Explained: how you will get into vintage fountain pens

happy halloween

This is Old Pen.

You will buy Old Pen from a very enthusiastic old man at a pen show. He will be wearing suspenders.

You will not intend to buy Old Pen. You will attend the pen show intending to buy ink and washi tape, but you will wander too close to Old Man’s table and become ensnared in his web. He will ply you with a haunting rime of days long past, its lilting melody transporting you through the mists of time to a simpler era, and before you know what is happening you are holding Old Pen, Old Man encouraging you to “just try it out” with a twinkle in his eye.

You will be surprised that Old Pen does feel basically like a new pen, except smaller since everyone in 1940 was 5 feet tall. You will examine it and note that it has a gold nib—and a full-sized one, too, not just some tiny chiclet obscured by a hooded nib.

You will also see that Old Pen has a lever on its side. You will wonder what this does and if Old Pen uses a converter to store ink.

It does not. Old Pen uses a floppy rubber sock.

Pulling the lever while the nib is submerged in ink forces the air out of floppy rubber sock, which then creates a vacuum that ingests ink. Pulling the lever while floppy rubber sock is already full of ink will shoot ink out of the nib, causing you to finally understand those squirting-fountain-pen-vaudeville bits on Muppet Babies.

(Do not ask Old Man about vaudeville. That is a question for Very Old Man, not Old Man, and you do not want to talk to Very Old Man unless you also have budget for a bunch of rusty dip pen nibs from 1921. You do not have this budget.)

Old Man will offer you a discount on Old Pen. You have zero understanding of what Old Pen is worth, but you like the word “discount,” so you buy it.

You will hold Old Pen in your hands and admire your purchase. You will look up to thank Old Man, but realize you are standing in front of an empty table, Old Man and his array of dusty curiosities nowhere to be found.

You take the business card Old Man gave you—Vintage Pen Shoppe; Old Man, Proprietor—and show it to the vendor at the next table. He asks where you got it and you explain.

“But that’s impossible,” he says. “Old Man died ten years ago.”

You walk out of the hotel ballroom in a daze, clutching Old Pen tightly in one hand and Old Man’s business card in the other, contemplating what this could mean. You catch a glimpse of yourself in a hallway mirror and stop short. You are now wearing suspenders and have a twinkle in your eye.

You look down at the card in your hand. It now says your name. Underneath, in beautiful script, is a handwritten note that simply says “good luck.”