The early week –
The week was filled with plenty of busy preparations, not the least of which was the scheduling of the evening meal with friends. Since we are only at a show for a couple of days, we like to make sure we have everything lined up before we leave. We had made arrangements to meet with a book publisher at the show to discuss the forthcoming Esterbrook book which is in the works, and also wanted to get together with fellow FPGeeks friends Eric Schneider and Stephen Brown. Hotel arrangements were double checked, directions printed, iPad, laptop, and camera battery were charged up. We had a couple of last minute deliveries show up just in time on Tuesday, including J. Herbin inks, Conklin, Monteverde, and Noodler’s ink. Lisa frantically checked everything in, then repacked them for travel.
We’ve discussed our pre-show rituals before, but as we bring on board more product lines, it gets tougher and tougher to find a way to keep everything in check and everything fitting in our new car. The old George Carlin saying about buying a bigger house gets you more stuff seems to also apply to cars. The new car is certainly bigger than the old Saturn Ion we used to travel to shows in, but now we find ourselves in sort of the same predicament, except we’re now packing for four tables rather than three. Lisa is an amazing tetris player and always gets it just right. I hate tetris, and never liked playing the video game, much like in real life, so I leave it to her and just handle carrying boxes out to the car. This is usually a suitable arrangement. After a last minute check in at our friendly mechanic to eradicate a “Maintenance Required” warning light, we are ready for departure day.
Thurday – AKA departure day
Being I have a new job and now have no real eligible vacation time, I end up doing four ten hour days just to get Friday off for the show. The over achiever I am, I do 10.5+ hour days just so I can leave a little early on Thursday. We get up early that morning, slam a cup of coffee and Lisa takes me in to work. It’s a 35 minute trip to work, so we talk about the details of the day. I work until 3:30, then she will pick me up, car loaded, and we head out. We both expect Lisa to be loading and repacking the car a minimum of three times before everything is just right. Well, much to my surprise and amazement (and I expect Lisa’s too), I get a text message at 8:30 am saying, “Car is packed” Awesome! Lisa works hard the rest of the day getting the rest of the stuff together and picks me up at 3:45 pm. The road trip begins!
We drive a couple of hours before stopping for dinner at one of our favorite stops, the A&W in Kenosha. The root beer lived up to its world famous reputation, but the burger and french fries were a bit of a let down. Oh well, pen show here we come! It rained pretty much the entire trip down, but thankfully, we missed many of the worst parts. At one point during a travel, we realized that we had just about had enough of our GPS as it decided it was a smart idea to take us through downtown Chicago during rush hour on a Thursday night. We lost about two hours going this way, and even started looking for a Best Buy to get a better unit, but then realized it wouldn’t be possible to program the device in the car. We resorted to the iPad to get us out of Chicago proper, and everything from there on out seemed to work ok.
A&W in the frosty mug!
Travel to shows for us is often an all night adventure. At some point (probably three or four in the morning we ended up doing some karaoke to oldies music on the radio. Maybe it was too much soda, but it sure made for a fun way to spend those tough hours in the car. All tolled, I probably got about three hours of sleep, Lisa more like two. We pulled in to the Sheraton around 9:00 am local time Friday morning, just in time for the fun and festivities to begin!
Friday –
Since we were right on schedule, with the ball room opening around ten o clock, we checked in at the front desk, spotted FPGeeks Eric and Stephen in the lobby, and then grabbed a concierge cart and filed it up and rolled it into the ball room. We had a pretty good idea where we were going to be on Saturday, but it’s a bit of a gamble since for whatever reason they don’t tell you where you are going to be. It would sure make sense to me to allow people to sit in their respective spots, but apparently there is some logic to it. We grabbed three tables and started with our setup. Setup takes us around two to three hours usually and this time was no exception. Three hours later we had our wall of ink up, modern pens out and vintage pens organized and paper set up. Time to sit down? Nope. Time to start selling! It was a very busy day for a Friday, since Friday’s are typically weekend traders and dealers. They are often somewhat slow, but can be good days.
I did manage to get out and take a look around the floor a couple of times, scouting out possible potential purchases, and spotted two, but did not pull the trigger on either, keeping them locked away in the recesses of my brain for further negotiating. I did manage to pick up some long sought after Parker 61 parts from Rich Lott that would enable me to complete three 61’s in my “looking for parts” binder. This was amazing as all three had cracked hoods and needed to be replaced. Rich had bags of 61 parts and hoods which even looked new old stock with good clean arrows. I was in heaven.
