We’re just home from the NY/NJ Pen Show. It was a good show in that we had several delightful bar evenings and one dinner in the hotel bar/restaurant and dinners out with friends at delightful restaurants like Iberia Peninsula in Newark and Trattoria Bel Paese in nearby Cranford, but it was definitely not a winning show as pen shows go. The ballroom wasn’t empty, of course; it was abuzz with activity, but there weren’t as many people in the aisles as is normally the case, and most of them were looking more than buying. (Most dealers were selling more low-ticket items such as accessories and parts than they were selling pens.) The current economic downturn is clearly having an effect, and all we can do is ride out the bad weather.
I don’t suppose there’s a law saying that if you have a Waterman’s Ideal Nº 7 you also have to have a Nº 5, but when the PURPLE Nº 5 shown above jumped out of another dealer’s case during my pre-show walkaround on Friday morning and said, “Buy me,” who was I to refuse? The Nº 5 is of course smaller than the Nº 7. There is a certain charm about the slight flare at the cap crown of the Nº 5. What makes this pen even more special (to me, at least) is that it was rather less than “correct” when I bought it. I had examined it and knew most of the flaws, and the first thing I did upon returning to the Nashua Pen Spa today was to put the pen into the shop. The cap’s color band was, and will remain, a modern replacement. The pen’s original lever box assembly died somewhere along the way, and the assembly in the pen when I brought it home was from a 1930s celluloid pen; the Waterman pressure bar was also long gone, replaced with a third-tier J-bar. I’ve refitted these parts with correct ones. Now the pen looks and works as it should.
Show organizer Maryann Zucker and I put our heads together a few weeks back and came up with a way for me to present a nib-grinding demonstration at my table instead of going off to a seminar room where I’d be limited to words and pictures rather than a live demonstration. It wasn’t a hands-on workshop, but I had some pictures so that people could see in very large scale what I was doing to a nib in very small scale. All in all, I think the idea worked out well; I enjoyed giving my presentations (one Saturday and one Sunday), and the people who gathered round to observe and ask questions seemed to be having a good time as well. Look for more such demonstrations at other shows.
I did acquire one other pen at the show, and it will appear here in due course, but for now I think I need to return to beast-of-burden duty and carry the remaining tubs of stuff upstairs.
