Comparison Of Pen Shows?

[ASCIIaardvark]

I'm new to pen shows -- I did San Francisco 2017, and the Portland mini show 2017/2016.

 

I've heard LA is larger but more focused on vintage with more expensive tickets (tho I can't find a price on their site), and less focus on seminars/social-time. (this year I have a schedule conflict)

 

 

I have family in Pittsburgh and Philly, so I'm also considering the Philly/DC/Ohio shows. But none of them line up with my usual travel dates...

 

So if you had to pick one more show besides SF/Portland, what would you pick & why?

Or, if you've been to several shows, how do they compare to eachother in general?

[StrawberryJam]

If I were to pick one to travel for out of Philly/DC/Ohio, it would be DC hands down. It's the biggest and the most well known (even if it hasn't been the most well run in the last few years).

[rutherfordr]

Definitely DC. It's the biggest show in the country, and has the most variety.

[inkstainedruth]

I haven't been to any of the Midwest or West Coast shows. The shows I've been to: DCSS (3 times), Ohio Pen Show (about 5-6 times), Triangle Pen Show, outside Raleigh (twice) and Commonwealth Pen Show, just north of Boston (twice).

DC is the most prestigious. It's where companies trot out their new pens and LE inks. Plus, I loved the ink testing station (even though the lighting in where it was set up in the old hotel was fairly awful). And like Rutherford said, it's huge. The flip side, though? It's huge.... My first show was DC and I almost didn't know where to look, because I was so overwhelmed.

Personally, I would recommend the Ohio Pen Show instead. It's large, but more manageable than DC, and the focus really is on vintage pens. And it's very well run. I like the DC show but the date change has made it impossible for me to get to the last couple of years. But for me, at least, even if I have to juggle times a bit and not go for the entire weekend, OPS is close enough that the first year I went I just day-tripped it on Friday (Columbus is about 3-1/2 hours from Pittsburgh).

The Triangle Show is a fair amount smaller than Ohio (and for me it's an all-day drive each way). I've had a good time but I'm pooped by the time I get home -- even when I talked my husband into going with me last summer. (Triangle and OPS are run by the same person, BTW). Commonwealth is very small. The first time I went, two years ago, there were only 17 tables and I was done in about 3 hours. It was bigger last fall, but still really small compared to other shows I've attended.

If you're only interested in new pens, by all means go to DC. But if you are remotely interested in vintage, go to OPS instead.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

 

ETA: I've never been to the Philly show, because, like DCSS has been the past 2 years, there is a scheduling conflict for me.

Edited January 5, 2018 by inkstainedruth

[ASCIIaardvark]

If I were to pick one to travel for out of Philly/DC/Ohio, it would be DC hands down. It's the biggest and the most well known (even if it hasn't been the most well run in the last few years).

 

I guess it's not called the "Supershow" for nothing

 

I did hear some of the drama around 2017 event.

 

 

DC is the most prestigious. It's where companies trot out their new pens and LE inks. Plus, I loved the ink testing station (even though the lighting in where it was set up in the old hotel was fairly awful). And like Rutherford said, it's huge. The flip side, though? It's huge.... My first show was DC and I almost didn't know where to look, because I was so overwhelmed.

Personally, I would recommend the Ohio Pen Show instead. It's large, but more manageable than DC, and the focus really is on vintage pens. And it's very well run. I like the DC show but the date change has made it impossible for me to get to the last couple of years. But for me, at least, even if I have to juggle times a bit and not go for the entire weekend, OPS is close enough that the first year I went I just day-tripped it on Friday (Columbus is about 3-1/2 hours from Pittsburgh).

 

 

If you're only interested in new pens, by all means go to DC. But if you are remotely interested in vintage, go to OPS instead.

 

I'm interested in both vintage & modern, but vintage flex has been slowly taking over my EDC pouch for a while now.

Are the vintage pickings better at Ohio, or is it just primarily-vintage with a less crowded environment? I don't usually mind crowds, I've been attending various geek cons for years now.

 

San Francisco has ~750 inks at sample stations. While yet more inks to test sounds nice, I still have like 550 more in SF I need to get thru this year

 

Ohio is physically closer to where I'd fly in, and temporally further from my other vacation in late-August... which makes it a tempting addition.

