About the Maltese collection

William Maltese, a renowned author known for writing his books with a fountain pen.  After he commissioned Ammo-Head design to create some fountain pens for his use everyday, we have started a collection in his name.  The pens you see in the collection is curated by William Maltese.  Each one will be certified authentic by Doyle Wheeler and William Maltese from Ammo-Head design!

Here is how the collection started in Williams own words:

I didn’t come to Spokane, Washington’s “Gallery of THUM” to meet Doyle Wheeler. I came entirely as the result of the non-fiction book I was writing, at the time, SPOKANE/PULLMAN WASHINGTON WINE REGION, as part of my WILLIAM MALTESE WINE TASTER’S DIARY series for mainstream publisher Wildside/Borgo Press’s “The Traveling Gourmand” imprint.

While attending a wine-tasting at Spokane’s Nodland Cellars, I’d learned that one of its owners, Tracy Nodland, not only made wine but painted wine-related pictures on canvases by combining the purple-paste sediments from the winery’s barrels with her paints — paintings “about” wine, painted “in” wine. I’d come to the gallery to see more of her work, as part of a multi-artist exhibition, as well as to meet the gallery owner, Cecile Charles, about whom I’d heard a good deal as regards her being one of the primary “doers” and “movers” in the area’s art community. While I’d been actively involved in the Seattle art scene, when living there, I’d come to believe that Spokane, as far as art goes, was rather a backwoods area, in comparison; Cecile’s efforts some of the few highlights and exceptions. Doyle was present as one of the artists whose works were being represented, and he was seated behind his display table situated just inside the door. My attention was immediately drawn to his handcrafted pens, many of them made from bullet casings, others finely wrought from various materials; each, in its own right, a separate and distinctive piece of collectable, as well as functional, artwork.

As someone with a life-time fascination with fountain pens, and as someone who actually wrote a good many of my two-hundred published books in long-hand, with a fountain pen, and who, often, still writes my books that way (time in front of a computer exceedingly boring!), I naturally found myself scanning each and every exquisite piece of his offered works for the fountain pens among them. Alas, there were only ballpoint pens (never a type of pen to have caught my attention to the extent of any fountain pen), and I voiced my disappointment.

Without blinking an eye, Doyle confessed that he’d always wanted to make a fountain pen, and, making one especially for me was as good an opportunity, as any, for him to do just that. Not that I would be obliged to buy the resulting pen if it didn’t meet my expectations, but he was more than willing to give it a try. And, certainly, I, having seeing the exquisite craftsmanship of which he is capable, was more than happy to let him do so.

The result, a few months later, was a real beauty that I would have grabbed up in a New York second if Doyle hadn’t been ready with yet another proposal. He was so personally pleased with the workmanship he’d managed to achieve on fountain pen #1 that he was thinking of doing several others, over the next few months, and he wondered if I’d like to hold out a bit longer and take my pick of that resulting larger selection.

At the end of that time frame, he provided me with a group of fountain pens that saw me acting like a kid in a candy store, trying my best to decide which of his marvelous heirloom pieces I wanted.

In the end, I went back to the first pen he’d made. Firstly, because it was his very first fountain pen and was sure to become a collector’s item just in that regard alone. Secondly, in the end, it was the pen which I truly did like best among the whole selection, although I was tempted, and still am, to buy more than the one.

Made of Desert Iron Wood, from a tree that’s one of the few in the world that will sink in water, due to the dry conditions in which it grows, machining it is like working with iron, although the end results can be absolutely stunning, complete with natural finish and shine.

By way of suitable christening of the pen, I used it to write my part of my latest WILLIAM MALTESE’S WINE TASTER’S DIARY series, Book #2 IN SEARCH OF THE PERFECT PINOT G! AUSTRALIA’S MORNINGTON PENINSULA (with A.B. Gayle).

In the interim, it has become my great pleasure to have my name attached to the WILLIAM MALTESE HEIRLOOM FOUNTAIN PEN COLLECTION, all the fountain pens of which will be designed and hand-tooled by Doyle, all personally selected by me for inclusion. There will be fifty editions of each pen selected by me for the collection (the Desert Iron Wood Pen included); all handcrafted by Doyle; all unique in that wood grain prevents any two from being exactly the same; each provided with its own certificate of authenticity as a bona-fide numbered edition.

I’ve already started penning my next book with my Desert Iron Wood Pen.

WILLIAM MALTESE