A look back at the Sheaffer No Nonsense fountain pen.

~ rupertarzeian

Looking back at the fountain pens which have been particularly significant for me, there is probably none more so than the basic Sheaffer No Nonsense. Certainly, these got the heaviest usage. These are the pens that I used as a law student at Bristol Polytechnic (as it was then called, but now the University of the West of England), from 1977-80.

A Sheaffer No Nonsense fountain pen from the 1970’s.

I would buy these from a local WH Smiths. They were sold on hanging card blister packs. I cannot recall the price back then but it might have been around £7.00. There were a few different nib options including Fine, Medium and Italic but I mostly went for the Medium nib. They took Sheaffer Skrip cartridges. A Sheaffer converter could be used, of the push button or press bar type, if you had one, but the cartridges were easier, to refill mid lecture. Just unscrew the barrel, remove the empty cartridge, drop a new one into the barrel and then screw the section back on; the pen did the rest.

Looking back on my first term at Bristol, the amount of information that we were expected to take in, assimilate and learn, was daunting and stressful. Typically a college day included two hours of lectures, always in the same lecture theatre with its banked rows of orange, folding seats, each with a small, fold-out tray from the arm rest, rather like the aisle seats in a passenger plane. These were barely big enough to support an A4 pad of notepaper, let alone the printed handouts of course material to refer to. Being left handed, I remember the dilemmas of whether to take notes by annotating the printed handouts, (which were of varying degrees of detail) or by writing on my A4 pad and, more fundamentally, whether to write in lefty-underwriter style (with my elbow tucked in) or my faster, neater more usual, lefty-overwriter style, which meant rotating the notepad 90 degrees anticlockwise.

I decided on the latter, overwriter style on A4 paper and also settled on black ink. In a typical lecture, I would write six pages full of notes in an hour. A reliable and comfortable pen was essential. The No Nonsense pens, with their firm, steel nibs, were well suited to this regime. The feeds were plastic although looking at them now, I have one which is of a different shape and might be ebonite. Some of the fins have broken off.

The usual feed.
A different feed on my white No Nonsense, now with a few of the fins broken.

Over the months, the nibs would wear down, so that the rounded pellet of tipping material would develop a circular, flat foot. By then, the writing experience would be super smooth for my writing angle but if you strayed away from this sweet spot, you would encounter a sharpened edge which would be scratchy. Eventually, when the nib was worn and getting too scratchy and when I fancied a change, I would replace the pen. Well, I say “replace” but I just bought a new one and never disposed of the old ones. I still have them all.

A well-worn nib.

Aside from using the pens for lectures, study notes and essays, it was also my practice to write up my diary each night, using small, page-a-day diaries from Boots. These were chunky little volumes, about the size of a pack of playing cards, with a page of plain, thin, fountain pen-friendly paper for each day. I would use reverse writing, (writing with the opposite side of the nib) to get an extra fine line and would, with very tiny writing, manage about 28 lines to a page. Back then I did not know that this was called “reverse writing”, SBRE Brown being not yet born.

I do not think I had a strong magnifying glass at that time, let alone the ability to take macro photos of pen nibs, and with a mobile phone! But looking now more closely at some of those No Nonsense nibs, there is wear on both sides of the nib so that the tip is almost like a sharp chisel.

Nib tipping wear from both normal and reverse writing. Apologies for the fluff.

The Sheaffer No Nonsense was available in various colours but I tended to buy blue, black or white. I also found some metal bodied versions, supposedly superior and bought a couple of these although I actually preferred the normal, plastic ones.

Rooting through a tin of old, long-since retired pens, I assembled my No Nonsense pens for a group photo:

My No Nonsense pens: the college years. The two on the right are the metal ones.

And here, in a never-before-seen-together group shot, are the nibs that got me through college:

My magnificent seven No Nonsense pens. Note the absence of any corrosion or staining, despite being some 40 years old.

The pens, as the name suggests, were no frills, basic, workhorse tools. They were of a good size, 121mm opened and 151mm posted. Being plastic they were very light, but solid. The caps featured a sturdy metal pocket clip with a round ball at the end which would serve very well although I carried mine in a pencil case. The brand Sheaffer was imprinted in the pocket clip. There was no Sheaffer white dot, for reasons unknown to me as I do not think that this would have added much to the cost. There was a chrome cap band, devoid of any text. The cap unscrewed on plastic threads, in one full rotation.

The steel nibs were imprinted with the name Sheaffer, the registered trade mark circled R, the nib grade and Made in USA. I suppose that this meant in Fort Madison, Iowa which I understand closed in 2008. There is a Sheaffer Pen Museum there now, with displays of their many ranges of fountain pens, desk pen sets, advertising posters and memorabilia as well as some fascinating old machines from the former factory and a gift shop. I have not been but enjoyed an amateur video of a trip to the museum on YouTube.

