A friend of mine just returned from a trip to his native country of India. He happens to be a pen nut, so naturally he went looking for interesting pens while he was there. And he brought back a few. Among the prizes was this Wality eyedropper, which he kindly gave to me:

This is one wicked cheap pen. There are a few sellers in the U.S.A. offering it for prices in the vicinity of $20.00 (a very fair price when you consider shipping, handling, import duties, and so forth), but in India my friend bought a box of them for the equivalent of $1.00 each. The interesting thing about that, even more than the astonishing price, is that these really aren’t cheap pens. They’re quite well made, and they’re the sort of pens that many people use. Cheap pens, in India, sell for the equivalent of about 25¢ each; that’s what schoolchildren use. (Yes, schoolchildren. They actually teach their kids to write over there.)

I particularly like this pen because it’s a real old-fashioned pen. There’s no high-tech O-ring to seal the barrel, and there’s no cartridge/converter-style nib/feed/sleeve assembly screwed into the front of the section. This pen relies on machined clutch surfaces to seal the barrel, and it has a hard rubber feed – with real vintage-style channels — forced together with a nib into the section. There’s a real inner cap, and the cap even has a breather hole. How much more honest and old fashioned can you get?

Okay, so the nib is steel. And it’s rigid, really rigid. But I adjusted it for a little more flow and smoothed the tip, and I gotta tell you, this is a remarkably nice pen. I probably won’t carry it much, but that’s only because it’s huge, at 515/16” long capped and 631/32” posted.

I have another friend who is Indian and is considering setting up to sell Wality pens on a broad scale here in the States. This is a good thing.