 

 

 

 

On an unrelated note: Is there an etymology for why they're "Pen Shows" and not "Pen Cons"?

Did these pen shows develop independently of geek cons like Dragon*Con and Sakura Con and the various StarTrek/Steampunk/etc? When I was at the SF pen show last year, it felt a lot like a con -- but with more vendors, fewer panels, and less scheduled socialization.

[sharonspens]

I've been to OPS many times, and DCSS once (2017). Given the problems with DCSS this past year, my opinion is admittedly biased, but I would go to OPS. There is a large percentage of vintage folks there, mostly friendly (or at least not rude). It makes for a long day, but I am generally well satisfied by the end of it. There are some new vendors there, too, like Franklin-Christoph, Bexley, and Laban, along with Edison and several other good/great independents. No ink station, but it sounds like you already have that covered. There are also nibmeisters and pen repair people there.

 

While I saw some of the same vendors in DC, it was a much more crowded, much less enjoyable experience, relatively speaking. Honestly, that seemed to be true for a number of the vendors, too.

 

Sharon in Indiana

[Jerome Tarshis]

On an unrelated note: Is there an etymology for why they're "Pen Shows" and not "Pen Cons"?

Did these pen shows develop independently of geek cons like Dragon*Con and Sakura Con and the various StarTrek/Steampunk/etc? When I was at the SF pen show last year, it felt a lot like a con -- but with more vendors, fewer panels, and less scheduled socialization.

 

A genuinely interesting question. Pen shows go back in American culture to before such things as ComicCons or steampunk, etc. etc. Pen collecting in its beginnings appealed to men (and a limited number of women) who were tinkerers, among other things. They wanted spare parts. Finding parts is, for some, an important thing people can do at pen shows.

 

The shows emerged, culturally, more from swap meets and flea markets than from the kind of gathering where fetchingly clad girls engage in cos (for costume) play. Think perhaps of such magazines as Popular Mechanics and Popular Science as they were in the 1940s and 1950s.

 

Nothing to do with the Society for Creative Anachronism. Nor really with genre fiction. It is true that as fountain-pen cultism has grown, it has come to include some people also interested in medieval handwriting, food, and costumes, but that is far from the way it began.

 

The vendors still don't look to me as if they can only barely be restrained from dressing up like superheroes. When I first went to a pen show, in 2002, a lot of the vendors and also those in attendance looked as if in an ideal life they would work on cars. And some pen people formerly did work on cars. My pen pal Oxonian (John Sorowka, eminent in British pen circles) used to work on and ride motorcycles. So, yes, there is some overlap in spirit, but historically there were two separate lines of development.

Edited January 6, 2018 by Jerome Tarshis

[inkstainedruth]

Interesting discussion -- especially having done both pen shows and the (rare) convention -- as well as a few SFWA banquets when I was in high school and college. And no, before anyone asks I do NOT do cosplay -- the closest I ever got to that was re-furbishing the really hideous bridesmaid's gown I wore at my brother's wedding into something sort of "Regency" for the Regency Ball the one year I went to Darkover, back when my husband and I were first dating.

Not sure how early SF cons start -- but certainly stuff like WorldCon was happening much earlier than the recent phenomenon of ComicCon and the like. I got curious and looked up online (since the Internet is run by a bunch of of geeks who would keep track of stuff like that ), and the first "WorldCon", Nycon I, was in 1939! (And run by a guy my mother was friends with, as it happens....)

And, as it turns out, my memory of the Worldcon where my family voted (one by one) for that year's Hugo ballots over the phone was faulty. According to the website I found, it would have to been later than I remembered: IguanaCon II in Phoenix, 1978.

So, I'm now really curious as to when those early "swap meets" that eventually became pen shows got started. As much as anything because once I get heavily involved in a hobby I get interested in the history and the cultural anthropology, and all the subtle nuances....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[Jerome Tarshis]

Swap meets and flea markets (for some of us, those terms are interchangeable) did not become pen shows. They still exist as separate entities. But *some* swap meets specialize in a particular area of hobbyist interest, such as modifying cars or, in my own experience, building and modifying personal computers.

