Agentann

Follow up …

Update to a previous story.......

There seemed to be a lot of questions in my recent post about Shirley Temple and whether or not the people back then actually would be able to recognize the pen she was holding and that the pen was red.

There were enough comments about this that I thought, instead of answering each comment one by one, I would just write a new general post addressing the issue.

So, the question is whether or not the average person back in 1934 would recognize the red Parker Duofold pen that Temple is holding.

The answer is yes, absolutely, and here's why:

For those living in media-saturated parts of the world, they wouldn't actually need to see the image in color to recognize that specific pen and to know that it was red because the Parker company had been heavily advertising their famous red pen for more than a decade at that point. Even in black & white advertisements, Parker paid the extra money to have the pen appear in color to highlight its uniqueness.

Prior to the introduction of the red Duofold, fountain pens mostly were made of hard black rubber (ebonite) that was difficult to color without making the pen brittle (some pen manufacturers got around this by encasing their ebonite pens in gold or silver metal work).

This well-known brittleness was the reasoning behind Parker's ad campaign in which they dropped one of their red pens from an airplane to show that they had overcome the brittleness problem.

Parker's advertising blitz was designed to sensationalize the pen, with bright printed colors jumping off the pages of magazines. They even commissioned a red and black airplane they named The Duofold and offered rides in it to people.

By the 1930s more pen companies were releasing pens in colors other than black (now mostly in materials such as Bakelite and celluloid) but the one everyone wanted, the one everyone recognized, the one everyone had been seeing everywhere since 1921, was the expensive and luxurious red Parker Duofold.

Because of all this, the red Duofold became a cultural symbol of success and wealth, even as the price of pens was coming down across the board.

So when the average person saw that photograph of Shirley Temple leaving a large ink blob on her contract, of course they would have recognized the pen she was holding, and, as people used to living in a world of black & white images, they would have recognized that the Duofold she was holding clearly was not pure black (see the two adverts immediately to the right of Temple's photo to see what I mean), and so had to be that world-famous and costly symbol of status: the red Parker Duofold.

I have been enjoying the comments on that original post, so please keep them coming!

Historia Obscurum

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