Raleigh Pen Show ReportPosted on: Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Last year was our first year here, we really had a good time, and it turned out to be a great show.  Raleigh has all the elements of a great show, a great organizer, good publicity which means good floor traffic, a vintage pen auction, dessert party, and an awesome hotel.  What’s not to like?

Departure time for us was 5:00 pm Thursday May 31st.  Our first stop, KFC for the new tradition, the Double Down, which I discussed in my Baltimore Show Report a few months ago.  This time was no different and every bit as magical as I remembered it being.  Thank goodness I only go to KFC about every other pen show or these things would probably be the death of me!

Travel proved difficult early on, with a two car accident backing up traffic in Chicago for quite a while (and of course the lane we were in), and seemingly non-stop rain from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Charleston, West Virginia.  After what seemed like forever, we finally pulled up to the hotel around noon Eastern time to unload.

Getting everything in and out of the new car was a breeze.  Ok, maybe not getting everything into the car, but taking it out was nice.  Everything fit on pretty much one large concierge cart and we were in the ballroom unpacking.

Friday morning saw the release of a consignment collection of pens.  It happened about three hours before we got there and it was akin to a pen feeding frenzy.  Apparently it was like we all dream of, grabbing handfulls of pens at good prices.  Oh well, we can’t be everywhere all the time.  Maybe next time!

Friday at the show was brisk.  Probably the best and busiest Friday we’ve ever seen.  We never had a lull in traffic and people were always making their way around the room.  It took several hours before I could get out to see what was available!  The show ran until 7:00 pm, which is nice for a Friday, as it allows people to get off work, grab dinner and make their way to the show.  With a $10 entrance fee good for the entire weekend, we saw plenty of people come all three days.

The usual assortment of folk were present at the show, too many to properly list (and my apologies if I forget someone), but among the dealers persent were, Terry Mawhorter, Hirsch Davis, Presnell Wood, Susan Wirth, Pendleton Brown, Bert Oserman of Bertram’s Inkwell, Mario Campa, Ron Zorn, Richard Binder, Ross McKinney (noted Moore expert from the Triangle Pen Club), Jimmy Dolive, Jim Rouse, Lee Chait, Paul Erano, Bill Weakley, Jonathan Vely, Joe Nemecek, Gary Garner, and many others I can’t think of.

One of the nice features of the show hotel is the two hour happy hour which starts at 5:30.  After a long drive the night before with little sleep, we were glad to relax a bit at the table with a glass of merlot as we waited out the final hour of the show.  By 7:30 we finished covering up our tables and finally got a chance to unload our clothes from the car and check into our room.  We made dinner, then made the mistake of laying down for a nap at 8:30 pm.  At 1:45 am we awoke and realized it was just time to go to sleep as the next day was also going to be a long day, and sleep was first thing on the list.

Saturday morning came early, with a 6:30 am wake up and we reluctantly got out of bed to head down for nice feature #2 of the hotel.  The free hot breakfast.  Want an omelet?  they’ll make one for you.  Scrambled eggs, breakfast potatoes, sausage links, bacon, fruit, coffee, orange juice, bagels, muffins, you name it, they pretty much had it.  All part of your room fee.  A decent night’s sleep (on nice beds too!) and a good breakfast and we were on our way to get going for day two.

Since dealers and weekend traders can get in early, we finally had a chance to talk to some of our other friends and dealers and peruse their offerings.  I spotted a few nice pieces for my wish list, but couldn’t pull the trigger on price.  We would see what the sales for the day would bring.  Among those lost in the daily fold, a early Moore safety with two large ornate gold filled bands, a hard rubber Sheaffer Skrip ink bottle, and an Aikin Lambert Taper cap eyedropper with mother of pearl slabs and two gold filled bands.  Oh well, maybe next time.  There would be other pens that would talk to me.  The only item I did manage to pick up was an original printers block for an Esterbrook advertisement.  Ever see that image of the J pen and the woman’s finger replacing the nib, a circle around the nib indicating how easy it is to replace?  Yeah, that’s the one I got.  Very cool stuff I couldn’t pass up.  I’ll feature that in a future blog post.

While we were busy on Saturday as well, it proved to be less so than Friday, but still a good day.  We got a chance to meet some very nice people and visit with old friends from the area who mainly only make this particular show.  The show ended at 5:00 pm, but shortly before then, as traffic was dying down I had a chance to walk around to look at some pens.  One particular table caught my eye where I picked up three pens.  The first that caught my eye was a full overlay lever filler.  The pattern appeared to be hand engraved, and is from one of my favorite so-called “second tier” pen manufactures, the Edison Pen Co. of St. Petersberg Va.  That’s right, there was an Edison Pen company in the 1920’s.  🙂  This one sported the wrong nib (but a Waterman nib at that) and had another issue, but I was ok with that given the price.  It’ll clean up nicely I think, and the overlay pattern is quite beautiful.

The next pen that caught my eye was a Snap-Fil pen by the General Manufacturing Company of Sioux City, IA.  These pens made their way around the Sheaffer lever patent by placing the lever the opposite way, then having a portion on the back of the lever pull out to depress the J bar.  Snap-Fil was known for their pens having chatelaine chains on them and this pen was missing that and had a replacement nib, but I wasn’t worried given the very cool nature of the nib and the otherwise clean nature of the pen.  When I heard the price, I just had to have it.

