It seemed to me a good idea to travel to Baltimore from Philadelphia for a fountain pen show. There’s a pen show in Philadelphia every year, and I always go to that, but people talk about other shows with enthusiasm and I thought it would be nice to see what this one was like. Also, I haven’t been to Baltimore in a long time.

I forgot a couple of things. First of all, travel is always an adventure. My train reservation was changed to a different train later in the day, then the later train was delayed further, and then I arrived to my reserved seat on the train to find a gentleman fast asleep in it, with headphones on, various food supplies, and a eye mask. A nice lady tried to show me how I could change my seat on the Amtrak app, but I just stood there until he got up, grousing, and moved to another empty seat belonging to someone else, probably.

I arrived in Baltimore to find out what I had suspected, which was that I should have made train reservations for the airport stop instead of downtown, because the show, like many such things, was at an inconvenient hotel near the airport. The airport is utterly elsewhere. Somewhere between DC and Baltimore.

But this was an adventure, so I took a MARC train to the airport stop, took the shuttle bus to the airport, and found the hotel shuttle. After all, I said to myself, I took a bus from the airport to the subway to Vieux Port in Marseille. I can do this.

And yes, my faith was justified. I found my hotel, a dingy Marriott across a highway from a dingy La Quinta. I could be anywhere in America and several places in Europe.

The pen show was in the “ballroom” every hotel has, plus some outlying rooms. The show was a glorious panoply of vendors at tables, and I walked around with my hands in my pockets so I wouldn’t be tempted to buy something too soon.

Eventually, I found a well-known nibmeister and got him to look at the pen I bought in Philadelphia that never wrote right. I forgot to warn him that it was full of ink, and he got it all over his hands. He was polite about that. Like many of the people in the pen world, he was affable, garrulous, and opinionated, and he chatted away as he fixed my pen, with his wife sitting beside him at his table. She seemed to be there for no particular reason, as she said she didn’t use fountain pens.

Many of the legendary pen people are my age or older, of course, and most of them are men.

I went off thrilled about my repaired pen, and eventually bought two fountain pens after much consideration, one of them new and hand-tuned after purchase, and the other one part of the immense collection of the man at the table. He was getting rid of a lot of his collection. It covered an entire table, and was eclectic.

I too got rid of a good half of my collection a couple years back, but I just gave them away. I am not interested in the labor of making money from my discards. I realize this is heresy. But my time and effort are worth something.

I bought a couple other things: a cheerful pen case and a wooden pen stand.

I walked through the rooms again, over and over again. I could have spent thousands of dollars on some of the pens, which are beautiful, but I don’t see why I would.

In the evening, I had signed up for a workshop on collecting vintage pens. That was a sort of amiable mess. Eight or nine men with backgrounds in vintage pens, who assumed everyone in the room knew who they were, sat down in a row facing a cramped room filled with tables. They had a bottle of what looked like whisky, which they passed around for their small plastic cups. The panel leader told a long joke that must have been one he told every time he did a workshop, because several people referred to “the joke,” as in “Is the joke over?”

Everyone there for the workshop had a small collection of vintage pens with them, and while we were waiting for the panel our small group at one table shared ours. I have examples of a lot of common old pens, and one unusual one. The woman sitting next to me was surprised that I don’t use my old pens much; I mostly use the contemporary pens, and keep the old ones around for display.

The panelists talked about why you should collect pens; the answer to that, of course, is because you can, but they gave various other reasons. For instance, they are an example of something a hundred years old that still functions as intended, they were built for regular use and are very resilient, gold was cheap when they were manufactured so gold nibs are common, and last of all, you can take them apart and fix them.

This last sentiment was incredibly popular with the men in the room.
The woman next to me exchanged eye-rolls with me. “I can change the oil in a car, but I don’t want to,” I whispered to her, and she agreed. “It’s the men,” she said.

I took my one unusual pen up to the head table to show it to some of the presenters. I bought it twenty years ago for $30 because it was pretty—it has a luminous striped snakeskin effect.

I suddenly had three men intensely engaging with me, because apparently I had an unusual gem, “an Eagle Prestige!” each one of them exclaimed one by one when they saw it. Apparently the lead presenter had written an article on the pen. One of the guys offered to buy it from me for $100. Another one told me that fixed, it could sell for $400, and told me that the third guy, a slightly drunk and baffled-looking elderly man, was the only person who could fix it for me properly.

I took my pen back and sat down, rather overwhelmed. Because you see, I am not a collector, exactly. My eyes don’t light up at the thought of fixing a pen, or having a prize rarity, or selling it for more than I bought it for. I don’t care if a nib is gold, not really.

I sat there a moment and then returned my old pens to their case, got up, and quietly left, feeling rather confused and annoyed, and trying to figure out why.

I think there were a number of reasons. One of them is that I have been a member of a number of large but niche communities that meet in out-of-the-way hotels through the course of a year and who chat in person and on social media in between: Star Trek fandom, science fiction cons, academic conferences, AA conferences, and fencing events. At each of those things, people who know each other and share a common interest get together, socialize heartily, gossip, conspire, and spend money. They meet celebrities. They are celebrities. And they are there to share their often lonely interests, and their culture of interest, with other people.

I say I spent a lot of time in these meetings, but I always felt more alone in them than most people seem to. For one thing, I don’t drink. For another, my opinions always seem to startle people.

That’s a second reason I felt rather annoyed. I do have opinions and beliefs about fountain pens, and I have been using and buying them for sixty years, but I feel like even more of an outsider when I’m with that community than when I’m with people who don’t know anything about them. I don’t quite fit the culture.

The third reason, of course, is that I don’t drink, so while other people are getting implausibly hearty and loud, I was sitting there getting quieter and quieter. It was time to leave, with my unexpectedly rare and valuable Eagle Prestige. It is my friend, and I like having it around to look at from time to time, but I don’t sell my friends.

I hear the DC Pen Show in early summer is big. If I recover from this one, maybe I’ll go to that one. It will be an adventure.