Hotter than Ever

Another geyser, hotter than ever, boiled up from the underwater world of ballpoint pens. As usual, it was started by Milton Reynolds, the Old Faithful of ball-pointism (TIME, Nov. 12, 1945 et seq.).

Reynolds, whose pens retailed for $12.50 before he started cutting prices, had started to bring out his latest models' to retail for $1.69 and $2.69 (at most, it costs him 33¢ to manufacture his ballpoints). So he wanted to clean out his stock of 350,000 obsolete models which retailed for $3.85. He sold the $3.85 pens to a jobber at a...