, completely hiding the filling-system from the user’s eyes, creating a cleaner-looking pen. Parker big-wigs were a little nervous about all this, espcially the idea to make the pen red. They knew from experience that dyes in the rubber-making process tended to make the finished product rather brittle, and that was saying something, considering how weak hard rubber could already be. What was even scarier was the price that this new pen would be sold at: $7.00.

Seven dollars is piddlesticks today, but 80 years ago, you could buy dinner for your entire family for seven dollars. It was NOT a sum of money to be sneezed at, again, another thing for the company executives to be worried about. How could a pen so expensive possibly sell?

Despite everything, despite all their misgivings, the Parker Duofold, affectionately named the ‘Big Red’ due to its size and heft, was an instant runaway success! The American public loved the new pen for its size, ink capacity, easy-to-use and discreet filling-system and of course…it’s colour!

The Duofold Hits the Shelves.

When the Duofold came out, it was big, red, expensive, succesful and…bandless. Really early Parker Duofolds (if you can find them), came without a gold cap-band around the lip of the screw-down cap. This was a big problem. As I said, hard rubber is prone to cracking and splitting. Without a cap-band on the pen to strengthen it, the lid could just crack in half like an egg, if an overenthusiastic writer screwed the cap on too tightly, or posted the pen too forcefully. Within a couple of months of release, the Duofold was withdrawn and reissued with a nice, fat gold cap-band on it. These Duofolds, because of the size and thickness of the band, were called “raised-band” Duofolds.

As the years went by, the Duofold started coming out in a wider variety of designs. The original ‘Big Red’ (called the Senior model), was followed by the Junior model (which was a half-inch shorter), followed by the Lady’s Duofold (with a ringtop instead of a pocket-clip), followed by the Duofold Special (which was Senior-sized, but was thinner in barrel-diameter). The biggest change came in 1926.

Pens Play with Plastic.

In the mid-1920s, a new material arrived on the production-line. It was strong, versatile, mouldable and it was called…celluloid. Celluloid was to pen-manufacturers what a truckload of Lego blocks is to a little boy who’s used to playing with wooden blocks. All of a sudden, pen-designers could whip out all kinds of new colours and patterns and shapes and suddenly, a whole new world of design-opportunities was open to creative and artistic pen-makers. The first pen-company to jump on the celluloid bandwagon was Sheaffer in 1924. Not to be outdone, Parker started producing its Duofolds in all kinds of wonderful new colours. First in Lapis Blue (a blue and white pattern), then mottled green, then in 1927, yellow.

Yellow was bold, bright, beautiful…and brittle. Yellow Duofolds were made from 1927 until 1929, but they would barely have been made for one month if George Parker, the company head, hadn’t insisted on them. The problem was that the yellow dye used in the plastic made the resultant pens incredibly brittle, even moreso than the hard-rubber which the celluloid replaced! Today, yellow Duofolds command very very high prices. Finding one in mint-condition is tricky, and when you do, it won’t be cheap.

Duofolds continued to change. In 1928, the first and last time that two-bander models were produced, saw the introduction of vest-pocket and women’s fountain pens with three cap-bands instead of the usual two and regular-sized fountain pens with two thin bands instead of the usual one thick one.

In 1929, with the Art Deco movement gathering steam, the original Duofold made one final change in design: It became ‘streamlined’.

Previous to 1929, the Duofold was very angular and tubular. The cap and barrel ends cut off in sharp, right-angles. In 1929, these right-angles were changed to smoother, more sloping ends, which saw them being transformed…in a manner of speaking…to something more in-style with the coming of the 1930s.