It was 10 years after cofounders Matthew William Conable and Michael Henry Honack established William Henry Studio—a firm specializing in engraved and artistic pocket tools made of exotic materials—that they decided to apply their craft to writing instruments. Up to that point, the company had produced pocket knives, money clips, and golf divot tools—items all characterized by flat surfaces. But when it came to creating a pen, the firm’s artisans and two resident pen makers discovered that the tried-and-true techniques they previously had used to turn fossilized materials into knives and money clips would not work when the intended shape was cylindrical and hollow.

After more than three years of research and development, the company achieved success not with the computer-aided machinery that it had used over the past decade, but with a 40-year-old drill press and simple hand-tooling. The final product—a fossilized mammoth-tooth pen costing $1,950 as a rollerball and $2,250 in a fountain style—is limited to 250 examples and includes a barrel constructed from 10,000-year-old, brittle material sourced from the ocean floor. "It took three and a half years of quietly destroying very expensive fossil material to figure out how to do it," says Conable.

Incorporating mokume, ebonite, and titanium alloys sourced from the aerospace industry, the pen is distinguished by numerous eye-catching accents, but it’s the woolly mammoth tooth constituting the pen’s barrel that Conable says makes each pen unique. "With material like mammoth tooth, no two pieces of material are going to be the same," he explains. "Most of the color to it is from minerals leaching into the seabed at the bottom of the ocean. I’ll never be able to show you one with green hues in the stripes again, because no other piece is going to look like that. It’s the only one like it in the world."

Such individuality makes a William Henry fossil pen attractive among collectors, and Conable gladly serves that market, but he does so with more than just the collector in mind. "I’m happy to serve collectors, but I don’t want to make a pen that’s only for collection," he says. "I want people to be able to use it."

Aside from the functionality of a pen made from rare, fragile materials, Conable is most proud of how the company has created a series of pens easily distinguishable from those made by the rest of the industry. "This is decorated, but it’s the nature of the material that makes the decoration," he says. "The pen market is all about applying a decoration to a base, but I’m much more interested in having the base be the decoration, and that’s what makes our pens distinctive."

William Henry Studio, www.williamhenrystudio.com