So as I have mentioned at other points I do collect pens. Specifically I collect fountain pens that I use for note taking and other writing at work and home.
Why fountain pens?
Well I’m left handed and what I find is that the inks that I use in them wind up drying quicker than the normal inks that I find in most ballpoint or gel pens and as such I don’t get as much of it sitting on my hands as my writing hand is dragged through the stuff I just wrote down.
So how did this start?
I was down in San Francisco for a work trip and was wandering in the area around Moscone Center before having to do work stuff and found a Pen Shop that was going out of business, and when wandering around there I found a green Lamy All-Star that caught my eye, and since it was on sale for a good price I picked it up on a whim and within 10 min of using it wound up going back after work to pick up another Lamy Safari that they had in stock since it was again very cheap and I really liked the way that the things wrote.
Over the years any time that I was shipped someplace for work I would wind up sniffing out Lamy Safari and All Stars and would pick them up as souvenirs of my travels. The thing with these pens is that Lamy releases special editions every year with them in new colours, so even after I stopped traveling I kept picking up the special editions from a local pen shop that I like to go to. At this point I think I probably have well over 60 of the things now.
That’s just a few of them.
Since then I’ve also picked up some other pens from Pilot and Twisbi, and I’m eyeing some others that look interesting to me but there’s a limit to how many of these things I can justify having sitting around.
The key for me is that these are pens that I use – I rotate through these things over time switching them out as they run dry on ink so that they just don’t sit laying around doing nothing. I wouldn’t mind having a better way to display these things other than the cases that I’m currently using but I haven’t had time to figure anything out. Might need to spend some time with a 3d modelling tool and a skadis pegboard or something like that.