Nice Pens!
The end of the day came and we discovered our assigned weekend table was not the spot we had picked, but rather directly across the aisle from where we were sitting. We had decided to leave the ink but take the pens with us as there was no overnight security present Friday night, but this now meant we had to empty our entire ink grid and move it across the aisle. Thankfully with help from friends Judy and Bryan from Allen Press, we managed to get everything boxed up and moved over in about 45 minutes. Time for dinner!
We met up with Eric and Steve, and Judy and Bryan for dinner at the hotel restaurant. Burgers were the order of the day for several of us, and were excellent. Appetizers of flat bread and some cheesy covered thing that resembled a pizza were dished up as well. Our friends from Allen Press Judy and Bryan were fascinated with the whole pen show sub culture we have and asked a number of questions. This was Bryan’s first time at a pen show and was a self proclaimed “newbie”. He had even came with a budget and money to buy some pens! We all tossed him fountain pens from our shirt pockets to try and discussed what to look for in a pen and some general “fountain pen for beginners” 101. This to me was very refreshing, and a nice change of pace from discussing imprint variations of insert-brand here and which pens have the best flexible nibs. This was truly what our hobby is all about, the generous sharing of information and assistance to other fellow collectors, no matter how experienced they may be. Advice given was excellent for a person of any level of collecting status, including such pearls of wisdom as making sure to peruse the entire bourse before making a decision, but if a pen really speaks to you, make sure to buy it for it may not be present by the time you make it back around again. Of course, in true show newbie experience we decided to place bets on how soon it would be before Bryan made his first pen purchase. Of course at this time we had additional help from Brian And Andrea Gray from Edison Pens, who decided it may be easier to do a before noon or after noon type of bet. Lisa placed up a $1 bet in to the pool, I saw her bet and raised her four packets of Sweet and Low that just happened to be present in my pocket (Lisa likes Sweet and Low in her coffee). Many of us came to the same conclusion however, it would not be very long before that first purchase would be made. I mean really, you’re at the world’s largest pen show, how long can you really hold out? 🙂 We concluded our dinner with some amazing dessert, many choosing the brownie ala mode. Then, after some 40 plus hours of basically being constantly awake, Lisa and I made our way to our room and collapsed, 6:30 am comes early.
Saturday – The BIG day
Saturday is always the day to look forward to ANY show. It’s the day things happen, dealers who couldn’t make it for Friday show up, the public comes in droves, and if you’re lucky, you don’t get to eat your lunch until 3:00. That’s really our litmus test of how good a show day is, how long it takes before you have enough time to sit down and eat your lunch. 🙂 We had some extra help this year from our friend and Arkansas Pen Show organizer Tim Byler. Tim showed up early, helping us make sense of having to reset everything up once again. Fortunately we got it up fairly quickly and were rocking early on. It was at some point around 9:45 that I realized I had not yet set my watch to eastern time. Tim asked me after a very busy morning what time it was, to which I said almost 9:00. He looked at me like I had just grown horns and a tail and said, “Really?” We had a good laugh over that for quite a while. The room was HOT all day. At one point, someone had set up a thermometer and it read a smoking 86 degrees. I just thought it was all the hustling and bustling going on and the spotlights beaming down on us, well apparently not. Tim had discovered there was a certain spot right behind the ink display that was noticeably cooler. Now that I think of it, he stayed there all day, coincidence?
For all the day brought, I managed to get away from the table only once to run to the bathroom and on my way back, just happened to stumble past a table where I saw this particularly beautiful overlay on Friday. I love overlays and this pattern is one I don’t have. Most certainly Aikin Lambert, it was unfortunately missing its original Aikin nib. No worries, I’ll be able to hunt one down, the problem will be which particular variation of Aikin nib belongs in this pen? Well, save that thought for a later moment as it was time to get back to the madness at our table.
Aikin Lambert Basket Weave Filigree
I got a chance to talk with Sheaffer rep and friend Jared Lutkowski about some of the upcoming new Sheaffer pens and there was also a series of special edition VFM, 100, 300, and 500 pens in Ferrari red, and some even had the Ferrari logo on the clip. Very neat looking pens, and maybe something we’ll be adding to our lines sometime soon. We did find out the new lines will be coming out sometime yet this year, and not next year as originally expected! I have been promised some more information in my email in box shortly!
