1939 Pepsi Cola Advertising Pen

This was a fun one to find and restore. 

The Pen and It's History

This is an original Pepsi-Cola advertising lever-fill fountain pen dating to approximately the late 1930s, most likely around 1939. While similar examples are sometimes described as 1940s pens, the late-1930s date seems to fit best with the design and with Pepsi’s advertising history at the time.

The manufacturer is a little less certain. These pens are often attributed to Eagle Pencil Company / Epenco, and that attribution is certainly plausible, but I haven’t found enough primary documentation to consider the manufacturer definitively established.

What makes the pen special is that it was designed from the beginning as an advertisement. The cream-colored body carries the large red Pepsi-Cola script, with dark blue accents and gold-colored trim. The cap clip itself is shaped like a Pepsi bottle and would originally have carried red, white, and blue painted details.

The timing also makes the pen interesting. Pepsi had launched its famous Depression-era “12 ounces for five cents” campaign in 1934 and was growing rapidly during the remainder of the decade. A fountain pen like this was essentially a small, functional piece of advertising that someone could carry and use every day. Nearly ninety years later, that advertising purpose is also what makes it such an unusual survivor.

The Restoration

For an advertising pen of this age, this one came to me in surprisingly good condition. My biggest concern during cleaning was preserving the original Pepsi-Cola lettering and as much of the pen's original character as possible.

I was able to clean the body without removing or noticeably damaging any of the original lettering. I deliberately stayed away from doing much with the bottle-shaped clip. There was more risk than reward in trying to make it look new, especially when preserving the remaining original finish was more important to me than making the metal perfect.  Unfortunately, the nib had already lost most of its original gold plating so the object was to clean without removing the scant plating that was left.

Mechanically, the restoration was pretty straightforward. I removed and cleaned the pressure bar and installed a new ink sac. Once those pieces were sorted out, the main issue left was the fit of the section into the barrel. The section was a little too loose to stay securely seated on its own.

I ultimately used a small amount of shellac to secure the section in the barrel. That worked very well and gave me the snug fit I was looking for without doing anything more invasive to the pen.

One detail on this pen really stood out to me: the ink window in the section is unbelievably clear. Most old transparent ink windows I encounter have aged to some degree of amber, yellow, or cloudy translucence. This one looks almost like a small piece of glass. It is easily one of the clearest ink windows I've seen on a vintage pen.

Overall, this was a relatively simple restoration, but that was part of what made it satisfying. The goal wasn't to make the pen look new. It was already an unusually well-preserved example, so my job was mostly to clean it carefully, restore its filling system, address the loose section, and leave the surviving original details alone.

Sometimes preservation is the restoration.