I have been slowly accumulating information on the Chilton company for some time. I think I got a pretty successful timeline developed, and have a reasonable handle on what happened to the company thru the stages of it's life.
As with the rest of the companies on the subject line of this forum sub category, I think they each have a wonderful story to tell. Unfortunately, a lot of these smaller companies had less surviving documentation, thus most of the effort to piece together a history usually starts out as a working hypothesis.
I am hoping to submit an article to the quarterly newsletter of a well known pen collecting club, in regards to some of the history. Not sure what topic I will present, but I have a pretty decent overview of the Long Island color/model numbering system, as well as a pretty thorough identification guide to the wingflow series of inlay.
My only hope is to see others start gathering fact, and information on each of these smaller companies, and move forward with it, by either making the information available to others, by writing articles, creating a website ( chilton pens on the web...) or whatever other valuable contribution they can offer. The information gets more difficult to find each day and year that passes, and hopefully with a lot of effort someone can capture even a part of it before it is lost forever.
Take care each of you, I hope I can offer some valuable contribution to the forum as time passes...
Great site Rick. I especially love your catalog on there. I'm trying to compile a resource of catalogs and other publications over in the Research section of this forum. I would love to have you post your catalog there. If you'll read our use agreement you'll note that you retain full rights to it other than we encourage folks to use the pictures on eBay so long as they credit this site. Our goal is to have the single largest free catalog resource on the internet. To be honest, we already do.
I'll have to see what I can find on Chilton pens myself. I love those Wingflow's.
PeteWK
edit here - I generally post scans that are 10 inches tall and either 72 or 100 dpi depending. That allows for the catalogs to be read but protects you from someone copying them for profit.