The Long Island show is in its infancy. This was only its second outing; although still very small, it was bigger and better this time around, and its prospects for the future are looking rosier than ever. This year saw more dealers, offering more — and more exciting — pens and paraphernalia than were in attendance last time. There were some remarkably nice door prizes, and there was coffee, lots of it. And bottled water. And all the pistachios you could shell and eat. The organizers (Terry Brack and Mike Bloom) even provided several big round tables. You could sit and chat or just rest, fiddle with pens, or explore the bounteous variety of Noodler’s inks – one of the round tables was a testing table, with zillions of bottles, dip pens for checking colors, and even paper to test on.

As happens at every show we attend, we spent some time with old friends and made some new friends. You may have heard this blog entry’s title in conversation before, but do you know how it came into the vernacular? For that you can thank Bill Griffith, the creator of Zippy the Pinhead. Bill dropped in at our table, and I was very definitely having fun chatting with him as he played with pens.

In case it’s not glaringly apparent from the preceding two paragraphs, Long island presented wonderful occasion for socialization. Not only could you chat with dealers — including some of the major luminaries of the hobby such as authors Jonathan Steinberg and Paul Erano — but there was also lots of space and opportunity to hobnob with your fellow collectors over dealers’ tables or at those big round ones out there in the middle. We saw many knots of two or three people with small piles (and some piles not so small) of new acquisitions spread out to be pored over and admired. This kind of interaction is what makes a pen show so much more than just a shopping trip.

I even managed to snag a couple or three pens for my collection. First, picked up Friday morning as dealers were beginning to arrive and unpack, was a no-name ED from about 1900. This wasn’t a pen I needed; but the one illustrated under mother-of-pearl in my glossary was somewhat inauthentic, and that was bothering me:

Although it may represent a pen of its period, I can’t be sure because i found it without a cap and mated an available cap to it. The new acquisition is all of a piece, and it also illustrates the care some makers took with all aspects of their pens’ aesthetics: its mother-of-pearl overlay is color matched to the gold bits:

So naturally I “needed” it.

The two other additions to my collection are both examples of my current fascination: combos. Conklin called its combo the Ensemble, and now I have an ensemble of Ensembles. They were made a couple of years apart, which is always interesting because of detail variations, and they both illustrate very nice color.

These two pens came from different dealers, one on Friday afternoon and one on Saturday. The Pearl and Black pen had a dead nib and was missing the trim band from its barrel, but I bought a nib at the show and found a correct Ensemble barrel band shortly after we rolled into Nashua this afternoon.

So, having popped and consumed some fresh popcorn, shlepped the suitcases and pen tubs upstairs, and patted the keys a little while to set down this entry, I can say with a fair degree of certainty, “Yes, we’re having fun yet.”