Another interesting item is
this ink bottle with the glass shaped
into two troughs or ledges for pen rests, shown here with an old Alpco
(American Lead Pencil Co.) pen on the far rest. The eBay seller of
this item told me he dug it from an old trash dump site in South
Africa and that it probably dates from the last century. Slightly
noticeable in both images is the broken, "burst", rough lip of the opening,
which he stated was done intentionally at the time of manufacture and which
thus dates the piece.
Mr. Kasten kept this old, handmade classroom pen stand as a souvenir of the old school, selling it to me at an antique show almost forty years later. Neither he nor I have any idea how old it is. Made of pine or other softwood, its color indicates it was stained (linseed oil?). As there are many ink stains, it was clearly well used (no pun intended!). I imagine the pens it held were inserted nib-side down, as illustrated in the photo (no pens came with the piece). The holes occur in three sets of forty-five, each set being five by nine. The left-most set (which is holding the pens) has its rows numbered 1-5. The overall piece measures 16 x 10 x 6.5 inches. |
This hand carved wooden (black walnut?) pen
holder is very similar to the pictures
of "cut penholders made in Brienz around the turn of the century" shown
on page 38 of Dietmar Geyer's Collecting Writing Instruments,
a copy of which page I received from 
To
view this, tip your head slightly to the left. The original picture
was taken from across the street cater-cornered. An American flag
flies from the roof above the corner entrance three floors below.
The topmost picture (not shown) is of the inside of the hotel bar.
Some tiny writing appears there, which says, I believe, "HOTEL
BAR HOTEL RIGI Adams & Clinton
Streets, Chicago, Ill. U.S.A." This is followed by a name,
illegible to me, and the abbreviation "Prop." QUESTION:
Does
anyone know or have any suggestions as to how I can magnify that lettering
so as to be able to read the proprietor's name?
The
old inkwell is a handmade job.
The blue glass almost-cubic well
actually is a square on the bottom but a parallelogram on the top, which
means it only fits inside the metal box one way. Try to drop it in
any of the other three ways and it just won't go! An interesting
variation here is the pen rest, which is INSIDE the lid, so it's
only usable when the box is open. This leads me to believe it was
a portable
well, perhaps used by a schoolteacher as he/she walked
around the room, or maybe by someone in a supervisory or inspector's role
in a manufactory or warehouse. This theory of portability is further
evidenced by the place on the closed cover where the user's left thumb
has worn all the brassy-looking surface off, exposing the dark, black metal
beneath, (meaning the user was right handed) .
I
could find no marks, but two seams are visible: the first is horizontal
just below the rests; the second is on a vertical plane parallel to the
rests. The two seams intersect in the shape of an upside-down
tee at each end of the bottle.
In
1956, the Santa Rita School in Santa Rita, New Mexico,
four miles north of Bayard and about eleven miles northeast of Silver City,
was "home" to 650 students, many of whom were children of the workers at
the huge open-pit copper mine nearby. Mr. Bob Kasten,
now retired and a school bus driver in Bayard (and, in his spare time,
a bank vice-president) , taught there then. As the edge of the pit
crept closer to Santa Rita over the next few years, however, the town and
the school were abandoned, ending an era that had begun in the 1600's when
Santa Rita was founded after the discovery by the Spanish of the area's
rich veins of copper. Later, Fort Bayard was established to protect
the miners from marauding bands of Apaches.