I just attended the club’s first meeting at the Independence Library, and I had a great time. I forgot to take count, but we had about 15-20 people in attendence. Maybe a little less, I’m working off of photographic memory here. It wasn’t hard at all to find the meeting room, although it was a little scary to open the unlabeled door hoping I wasn’t bursting into someone else’s meeting uninvited. Maybe we could get some sort of sign we can hang up to welcome people? I made a beeline to the closest seat to the door, and I got to introduce myself to my closest neighbors and penfriends. I brought some of my most interesting pens, but I was supprised to learn that my Pilot Myu in Medium proved to be the most popular. It seems like most people are only able to find the Fine nib? The Medium nib was just what I happened to find first at the Ohio Pen Show last November, so that’s the one I bought. Usually, I don’t like Medium nibs, but the Pilot one is so nice that I made an exception.

Once things started to wind down, I moved to the other side of the room to interact with the other group. There, I got to look at Howard’s collection. He had a lot of vintage mechanical pencils that were retrofit into being ballpoints. The highlight of this category of his collection was a Parker 61 fountain pen that had its nib replaced with a ballpoint refill. It looked kinda cursed, so I love it. He told me that the guy who made these conversions had a stroke a few years ago, and he hasn’t been able to do them since.

The pen in his collection that left the largest impression on me was his Omas 360 in Wild Celluloid. I’ve actually seen a picture of this pen – The youtuber Doodlebud said his grail pen was this exact variant, but he changed his mind when he learned the price. I got to hold the pen in question, and it was breathtaking. This morning, I actually ordered a Majohn V60, which is a clone of the Omas. I know it won’t be exactly the same, but given how comfortable to hold the Omas was I think the Majohn will be (perhaps) 90% as nice. When I mentioned this to Howard, he said he was unfamiliar with Majohn as a brand, so I gave him a quick rundown on the company. He gave me his buisiness card and asked me to email him some links to some of their pens. I should have taken a picture of the Omas for the Specimines page, though.

At the very end, I took a look at the ink samples table we had set up by the window. There were a lot, and I had 4 samples to add to the pile. There was also a Noodler’s Konrad fountain pen, and it really cought my eye. One of my eventual goals is to have a complete collection of Noodler’s pens, and the Konrad was missing from my inventory. Then later, I was also encoraged to take the other Noodler’s pen there, a Nib Creaper in some sort of purple color. For some reason, it smells like grapes? Is this the true solution to most people’s Noodler’s smell problem? The problem is that I like the Noodler’s smell. It makes me feel alive. I also took a lot of ink samples – eight of them. It was peer pressure. There were a lot of ink samples, and Michelle didn’t want to have to take them all home and bring them back for our next meeting in April.

As people slowly trickled out, I was part of the small group of people that were cleaning up and trying (mostly failing) to leave in a timely manner. We just had so many things to talk about, after all. One of the subjects was how to arrange the tables next time to encorage people to talk to each other. Of the more interesting suggestions was to arrange them in a hollow astrisk shape (like a * symbol but without the center). My suggestion was to just have the tables in a long line. That would encorage people to sit at both sides of the table, which was a problem this time because of the U shape we had the tables in. I think that a long line would also minimize the number of independent groups, which wasn’t a major problem this time but could be with other table arrangements. A long line might not be space efficent enough, but we had plenty of space in our meeting room.

The other topic when we were leaving was the distribution of leftover snacks. We definately brought too many. The chocolate chips cookies from Costco were less than 1/3rd eaten, and the Keebler chocolate-coated cookies were untouched. I ended up taking the chocolate chip cookies because I really like chocolate chip cookies, but also because I can bring it to my workplace and it’ll be gone before the day is over. The remaining people helped Michelle carry her bannana boxes filled with club materials into her car, but I didn’t have anything to carry so I was sharing holding the door open duty with Michelle’s son.

–Amelorate