Then as I’m getting ready to leave the table I spot another overlay.  I had seen it earlier, but let’s just call this a lesson of never assuming you know what something is until you do further research.  This pen looked like a Morrison filigree overlay, of which I have a set, so am very familiar with the pattern.  Others used it as well (Eclipse, most notably), so I picked it up.  No clip, which seemed weird at first.  I was told it was a Waterman.  Now, I’m no expert at Waterman, but I do have a couple dozen of them, and was pretty sure this wasn’t one.  We opened up one of the Fischler and Shneider books (the big blue one) and I was shown what was thought to be the pen.  It clearly was not, but we continued to discuss its nature.  I opened the pen up and noticed immediately it sported a Wirt #1 nib and matching vented feed.  I couldn’t imagine Wirt using this pattern, but figured there really was one of two things going on here:

1) This was a morrison or eclipse or other similar pen with a replacement Wirt nib
2) This was a Wirt.

Now, if you think of the first scenario, it’s not very likely.  Think about it for a minute.  With most pens, if the nib gets damaged, it can easily be replaced.  This Wirt nib is ventless, and is matched with a vented feed, so if it was a non-Wirt, someone would have had to replace both pieces.  It may have worked with a traditional feed, but probably not well.  We decided to page through the F&S book to see if  Wirt were listed and sure enough, this exact same pen was listed in the book at the bottom of page 299, down to the last detail on the cap and barrel.  Unfortunately, this now had the event of raising the price of the pen, but we were now pretty sure of its origin.  I snagged the pen, and even gave a little more than the first initial asking price.  It was still a great deal on a very pretty pen.

All the deals done, I reluctantly strolled back to the table in hopes of not getting Lisa upset with my purchases.  You see in just a few short hours, the auction was to take place and I had my eye on a number of pieces.  I softened the blow by running out to the happy hour and grabbing a couple glasses of Merlot and all was forgiven.  🙂

After the show closed, and we relaxed for another drink, we had little time to go and eat before the dessert party at 7:30.  This was down the hall from the auction room, and there were cookies and creme puffs and other delectable treats.  I was too stoked for a second pen show auction in as many months that I barely ate before grabbing a seat in the auction room.  Lisa had volunteered to help keep track of the winning bidders, so I sat this one out on my own, much to her chagrin.  Who was to keep me under control during the auction?

All tolled, there were 100 lots in the auction.  Gary Garner did a great job of moving things along quickly.  Many lots had reserves, but they were so low, the prices were often never mentioned.  Oddly, a number of lots received no bids at all and were removed.  I don’t recall ever seeing this happen in the past few years I’ve been going to auctions.

One piece in the auction was designated as all proceeds going to the Pen Collectors of America.  Being the “first husband” I felt it my duty to encourage bidding on such a pen.  Little did I expect to actually win this!  Thankfully, it was something I was interested in, being a very nicely patterned Waterman 12 eyedropper in the woodgrain pattern.  A clean pen and I’m glad to have helped out the PCA best I could.

Often times during an auction I have my eye on something that ends up being two thirds the way through the auction or near the end.  This can become frustrating, because if I want to try and keep things under control, I save up until the pen comes on the block.  Let me just say there were some very good prices going for some nice pens.  However, knowing I had violated the first rule of pen show auctions by having had three glasses of merlot prior, I tried to keep everything in check.  I was successful, and when my item came up I was on the winning end.  This, an unmarked thumb filler with two lovely gold filled bands.  I didn’t get the Aikin thumb filler I was looking for, but this was a nice close second.  I managed to come up on the short end of the stick on some nice Wirt eyedroppers, but did end up unexpectedly winning a green 51 aerometric with a gold filled cap.

The highlight of the auction was a complete, in-the-box set of four Parker bridge pencils and their respective bases.  Each packaged in their own smaller box, they had a different suit on each one.  An exceptional find that ended up reaching $1200 to the lucky winning bidder.

After the auction I quickly made my way back up to the room to chat with FPGeek‘s Eric Schneider to recall the days events.  Unfortunately, our interview never saw the light of day due to a technical problem, but it was fun anyway.  Maybe next time!

We ended up down in the hotel bar area with Mario Campa and his girlfriend Angelica, and Scott and Dan from Franklin-Christoff.  After a nice Sam Adams, we headed off to bed.  Sunday would be another (very) long day.

When the alarm went off Sunday morning, I realized I had promised to resac a pen for someone.  I got the pen out, measured and cut the sac and got the pen back in working order.  After breakfast, I went to drop off the pen, only to find it was for his wife, and she wanted a Waterman 52, but nothing too short.  So, I offered to pay what he had paid for the pen and we were both happy.  I later found someone with a real 52 and he managed to grab it, so all worked out in the end.  Funny thing was I was shown this Waterman the day previous, and not really being a big fan of the 1/2v models, passed, despite there being a lovely pansy band and it being an early 12-1/2v PSF model.  I was thinking of getting it, but figured I had bought enough and with the auction coming didn’t need one more.  Well, it made its way into my pen case anyway.  🙂

Sunday was your typical Sunday.  They are often slow until the afternoon when church and lunch time is over.  We had some business, but by 4:30, decided with the impending 16+ hour drive, we would start packing up early.  However, this didn’t happen before I managed to find a large number of old style faceted Pilot Vanishing Points, new in the box, with the stickers.  Very cool find!

As we were wandering around in the morning I spotted Lisa looking at a pen.  I’ve seen her eye this particular one up for a cople of pen shows now, so slipped the dealer the cash and we took it home.  We had one of these before, but it just wasn’t right.  Hopefully this one will work out better for us.  I just love the look of the Montblanc 124.  It’s just so… Un-Montblanc, and the nib is fabulous.

I also spotted an unusual Italian filigree overlay pencil.  Yes, you heard me, a cool pencil.  Similar to the so-called “Continental” safety overlays this was really cool.  I only wish I hadn’t spent my allotted funds or this too would have made its way home with me.  Maybe next year.

All in all, another great show.  It took about 17 hours to get home, but we gladly do it for the opportunity to see such great people and great pens.  If you haven’t been, you need to put this show on your list for next year!

See you at the next pen show!
Brian & Lisa