 

When I became interested in microcomputing (as it might then be called) during the 1980s, I almost immediately became aware that computer hobbyists had what were called swap meets, where people sold and traded computer components and software. The dramatic personae were not unlike the folks one might encounter at a Mensa meeting.

 

Old fountain pens were one more area for informal coming together and trading or selling, a hobby like working on cars or motorcycles or computers.

 

Some swap meets are unspecialized; all kinds of (primarily) inexpensive things are bought and traded. If I ever grit my teeth and decide to do some serious acquiring of 1980s dedicated chess-playing devices, a flea market or swap meet would be an excellent place to begin.

 

Two important points of difference between cons and pen shows: First, as Ruth has suggested, cons at least began as conventions (that's where "con" comes from) of an organization. In addition to meeting fellow fans, the business of a con included the business of the organization. Might include voting on awards. Electing officers. This and that else organizational. Not just entertainment.

 

The other point, which I hesitate to make, is that "cons" tend to be about activities for which the fans tend to be concentrated in the teens and early twenties. I well remember being told by one of the best-known American science fiction writers, "I get a year older every year, but the readers will always be seventeen." It is said of the rise and fall of New Wave science fiction in the 1960s and 1970s, "The writers grew up and the readers didn't."

 

In its beginnings, fountain-pen collecting as an organized activity did not have that connection with popular culture (science fiction, fantasy, comic books) or teen-agers. That is changing, not always comfortably.

Edited January 6, 2018 by Jerome Tarshis

[AltecGreen]

 

On an unrelated note: Is there an etymology for why they're "Pen Shows" and not "Pen Cons"?

Did these pen shows develop independently of geek cons like Dragon*Con and Sakura Con and the various StarTrek/Steampunk/etc? When I was at the SF pen show last year, it felt a lot like a con -- but with more vendors, fewer panels, and less scheduled socialization.

 

 

The earliest pen shows grew out of local pen collecting clubs and are patterned after swap meets. It was an excuse to the collectors to get together and swap vintage pens, history, repair, techniques, etc. Chicago, DC, LA, Columbus would the the four oldest shows. If you go to a meeting of some of the really old established pen clubs (like the Pan Pacific Pen Club), the meetings are like mini pen shows. It's all about buying/selling/trading. As these shows grew, modern pen dealers started showing up.

 

Of the three organizers for SF, I'm the youngest and the came into pens less than 10 years ago. My background before pens include various rolepaying cons, Anime Expo (ex-staff) and it's predecessor Anime Con, and various scientific conferences. We've added a lot of elements from those events to SF. We did this because the fountain pen world is changing and you always need to adapt.

[ASCIIaardvark]

My background before pens include various rolepaying cons, Anime Expo (ex-staff) and it's predecessor Anime Con, and various scientific conferences. We've added a lot of elements from those events to SF. We did this because the fountain pen world is changing and you always need to adapt.

 

Well thank you for the con-influenced elements - it made my trip more like a vacation and not just a shopping trip

 

Your ink-testing stations each became a small-scale gathering spot for people to sit and chat -- with a social pretext, so us introverts could acclimate for a moment before joining a conversation and don't have awkwardly join an chat in-progress. I think I only got ~200 inks though, so I'll have to spend more time at it next year

 

The Pen Addict's rotating tables of experts were a lot of fun. I learned a lot about urushi, pencils, and Nakaya while meeting some of my fellow pen-nerds. I'd like to contribute something toward that next year; but I've only been into pens ~5 years, so I'm not expert on anything. I'd feel comfortable doing a basic tuning talk though -- tine alignment, smoothing, adjusting for wetness, heat setting ebonite, that sort of thing.

 

 

To me, the social & educational aspects of the con show were just as valuable as the extensive vendor space. I came home with a few nice pens, better handwriting, and a membership in the infamous Black Pen Society (though I barely qualify).

[Ron Z]

SF is taking off, Chicago with new leadership has turned into a really good show with more of an international flavor than most others that we go to. Ohio is well organized and as Ruth has noted, well attended. More laid back with the emphasis on vintage. Baltimore is growing after the change in venue a couple of years ago. DC did have quite a bit of drama last year that has some vendors either not going back, or up in the air about going again. Until last year it was consistently our largest grossing show. Last year? Meh.