A podcast listener stopped by our table late in the morning with a most interesting German made pen. It was an unusual orange color, with a stanhope in the cap of a scantily clad woman. The business end of the writing instrument was a reversible combo, which we didn’t discover until I looked at it, Apparently one end is a pencil, and you unscrew it from the barrel to reveal a gold plated dip pen nib on the other side. This was one of those cheap nibs that were stamped to create a depression at the top of the nib, and thus a protruding writing tipping on the reverse. The top of the pen had a working compass, and if you unscrewed the top of the cap a very small dice was revealed. This probably was a pair or more at one time, but these are easily lost. Other companies made similar compass/dice holding writing instruments, but this was surely a multi purpose tool! I suspect there was also more to the instrument as an unexplained space still existed inside the barrel, but since it was most certainly casein, we decided it was not a wise idea to try and open this without heat. There was a good two inch section of the pen which remained unexplained, and I can’t imagine this didn’t have some use. Extra lead or nib storage perhaps?
I had a chance to chat with Joe Nemecek, winner of the wonderful Parker bridge set at the Raleigh auction this past June. He was still all smiles as we talked about this amazing set. It’s good to see what is clearly a once in the lifetime find go to someone as nice as Joe. I chatted with Stuart Hawkinson, maker of perhaps the best 51 inner cap removal tool available. He had some 51 debutante, and 61 cap mandrels I wanted to get, but frankly, totally forgot to go back and get them before the weekend ended.
Jonathan Veley stopped by my table with a most unusual pencil he managed to snag from noted Esterbrook collector Carl Daniel. An interesting pencil with a sterling inlay attributed to the 1939 World’s Fair. What makes this interesting is that the pencil in question (a Pushmaster) was not to see the likes of production until 1941, and with the later Esterbrook only imprint present on the pencil, most certainly an even later indicator under normal circumstances.
The show wrapped up and we made our way to dinner with much the same group as Friday night, but added Brian and Andrea Gray from Edison Pens as well. We had a great time and were the last people to leave the restaurant that evening. We then moved our conversation to the lobby where we brought out a couple of bottles of wine, only to be scolded by hotel administration for doing so in a public space. Like a bunch of teenagers, we snuck the bottles back into the bar area and behind the chairs under a bag. We managed to snag a few moments with Bryan from Allen Press and discussed details of the forthcoming Esterbrook book. It was pretty exciting! After both bottles of wine were nearly gone the party broke up for the evening, all of us wanting a good nights sleep for there was one more day to come.
Sunday – No Slowness Involved
Sunday’s are usually the slowest days at any pen show, and we’ve learned to not get your hopes up as you will usually be disappointed in the results. We look forward to selling any paper as this is the heaviest to take back. Anything that comes in a box is the next best thing to sell. 🙂 To our surprise we had an excellent day and were quite busy the entire day, ending up with a better day then even Friday! At a slow spot, I managed to jump at the chance to pick up one more pen I had my eye on, this sterling filigree eyedropper, remniscient of Waterman fine silver overlays of the period. What drew me most to this pen was the large flower on the cap.
Sterling Filigree Eyedropper
While not marked with any maker’s marks, this is a high quality made pen. To my surprise, when I brought it home, I found it to be much larger than the Waterman silver overlay I have.
Pair of Sterling Eyedroppers
This particular pen has a Warranted #4 nib in it and is very flexible. All tolled, despite only buying two pens, I was very happy with the purchases.
Later on Sunday I was walking around and ran into Luiz Leite from Portugal. Luiz is an advanced collector and had purchased perhaps one of the largest pens I think I have ever seen. The look on his face is that of a proud man after a successful hunt. This Dunn Pen was perfect. No cracks, chips, and the red caesin knob was to die for. Oh, and a HUGE nib.
Luiz and his Dunn
Just to give you a sense of scale as to how huge this pen is, here’s a (pretty bad) shot of the pen next to a Pelikan (Not sure of the model)
Dunn
Sunday finally came to a close and we packed up our stuff in near record time. We were on the road by 6:20 and headed out back to Wisconsin. After a rocky couple of hours around 3:00 in the morning, we finally made it back to dropping me off directly at work at around noon on Monday. Let me tell you that was a very long five hour day of work!
As always, getting to a pen show is filled with fun and excitement, good pens, good food, and best and most important of all, great friends. To share a common interest with people from around the world and get to know them better on a more personal level is something that only happens at pen shows. I highly recommend making it a goal to get to one if you have never been! Next stop Dallas in September!
Cheers!
Brian & Lisa