Photos & licences

15 models without a photograph — each carries a reason, and its entry opens with a technical drawing generated from dimensions.

• Fisher Space Pen Company Bullet Space Pen #400 (chrome)

  Commons has photographs of this model, but all of them show polished chrome, and chrome mirrors the background and so takes on its brightness. No cut-out threshold exists at which the cast shadow disappears while the lit side of the barrel survives: at the setting that removes the shadow, the pen is reduced to a sliver.

• Fisher Space Pen Company AG7 Original Astronaut Space Pen

  The only free frame showing the AG7 rather than the neighbouring Bullet model has the pen in its presentation case, against foam and a warranty card carrying the maker's logo. The background cannot be cut out, and the most legible element of the picture would be the trademark — which this site does not do on principle.

• LAMY LAMY 2000 ballpoint

  There is one good frame, wrongly described on Commons as a fountain pen. It lies on white cloth with folds, and no cut-out threshold keeps both a clean contour and the steel cone of the tip: the cone has the brightness of the cloth, so it goes when the cloth goes.

• LAMY cp1

  Four candidates on Commons, none of which shows the CP1. One of them is a Lamy swift — a thick barrel with drilled holes in the grip zone, that is an entirely different construction sold under the same brand.

• LAMY pico

  Commons holds one file matching this name, and it is not a product photograph but an everyday-carry flat-lay: some twenty objects on a dark lacquered desk. The model can be neither isolated from it nor confirmed.

• LAMY swift

  The only free frame was taken in hard sunlight. The sheet under the pen splits into two brightness zones, and the cast shadow touches the barrel, so the background flood passes through the penumbra into the object itself: either the whole lit strip of paper stays, or the pen disappears.

• Pentel EnerGel (standardowy model przyciskowy, BL77 / BLN75)

  Two candidates, and neither allows the model to be confirmed. The first is an extreme macro of the tip alone, on which no barrel printing is visible; the clear blue ribbed barrel does not match the variant described here in any case.

• Pentel R.S.V.P.

  The model is identified beyond doubt in the photograph — six barrels carry the gold print "Pentel R.S.V.P." and "MADE IN USA". What rules it out is the background: a polished wooden desktop with pronounced grain, light reflections and other objects at the edge of the frame.

• Pilot Corporation Hi-Tec-C

  Three candidates: a nineteenth-century portrait lithograph, a set of a dozen different pens on a desk, and a frame in which the model cannot be read. None serves either as illustration or as confirmation.

• Pilot Corporation Hi-Tec-C Coleto (ハイテックCコレト)

  Twelve candidates, mostly sports photographs of a figure skater named Koleto. The model's name is exceptionally unhelpful to a search engine here, and after viewing every file we found not one containing a pen.

• Retro 51 Tornado

  Wikimedia Commons does not hold this model. Queries on the name return only scans of old books in which the words "retro", "pen" or "tornado" occur somewhere — that is, full-text matches rather than photographs of the object.

• Sakura Color Products Ball Sign 280 (ボールサイン280)

  The entire candidate pool proved to be an artefact of searching for "sign ball": autographed baseballs, barber's poles, an information pylon in a metro station and a shop sign. The one photograph of a Sakura product shows the Gelly Roll line — the legible barrel print settles it.

• uni (Mitsubishi Pencil Co., Ltd.) Jetstream (standard)

  The candidates divide into the Latin phrase "in hoc signo", the Spanish surname Signo, and the British Aerospace Jetstream 41 aircraft. The one clean photograph of a pen in the pool shows a uni-ball Signo DX, a gel pen from a different line — the barrel print settles it unambiguously.

• Zebra F-701

  The "Zebra pens" category on Commons runs to twenty-three files and the F-701 is not among them — there are the Sarasa Clip, Hi-Mckee, Tapli and markers. The single candidate matched on the brand name shows a black barrel with a rubberised grip, not this model's knurled stainless body.

• Zebra Sarasa Clip

  There is a free photograph of five units in transparent packaging on a light background, and the packaging is what settles it. At a low threshold a membrane of background remains between the barrels; at a higher one the pale barrels dissolve — the beige and the pink go with the background, because they share its brightness.