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That One Pen Christmas Morning. My wife doesn't give me pens anymore. No, pens for me are about as common as cups of coffee, and a pen as a gift just doesn't make sense anymore. She gave me a nice sports coat instead and I appreciated that all the more. You see, I spent the last 10 years buying and selling a lot of pens; thousands of pens, whole collections of pens at a time. I bought many for immediate resale, some for research and some for my own humble collection. The other morning my assistant walked into my office and asked if she could borrow a pen. I was at a loss. I had hundreds and hundreds of pens scattered around in trays and chests, but I didn't have a single one inked and ready to write. My six year old son, handed her a cheap ballpoint pen from his back pack. I felt my heart doing the deep Japanese bow of shame. I wasn't always like this. I used to carry several pens with me and spend long hours writing with my pens. I deeply enjoyed spending much of the night restoring an old fountain pen so that I could use it at work the next day. Now, having stopped to think about it, I seem to do most -- actually nearly all -- of my writing by computer or by cell phone. What a sick feeling; something along the lines of Rip Van Winkle, waking to find that the world had past him by. Sometimes fate, if you want to call it that, likes to kick you square in the ass. While I was pondering the current state of my pen madness, the mailman delivered a box from Amazon. Inside were a few books by and about Poe. One was the novel "Nevermore" by Harold Schechter. What took me by surprise was the blurb on the back cover written by Anne Poe Lehr. Anne was a friend of mine. I met Anne on ebay. She bid and won a 1930's no-name maki-e pen that I had listed. The pen had a pleasing maple leaf design, however the pen suffered some extensive lacquer damage and was prone to leaks. I didn't think that the pen would sell very well, but the final bidding climbed up to the stratosphere. As the bids rose, I kept checking the description to see that I had clearly pointed out all the faults with the pen. I had, yet three bidders desperately wanted that pen, but Anne prevailed. A few weeks latter, I received a card in the mail. It was nicely written in a dainty hand, telling me how Anne and her mother had shared opening my package together, and both were so delighted with the pen. Anne told me how she had a Japanese friend named Miho at school a long time ago, and seeing this pen reminded her of a pen that Miho had used to write in her journal. Miho had said that writing "eased her heart." Anne said that nothing in the world could have made her happier than finding a similar pen as Miho's, and indeed, it eased her heart as well. Anne passed away in her sleep not too long after that transaction. Her death came as a shock, and my only solace was that I knew I had eased her heart at least for a little while. So today, I searched through my trays until I found it, a gold plated Cross Townsend. I wrote my wife a special little Christmas card. This is the pen that my wife first gave to me several years ago before we were married; back before I thought about pens at all. I used this pen to write her sappy letters while we were dating, and I used it years later to sign my son's birth documents and to sign him into his kindergarten. It isn't my best writer and it isn't something that any pen collector would be proud of, but it is my pen, presented to me by my wife whom I cherish deeply. If you are reading this, I suspect that you too have a touch of the pen madness. It isn't necessarily a bad thing. Pens are nobel tools, and the people who are drawn to them are some of the finest people you will ever meet. I just hope that among all your pens, you have that one special pen that eases your heart. If you would like to share, please drop me a line at rd@kamakurapens.com Stay well and Merry Christmas.
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Above
is Anne's pen. This was from several years back. It was before I
had a digital camera and the image was created with a flat bed scanner.