A Feast for 39+1 Years

With the new "39+1” fountain pen collection, Nino Marino reunites with his first love: Delta Pen Company.

- By Nicky Pessaroff

The new Delta 39+1 fountain pen is composed of a rare Italian brown celluloid matched to gold-plated appointments and features a patented Write Balance system with a removable two-gram weight in the barrel's blind cap.

In 1982 Nino Marino co-founded an Italian pen company with a global reach, Delta s.r.l. Fans in the United States prized Delta pens for their traditional Italian hand-turned ebonite, celluloid, acrylic, precious metal, and wood bodies and their innovative filling systems and nib options. Delta Pens was instrumental in the renaissance that Italian pen making experienced through the 1980s and '90s.

Then, in 2017, production at Delta stopped, and Marino, a dynamic figure in the pen industry, went silent for a time. Turns out, while temporarily out of the public eye, Marino was considering future challenges.

Delta's special 40th anniversary logo and 39+1 anniversary logo.

Within a year, Maiora Pen Company was founded, which continued the artistic and technical vision of innovative writing instruments and vintage-inspired bodies with Italian flair.

Marino says, “The end of one existence, Delta Pens, became the beginning of another, Maiora, and so a story that began 40 years ago continues. Maiora is a team environment united by specialized skills and by the indelible imprint of so many years of experience in the field of valuable writing instruments.”

Marino was nowhere close to done: a year later, he relaunched another beloved Italian pen brand, Nettuno 1911 (See PW Vol. 34 No. 4, “A Tree Grows in Naples”).