 

Long Island is also a good show. We've done it for a long time now, and it reached "critical mass" a couple of years ago, with really good attendance. Its held at Hofstra University.

[tadas]

Swap meets and flea markets (for some of us, those terms are interchangeable) did not become pen shows. They still exist as separate entities. But *some* swap meets specialize in a particular area of hobbyist interest, such as modifying cars or, in my own experience, building and modifying personal computers.

 

When I became interested in microcomputing (as it might then be called) during the 1980s, I almost immediately became aware that computer hobbyists had what were called swap meets, where people sold and traded computer components and software. The dramatic personae were not unlike the folks one might encounter at a Mensa meeting.

At least on the East Coast, the original computer swap meets derived from ham radio enthusiasts (I'm talking about the early days, say from the mid-70's thru about 1985, when mass-produced Asian IBM clone components took over). I remember enjoying the Trenton Computer Festival every April, with acres of hardware hackers swapping parts... Generically, they were called "hamfests" at the time. And, yes, the ham radio guys had some resentment over the takeover by computer guys, particularly when the clones took over completely. This is similar to the vintage-vs.-modern pen dichotomy at our hobby's shows. I urge everyone to get behind Paul Erano's initiatives to get the two groups together....

[sharonspens]

SF is taking off, Chicago with new leadership has turned into a really good show with more of an international flavor than most others that we go to. Ohio is well organized and as Ruth has noted, well attended. More laid back with the emphasis on vintage. Baltimore is growing after the change in venue a couple of years ago. DC did have quite a bit of drama last year that has some vendors either not going back, or up in the air about going again. Until last year it was consistently our largest grossing show. Last year? Meh.

 

Long Island is also a good show. We've done it for a long time now, and it reached "critical mass" a couple of years ago, with really good attendance. Its held at Hofstra University.

 

Ron, what do you mean by Chicago having more of an international flavor? I am thinking of attending this year, but I would only be able to to attend on Sunday. Trying to decide if it would be worth the quick turnaround.

 

Sharon in Indiana

[penmanila]

I've been to Chicago three times over the past 25 years and have always enjoyed it; Ohio once and Baltimore once, and enjoyed those, too. But the good thing about Chicago--aside from the number of sellers and the many vintage pens and parts on display--is that you can enjoy the city after the show. That's got to count for something, too--especially if you're coming from 7,000 miles away, like me

[Ron Z]

 

Ron, what do you mean by Chicago having more of an international flavor? I am thinking of attending this year, but I would only be able to to attend on Sunday. Trying to decide if it would be worth the quick turnaround.

 

Sharon in Indiana

 

We had clients at our table for repairs from almost 10 different countries. That has never happened before, even at the DC show. It was a real treat.

 

The Chicago show does quite a bit on social media as well. Its the first show that I've gone to that ever gave "tours" of the show for people who have never been to a pen show before, introducing vendors, repair people, talking about what goes on at a show. Lots of social social interaction after the show too.

[GutSchrift]

Wow Chicago sounds like a great show to make it on the list! Didn't know about the drama last year in DC. Surprised as it was always the top show in the country.

[Maja]

I've only been to the mini-shows in Portland and the L.A. Pen Show in 2015. Both were very friendly and well-attended, but of course L.A. was much larger. I didn't think Los Angeles was more of a vintage show, to be honest, but there were a lot of vintage pens, yes. The weather in that part of southern California is so beautiful, though, that I'd go back in a heartbeat (and the Getty Museum is ....and free!)

The DC Supershow is one that I hope to attend, but I was told by many pen friends that it is vast and almost overwhelming (in a good way!). I've never been to DC so I'd combine the show with tourist attractions.

[Ron Z]

 

 

The DC Supershow is one that I hope to attend, but I was told by many pen friends that it is vast and almost overwhelming (in a good way!).

 

It was a bit like that at the Sheraton. But at the new venue? Meh, not so much. I think it was a bad move, especially since the Sheraton apparently liked having us there.

[Maja]

 

It was a bit like that at the Sheraton. But at the new venue? Meh, not so much. I think it was a bad move, especially since the Sheraton apparently liked having us there.

So, basically the DC Supershow shrunk in size? As far as I know, the pen friends that attended the show at the old venue haven't been to the new one, so I appreciate the info, Ron