The Fascination with Gold Bond Just to be clear, here we are talking about Gold Bond fountain pen brand, not foot powder or ointment. Gold Bond pens were marketed by Montgomery Ward in the 1930s in both their catalog and their stores, so they were pretty well-known merchandise in those days. Interstingly, today it seems that except for me and a few others, these wonderful pens are not well known in the entire fountain pen collector community. Some dismissed it as just another "third-tier" pen brand, but to me, as long as a pen is objectively made well and of high quality, it can be welcome in my collection. I don't care if it wasn't the top most popular brands, it makes even less sense for me to limit my collection that way. So this is the chronicle of the Gold Bond pens that I discovered and restored over the years. #1 The Big Gold Bond (restored in 2017) You have no idea how much I've been waiting for this Gold Bond brand pen to "rise from the ashes"...
You know, there are bits and pieces of history that we learn when we were young, which stuck in our mind all the way through adulthood. For me, one such history has to do with the abbreviation VOC. We'll get to that a bit later, but first, if you were to pick two cities in Europe that are not too far from one to another, which can be visited within a week's time, which ones would those be? If you answered "too many to choose from", then you start to understand our dilemma, but in the end we chose Amsterdam and Paris. So we'll go through the travelogue in order, first Amsterdam in this blog post, and the next one would cover the Paris part. A fair warning: As a family we identify ourselves more with adventurers than tourists. We don't zoom in and out tourist attractions, rather we just have a relaxed (and very flexible) path to a destination that sounded interesting. We find this method more enjoyable because it lets us discover more about the locale, rather t...