The No Nonsense pens are still produced as calligraphy sets although last time I bought one it was disappointingly plasticky, with a snap cap, soft grip section and a huge open ink window in the barrel.

Some years after college, I bought myself a Sheaffer Connaisseur, which seemed to be an upmarket version of the No Nonsense with an 18k gold nib. It sounds good on paper but I never really took to it for some reason.

Not long ago I inked up one of my No Nonsense pens, the blue plastic one with a super-smooth nib. It is still very usable and still remembers my writing angle. But I think it has deserved its retirement now.

30 thoughts on “A look back at the Sheaffer No Nonsense fountain pen.”

  1. Thank you, what a super delve through your memory. I wish I’d been as diligent as you and kept the fountain pens of my teenage years. I got a Sheaffer fountain pen in either 1976 or 1978 – not the No-Nonsense model – and it was a true friend to me, writing many a long letter in my lunch breaks to my friend who was taking her A-Levels whilst I went to whilst I went to work in a bank. Also used it to write my journal in A6 hardback lined notebooks the source of which eludes me. I’m happy they didn’t survive my purging years.

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      1. The Triumph Inperial Brushed Chrome looks right. Definitely had that diamond nib and the cap and body were both in the brushed metal. I don’t remember it as only a cartridge filler, but then I don’t remember it not being only a cartridge filler either, so it probably was that model. It was a present from my mum and dad (16th or 18th birthday), as was my next fountain pen which had to wait until I hit 40! Since then I’ve been buying for myself and it’s become a much more regular habit!!

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  2. Thank you for this post! I love my Sheaffer No Nonsense pens. They are work horse pens that took me through high school and have survived to this day without any mark of age on them. I can wax quite nostalgic about them, so I’ll just close here with my thanks. ^_^

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  3. I love these posts of your old school and university fountain pens- they are a real trip down memory lane! I also used to have a Shaeffer No Nonsense- blue like yours- but I think it has disappeared in what Shakespeare nicely described as the “dark backward and abysm of time”… They were excellent and so reliable.
    I also remember the reams of notes we took when I was at law school- noticeably more than in my first degree (in History and Literature). I think it was a lever arch file of notes per term… But I don’t recall wearing down a pen nib in the process- so you must have scribbled even more furiously than I did! But the terrible thing is that I really don’t remember much of all that knowledge I once could recite and reproduce in the exams.
    I’ll be fascinated by your next “nostalgia” review!

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  4. Ah… the memories of being a leftie in a row of those writing desk chair thingies. We had a few at school, and I remember getting a stiff back from being all twisted to use the right hand table-ette. Thankfully most classrooms still had older desks (with recently retired ink well holes). Durham Uni’s science lectures were more old school with banked lecture theatres. The lefties naturally congregated to the same rows so our elbows didn’t interfere with each other’s writing!
    I recently acquired a gaggle of No Nonsense fountain pens as part of a lot. All with italic nibs. The Fine italic seems quite usable, which surprised me. The broader M and B ones are definitely more for “artistic use”. One of them actually turned out to be a ballpoint barrel with a fountain pen section attached. The lot included one of the later transparent models with a rubber sleeve on the section and four of the current calligraphy models with really placky bodies and the ink viewing slits. Dreadful design. I read somewhere that the later nibs say “made in Germany” and are just jobbed out to the cheapest current vendor.

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    1. I too have served my time in a row of all left-handers. And that was the College of Law.
      Yes, those new plastic Sheaffers with the ink windows are not a patch on the 1970’s ones.

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  6. I’ recently pulled out a New Old Stock No-Nonsense, and greased the threads to use it as an eye drop filler. The fine point writes beautifully and has produced dozens of pages on that one enormous fill. What I find noteworthy is that it never burped like a regular eye drop filler.

    A note on the white dot: my understanding is the white dot was like Parker’s blue diamond, and reserved for their highest grade of pens to signify that the pen had a lifetime warranty. In retrospect, these No-Nonsense seem to deserve one.

    I remember reading somewhere that these were handed out as gifts by the US Diplomatic Corps when they made visits abroad. They were inexpensive enough that they didn’t need to be declared by the recipient, but were highly sought after for their reliability and smoothness. The Diplomatic Corps referred to them as “$5 Ambassadors”.

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  7. I used mine even today (I was feeling a bit nostalgic and re-inked mine) and it’s such a great pen.
    I like the fact that my nib is like yours, loosing it’s roundness – well, it’s completely flat now – and I have to write at the good angle or it gets scratchy.
    I used that pen from junior high to college and it never failed me.
    I might try to get a new one, with a converter this time.
    But like you, I’ll always keep it.

