Some pens are bought to write with. A David Oscarson pen is made to be kept, in the old sense of an heirloom. The collection speaks, in the house's own words, to imagination and emotion, memories and history. Each piece is a handmade limited edition that joins strict attention to detail with quality materials and time-honoured craftsmanship, and each one is individually numbered.
Two old-world crafts
The signature of every collection is the meeting of two techniques that most workshops abandoned long ago. Guilloché is the engraving: each precious-metal component passes through multiple stages of precision cutting until the surface carries an intricate, repeating pattern that catches and throws light. Hard enamel is the colour: a paste of glass, water and metal oxides, ground by hand with a mortar and pestle, laid over the engraving with a quill and fired in a kiln at more than 1,000 °F until it fuses into a layer of glass.
Because translucent enamel lets light pass through it, the engraving glows up through the colour. The pattern seems to move as the pen turns in the hand. That is the effect every David Oscarson design is built around, and it is the reason the house describes its work less as decorated pens than as decoration you can write with.
From Stockholm to St. Louis
Oscarson's family name was originally Oskarsson, and he spent most of his youth in Stockholm before making St. Louis his home. That double geography runs through the catalogue. Swedish subjects such as Carl Linnaeus, Alfred Nobel, Sankta Lucia and Valhalla sit beside American ones such as Lewis & Clark, the Golden Spike, the Spirit of St. Louis and America the Beautiful.
It is also a family house. His wife Veronica drew all of the line art for the Carl Milles collection, which celebrates their wedding anniversary and the twentieth anniversary of the company. On that pen the symbol of the St. Louis city flag sits at one end and the symbol of Stockholm's flag at the other, connecting the two cities just as the sculptor Carl Milles did.
More than forty stories
Over the years the house has released more than forty limited editions. Each takes a person, place or idea and distributes its symbols across the cap, clip, barrel and gripping section. The Russian Imperial, the twenty-eighth collection, honours Fabergé and the Romanovs. Edwin Hubble, the fortieth, carries the expanding universe in sterling silver. America the Beautiful, the forty-second, was made for the Semiquincentennial of the United States.
Edition sizes are chosen to mean something rather than to sound rare: 63 pieces per colour for Hubble, one for each year of his life; 76 for America the Beautiful, in honour of 1776; 304 for the Russian Imperial, one for each year of Romanov rule. Several earlier collections are already sold out, and once a run is complete it does not return.
Twenty-five years
The Twenty-fifth Silver Anniversary collection marks a quarter-century of design in the Art Nouveau motif. It is made of solid .925 sterling silver, with ten colours of translucent and opaque hard enamel and fifteen sections of guilloché, and each colour variation is limited to just 25 pieces. It received the 2025 Pen World Readers' Choice Pen of the Year Award.
Every piece is numbered, and every edition size means something.
Buying David Oscarson in Canada
Every collection is offered as a fountain pen, with an 18-karat gold nib made in Heidelberg in Fine, Medium or Broad, and as a roller ball. Both count toward the same numbered edition. El Laguito Cigars is an authorized David Oscarson retailer in Canada. Each pen we supply is genuine, individually numbered and shipped insured from Mississauga, Ontario. If you are looking for a particular collection, colour or number, contact us and we will check availability with the house.