Guide: how to stay in budget at a pen show

plus: Italian pirate pen // DOUBLE PLUS: cookie chaos

Hey guys I went to the Dallas pen show and bought this crab wearing a top hat:

So I think we can all agree I know everything there is to know about pen shows.

And, by logical extension, that means you do not. (Only one person can know everything about pen shows. It is a Highlander situation.)

But don’t worry: If you’ve ever gone to a pen show and struggled to stay in budget, here are some HOT TIPS that will help from me, the owner of Crab With Top Hat.¹

Make it hard to buy things

There will be more things at the pen show that you want to buy than things you should buy. This becomes even more true once you make your first purchase and get a little dopamine rush. Things can snowball quickly and if you’re not careful you can end up over budget and owning a pen shaped like a parrot.

the ur-pen for this blog. review here

Avoid this by making it harder to buy stuff. Some people do this by only bringing cash, but that has the drawback of you 100% spending of that cash, possibly on parrot pens and hat-wearing crabs. It keeps you in budget but does not necessarily make any of your purchases smarter.

A better approach is to only bring cryptocurrency, commodity options, or foreign currency—basically, anything that has real value but requires a few steps before someone will take it in exchange for goods or services. Make sure you REALLY want that parrot pen (and stay in budget) by making every transaction take an hour.

Handle stuff you want fixed before buying new stuff

Trick your dumb lizard brain into thinking you bought new pens by having some old ones fixed. This time I had Matthew Chen tune the nib on my Montegrappa Extra (many skulls, review here) and Will from Reedem Pens re-seat the nib on the Moore I bought from him last year (most popular review on this site, here).²

$35 later I was like WOW IT’S LIKE I GOT TWO NEW PENS because then they worked better.

Also, doing this first will make you slow down. Not buying stuff right away helps you make better decisions. Another way you can do this is…

Take a lap

See all of the things before buying any of the things. Anything big, at least.

Don’t buy a bunch of mid-range pens and then find out the very expensive one you want is available for a ridiculous discount but whoops you bought a bunch of special edition Safaris so you’re out of money. Survey what’s there before spending money. And while you’re doing that…

Ask the price of everything

To help you plan what to actually buy, ask the price of anything you are remotely interested in. Especially stuff that’s expensive.

Most of the time it’s what you’d expect, but don’t assume this. If I’d done that, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you our final tip…

Get really lucky when the ridiculous pen you want is on sale for $5 less than your budget

Okay, so this was at the pen show:

That’s the Stipula Da Vinci Caribbean. It’s a retractable pen—it’s like the LAMY Dialog, except five times more complicated, ten times more fragile, and 100% more pirate-themed. Here’s a glamour shot from Atlas Stationers, which is one of my favorite vendors lately.

Obviously I wanted it. But then:

Oof.

I saw it when it came out and was like “that’s awesome, good luck with that pricing.” I know the exuberant idiot pen market well (PARROT PEN) and the only way you’re getting that price for a pen that ridiculous is if it was designed by Sylvester Stallone.

Stipula only made like 10 of each color so I’d never actually seen one, but the Dromgoole’s distributor guy had TWO. I asked him how much he was selling them for, expecting to get a “special pen show price” of 5% off and walk away.

Instead he told me a price that was well more than 50% off, taking it from a silly MSRP to a pretty normal price for an Italian pen with a gold nib. I said something like “okay, thanks—wait, really?”

Anyway, now I own one.

Kinda. It’s my wife’s Christmas present to me, which means she hid it. And yes, having learned my lesson from the last time I bought a weird Italian pen at a suspiciously deep discount, she hid it AFTER I thoroughly cleaned and tested it. It needed a little TLC—this is the kind of pen where everyone who sees it is like “haha what LET ME DIP IT IN INK AND PUT MY FINGERPRINTS ON IT”—and I’ll cover all that when I’m allowed to see it again.³

In conclusion, best pen show since I bought that parrot pen in 2019. Share your own tips in the comments!

Other stuff

DOING WELL, THANKS: thanks to everyone who checked in on my hand. It is healing well, though I’m still going to be doing PT for a while to get my range of motion right.

Also, as a preview of our annual men’s health awareness post, I found out on Sunday that I’m two years cancer-free! One more year of MRIs based on what my doctor told me last time and I’m done.

The BENU Hallowed Harvest is a great “sorry you have cancer” gift

COOKIE CHAOS: this post is a day late because I went to the state fair yesterday, so I had to prepare for that and then do it and then take a nap. Here is a thing I ate.

And here’s a margarita filled with Pop Rocks.⁴ Bye!

1. technically the husband of the owner of Crab With Top Hat as it was a gift for my wife WHO LOVED IT AND HAD ZERO QUESTIONS

2. i hate to break blog lore but Will is not actually an old man wearing suspenders despite what that post says

3. the apparent floor modeltude of the pen may also be why it was over half off

4. AMERICA THAT’S WHY