Tempest in an Inkpot

In Manhattan's Gimbel Bros., Inc., thousands of people all but trampled one another last week to spend $12.50 each for a new fountain pen. The pen was made by Chicago's Reynolds International Pen Co. In full-page ads, Gimbel's modestly hailed it as the "fantastic, atomic era, miraculous pen." It had a tiny ball bearing instead of a point, was guaranteed to need refilling only once every two years, would write under water (handy for mermaids), on paper, cloth, plastic or blotters.

To Gimbel's, all these wonders seemed well worth a plunge. The store had placed an order for 50,000 pens (retail value: $625,000). At week's end, 30,000 pens (including 12,000 mail orders) had been sold. By selling the first ball-bearing pen in the U.S., it looked as if Gimbel's had pulled the neatest merchandising trick of the season.

But the excitement over the pen was not limited to Gimbel's counters. A month ago, Thurman Wesley Arnold, hiring out his trust-busting talents to Reynolds, had filed suit in Wilmington's Federal Court for $1,000,000 (treble damages) against Eversharp Inc. and Eberhard Faber Corp. on a familiar Arnold charge: violation of the antitrust laws. The two defendants, Arnold claimed, had tried to "prevent mass distribution" of the Reynolds pen until they could 1) get rid of their own obsolete stocks, and 2) produce a ballbearing pen of their own on the basis of patent rights acquired from Laszlo Joszef Biro of Argentina (TIME, Aug. 21, 1944)

Back came a counterclaim, also for $1,000,000. Eversharp and Eberhard Faber, in a sizzling defense memorandum, went after the "somewhat checkered career" of Milton Reynolds, president of Reynolds International Pen. They charged that he had owned or been active in at least four companies which went broke. He had recently sold U.S. retailers Mexican cigaret lighters which "later turned out to be defective. He ... is apparently ... a 'stop-&-go guy,' a man who . . . drops the item [when it goes sour] and turns to another."

So far, Gimbel's had no complaint; only 150 pens had been returned as faulty. And Reynolds bragged that it now has orders from 700 other stores.

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