(Caroline Foty's first fountain pen was a 1970s Sheaffer No Nonsense that still writes perfectly. Since she discovered pens by independent makers, she wants "one of each, please" and wants to meet all the makers. Maybe you do, too. She lives in Baltimore with pens, cats, and all kinds of fiber arts supplies.)
Imagine yourself wandering a pen show. You walk up to a table displaying the sign “Bonecrusher 7.” Serious stuff… When you look a little more closely, you see that the pens have women’s names… come to think of it, they are named after cartoon characters! Now you’re really interested.
This imaginative exercise is not fiction. James White’s last assignment before retiring from the Army was in the demilitarized zone in South Korea. “The medic call sign was Bonecrusher, and the number indicated status. I was the highest ranking non-commissioned officer, the supervisor of medics, so I was Bonecrusher 7.” When a new officer changed all the call signs, White decided to keep Bonecrusher 7 for his own.
White has made things as long as he can remember. “My dad taught me to work with steel, to grind metal for homemade knives.” When he was stationed in Iraq in 2007-8 he taught knife making classes in the base’s aid station. Later, at Fort Campbell, there was a wood shop, and in a what-the-heck moment he signed up for a pen making class and made a mechanical pencil. His interest was piqued.
He spent about ten years making kit/component pens. “For the first couple of years you give away a lot of stuff you make that you aren’t happy with.” In 2017 he attended his first pen show, in Denver, and met and talked to many pen makers. “I got to see another side of pen making.” He started making prototypes of fountain pens in between turning out kit pens, and got a table at the Colorado show the following year. “I had a spread of kit pens on the table, and on the side a little box of fountain pens I was working on. Show organizer Ed Capizzi said, ‘THESE are the ones people want.’”
From that point, the bespoke style fountain pen was the focus. “I went through a couple of model iterations. It took a couple of years to get the Velma where we wanted it.” Yes, THAT Velma…
“A lot of pen makers name their pens after something they are interested in. I enjoy the simplicity of some cartoons. I started with Velma from Scooby Doo, it was one of my brother’s favorite cartoons growing up.” (April Mathews, White’s partner and admin/QC assistant, holds up a little plastic statue of Velma that they were given by a customer.) “We try to think of a female cartoon character that fits each new model. For our thinnest pen, it’s Olive Oyl. For our smallest pen forthcoming it’s going to be Agnes from Despicable Me. Wilma is our biggest model – a strong sturdy but appealing cave woman. Betty was shorter than Wilma and had a bow in her hair, so Betty has a clip.” His personal favorite character was Alice in Wonderland. Really, the possibilities are almost endless.
For their first show outside Colorado, Bonecrusher decided to go big and go to DC in 2025. “We were going to go as attendees, then got picked off the table waitlist six weeks ahead and had to hurry up and make some inventory.” Their slate of eight shows in 2026 has felt like too much, though, so next year they are going to reorganize their show calendar a little. (Mathews’s son, Talon, will occasionally staff their table, as he did at BWIPS in 2026, to lighten their travel load.) Colorado will always be on the list, though, Mathews says. “It’s our home show. The Colorado pen posse supported James and watched him come into his own style.”
White and Mathews have begun learning to make blanks, although they are clear that they don’t see themselves ever selling them. “As someone who likes to create stuff, you see a picture and you think, ‘That would make a beautiful pen,’ but it’s hard to get another maker to see it the way you see it.” That doesn’t mean they don’t try; White says that Tim Crowe (Turnt Pen Co), Mark Koster (Hobble Creek), and Tim Mckenzie (Diamondcast) have been particularly patient in trying to achieve what they’ve imagined in blanks. “Different makers also have different things they are particularly good at. Bob Dupras has a way of feathering in the mica; Cocoon has transparency; Tim Crowe does great color mixing; Mark does this spiraling.” Sometimes they will make a blank whose recipe they don’t think to write down, and then they begin the quest to try to make it again. One of their most popular resins, Penny Dreadful, came out of the process of trying to recreate a blank whose specifications were not recorded.
One thing White particularly enjoys doing is segmenting stone into wood pens, and he’s acquired a metal lathe from Jim Hinze to allow him to work safely with harder materials. It’s no surprise, then, that one of his favorite pens is a Ryan Krusac L-16 in black ash wood; a pen from Brian Weaver’s Ironfeather Creative, with a handmade Damascus steel clip, also comes to mind. But, he says, “I don’t use a lot of fountain pens! I use a tester that I made, but usually I’m using a mechanical pencil to draw an idea, and I can erase it.” Mathews, it turns out, is the pen collector. One of her favorites is a Jason Neil Penworks pen from an As The Pen Turns podcast Secret Santa exchange. “James enters, and I get the pen. At shows we try to support our fellow makers, and I buy a pen or a bunch of blanks. We’ll also send people to other makers if they want something that we know is someone’s specialty.”
Bonecrusher is in the process of relocating from Colorado to Alabama, and they are building out a larger shop there. “We need more space,” White says. “We want to add a laser engraver for logos, we want to make clips and do metal work. Blank casting needs more space.”
Honing his craft is a constant priority for White. “We asked Ed Capizzi and his wife, ‘What do you NOT like about pens?’ Ed said that he didn’t like how if you dropped a pen, it would often break at the section threads, so I added an extra millimeter there to make them stronger. His wife said she didn’t like the feel of sharp threads when you hold a pen, so we started tapering the threads to the section so it’s softer to hold. We want our pens to be pretty, but also the most comfortable for long writing sessions. We take reports from customers – they’re what make us, us – our BC7 family.”
This continuing improvement is White’s favorite thing about what he does. “As we keep making pens we find things we can do better. It’s craftsmanship – taking a raw material and turning it into something that is beautiful and useful at the same time.”
James White’s work can be seen at his website Bonecrusher 7 Studios, his Instagram @bonecrusher7studios, and at pen shows in Colorado, Baltimore, DC, Arkansas, Pacific Northwest, Orlando, and possibly next year Atlanta and Raleigh.
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