Restoring a Green Eversharp Skyline Set

Pen History

The Eversharp Skyline arrived in 1941 at a point when Eversharp needed a major new fountain pen line. Industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss gave the Skyline its striking streamlined shape, a design often compared with the streamlined locomotives and transportation work for which Dreyfuss became famous. Beneath the dramatic profile, though, the Skyline remained a conventional lever-filling fountain pen built around one of Eversharp's strongest assets: its reputation for excellent gold nibs. The Skyline became a major commercial success and had become the best-selling fountain pen in the United States by 1945.

Eversharp produced the Skyline in an almost bewildering range of colors, cap treatments and price points. This example is a standard-size Eversharp Skyline with a dark green body and striped celluloid cap, matching green derby and gold-filled trim. The matching mechanical pencil uses the same green-and-celluloid treatment, and the pair survives together in an Eversharp presentation box.

The matching fountain pen and pencil survive here together in an Eversharp presentation box. The fountain pen carries an Eversharp 14K Fine nib that writes firmly with little to no flex—a very different experience from the flexible Skyline nibs that tend to receive most of the collector attention, but entirely appropriate for the period.

And then there is the cap.

Restoration Story

From a distance, this looked like a straightforward green Skyline restoration. The barrel was a wonderfully dark green, the striped cap still had plenty of visual depth, and the matching pencil made the set worth keeping together.

Once the pen was cleaned, though, the top of the cap became much more interesting.

Immediately below the derby, the striped celluloid abruptly becomes transparent. It isn't the kind of gradual fading or general discoloration normally associated with an eighty-year-old material. The stripes simply stop. There is a remarkably clean boundary between the normal patterned celluloid and the altered material immediately around the derby threads.

That location was the clue.

The change is concentrated exactly where a previous owner or repairer might have applied something to help loosen or lubricate the derby threads. My working theory is that an oil, lubricant, or solvent-containing product was used there at some point in the pen's life and changed the surrounding celluloid.

What I can say with confidence is that the celluloid's appearance in that localized area is no longer original.

That's an important distinction. The cap itself appears to be the original Eversharp striped celluloid cap. This isn't replacement material and it isn't some undocumented transparent Skyline variation. Rather, part of the original material has changed. The stripe pattern that should continue beneath the derby is no longer visible there, leaving an almost clear window into the construction beneath it.

The strangest part is how neat it looks.

Had the alteration been blotchy or irregular, it would simply read as damage. Instead, the transparency ends at such a sharp line that it almost looks intentional. The striped celluloid runs toward the derby, reaches that boundary, and stops. Above it is this small clear section around the derby threads.

That presented the main judgment call in the restoration.

Trying to make the area look “original” would have required disguising what actually happened to the material—adding color, recreating stripes or otherwise visually reconstructing something that is no longer there. I wasn't interested in doing that. The alteration is part of this particular pen's history now, and the better decision was to clean the cap, stabilize what was there and leave the transparent section visible.

The rest of the pen responded nicely to cleaning and polishing. The dark green body regained its gloss, the gold-filled trim cleaned up well, and the striped portions of the cap still have the depth that makes these green Skylines so attractive. The 14K Fine nib writes with a firm, controlled line and little to no flex.

The matching pencil completes the set, although its rear eraser cap has been lost somewhere along the way. The original box has also done its job for roughly eight decades and shows it.

So the most interesting part of this restoration ended up being something I didn't restore at all.

The transparent band beneath the derby is technically a flaw and it will be disclosed as one when the pen is sold. But it is also a tiny archaeological record of somebody who owned or worked on this pen before me. Whatever they put on those threads left a permanent mark on the celluloid—and an oddly clean one at that.

For a Skyline, a pen built around one of the great streamlined designs of the 1940s, the strange little transparent cutoff somehow works.