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  8. My mum had a No Nonsense pen when I was growing up, and even then I remember writing with it and thinking it was insanely smooth! Does it have a modern equivalent for smoothness at a high street price?

    I remember they also came with patterns or pictures on – hers was a queen of diamonds playing card design.

    Thanks for article – I’m glad to discover so many people remember them fondly.

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    1. Thanks! I am glad that this post brought back some fond memories for you. I remember the playing card print design, now that you mention it.
      As for a modern equivalents, that is a good question. A few possibilities might be a Faber Castell Grip, a Kaweco Perkeo or a Lamy Safari or Nexx, depending on your preferences, all in the £15 to £20 price range.

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  10. Enjoyable post! I still have 2 Sheaffer No Nonsense plastic pens. I think I bought them back in the 1980s. One is dark green, the other orange. I use black Scrip cartridges and medium italic nibs in them for writing music manuscript. I have other fountain pens, but these are the most dependable pens in my collection.

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  11. Hi. I loved looking at your Sheaffer collection. I bought a no nonsense red pen about 30 years ago and just recently started using it again. One of my nibs (fine italic) just doesn’t work at all. Stored with the other M and B nibs which I successfully cleaned and work perfectly. I’ve tried everything I’ve found in google searches but no luck! The ink just doesn’t come through at all. I’m now looking for a replacement for it but there is absolutely nothing online. Any suggestions on what else I can do to make it work (or do you have one you would like to sell?).
    Many thanks for your great article on your pens. It was so interesting.

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  12. Thanks Jen.
    It is difficult to say what might be the reason for your fine italic nib no longer working. It is probably due to ink residues having dried and hardened in the feed channels. The obvious things to try are soaking the nib, perhaps overnight, and flushing it through with a bulb blower and clean, luke warm water. If you do not have one of these, just try filling and emptying the pen a few times with a converter fitted – or failing this, just use an old cartridge and squeeze water through the feed.
    You can check how the nib looks under a loupe, checking for the tines being level and not too tight or too wide apart.
    If all of this fails and you still want an italic nib then you have the perfect excuse to buy a new pen. An Italix “Captain’s Commission” from Mr Pen, with an italic fine nib is a good contender, or perhaps a Sailor Pro-Gear Slim with a music nib if you are going for gold. Good luck.

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  13. Really enjoyed your reflection on the Sheaffer No Nonsense. I enjoy these preowned pens today. I’ve read that the tipping on a nib can wear, but I thought it took a lifetime (or more) of use! Wow! Those two metal Non Nonsense pens, especially in color, have to be collectors’ items.

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    1. Thank you for reading Bryan. Yes those No Nonsense pens took some wear, in the 1970’s. I applied very little pressure to the nib, so it was just due to daily use in lectures. They were basic but solid, comfortable and dependable for exams.

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  14. I used to work in WHSmith selling, among other things, the Sheaffer No Nonsense. I have a red one myself and used it with the variety of coloured ink available, peacock blue was a favourite.
    I have so many happy memories of using it, a pen that made long school days and piles of homework a little more bearable.

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  15. Love your informative & nostalgic blog. My f.p. days started in Northern California in 1963 with the Sheaffer “school” cartridge f.p. with pointy ends, moved to London 67-71 for “O” & “A” Levels with my trusty Osmiroid, when I wrote so much that the tipping material would wear down & then the tip would actually break off — every few months I would have to replace the solid gold nib (when gold was $32 an OUNCE)!!! . I have even bought a few pens after reading your reviews (e.g. The Moonman 2 or 3 [I have both]– I mean the marbled Light Blue, Burgundy & Green ones you recommended!). If you ever want to sell your 2 Metal-bodied No Nonsense f.p.s, I even have 2 NOS Medium No Nonsense nib units & I promise I would give them a good home in Southern Arizona!

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  16. I recently came across my three Shaeffer No-Nonsense fountain pens, cleaned and squirreled away with my slide rules. I used them all until the late 1980s, when I started using computers for most work. I wondered about using them again, now that I’ve retired, and came across your lovely post while searching for refill cartridges. Local office supply and stationery stores don’t carry any, and nothing I found online mentioned the No-Nonsense line. Are there refill cartridges available today that will work with these pens?

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    1. Hi Guy,
      Thank you for your kind comments on my blog post. Congratulations on your retirement.
      It’s good to hear that you still have your old Sheaffer No Nonsence fountain pens from the 1980’s. Yes, ink cartridges are still available. Look for Sheaffer Skrip, classic ink cartridges. They are sold in packs of five cartridges. Blue and black are commonly available. You may have to hunt harder if you want other colours. Alternatively you can fit a Sheaffer converter and use any bottled fountain pen ink.

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    2. My No-nonsense pens use Sheaffer proprietary cartridges and converters. Lots of online fountain pen shops will carry them as well as Amazon.

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