The PENguin Blog

  I hope everyone had a good holiday season and are of good cheer.     I want to thank everyone who bought a pen during the holiday season. You all kept us quite busy. And as a thank you I am extending the sale a bit longer. But I can't promise that it will go much beyond mid-January. So take advantage now.    And if you need help making a choice let me be your personal shopper!  Contact Rick  and I will get you the right pen at the right price.   Here are a couple of holiday specials to get you thinking pens:   First off, I have listed nearly a dozen vintage Parkers, mostly Vacumatics including a Vacuumfiller Crystal and a couple of very special Senior Maximas. We now have our largest inventory of Parkers ever with more to come after the holidays. Ask if you don’t see what you want.   Right now I find myself with a lot of Pelikan 100Ns in green, black, gray, and tortoise. So, it seems time to move some of them out.    So, I am...

        Well, the sale is not bizarre, the year was. We hope everyone is well, grateful, and hopeful. We are, at least when we work at it.   In these trying times, the gift of a special pen to your favorite person (or maybe even yourself) may be just the thing for the holidays--be it Christmas, Diwali, Festivus, Hannukah, Kwanzaa. Browse our offerings.    And if you need help making a choice let us be your personal shopper!  Contact Rick  and I will get you the right pen at the right price.   Here are a couple of holiday specials to get you thinking pens:   First off, I have listed nearly a dozen vintage Parkers, mostly Vacumatics including a Vacuumfiller Crystal and a couple of very special Senior Maximas. We now have our largest inventory of Parkers ever with more to come after the holidays. Ask if you don’t see what you want.   Right now I find myself with a lot of Pelikan 100Ns in green, black, gray, and tortoise. So, it se...

It’s been a while since I have updated the Pelikan pages on the website and even longer since I have had a sale on Pelikans. But desperate times call for desperate measures. So, we have some new Pelikan pens just gone up on the site and a few price reductions on specific items.  And, across the board 15% off on any Pelikan 100 or 100N*. So if you have been lurking around on the site forever now is the time to pull the trigger. And for August any and all Pelikan purchases ship for free within the US and at a discount for other destinations As many of you know, our last upgrade ripped the wheels off the shopping cart. But to get these bargains you have  to reach out to me  anyways.  *This excludes early Pelikans, those produced before the model 100 designations. See individual listings for details.

Usually the penguin is up in Oregon for most of July, but this year we are watching Shakespeare on youtube and hitting the backyard pretty hard what with barbecues and grilling and churning ice cream. Oh yeah, and there’s a gym back there to keep things somewhat under control. This is our first update in a long time. Most folks know us for Pelikan, but there are lots of other makes that interest me and that I collect, buy, sell, repair.  I have a good deal of respect for Montblanc, especially the older ones. There are always a few on the site and I have some prime vintage users and collectors items including a couple of modern-ish 146s. Some of the more exotic montblancs are also on summer sale! So check out our  Montblanc  page. And, as always in these perilous times, stay well, stay safe and try to stay sane.

We have a very limited number of new-old-stock Pelikan Bright Red M101Ns, most commonly known as Coral.  These pens are offered with full packaging at a special price of $345. And for something even more special order one of these pens with a vintage nib assembly, as shown. Pricing for these custom pens ranges between $500 and $595 depending on the nib type chosen,  please inquire .

We have been sticking pretty close to home since our most recent Southwestern trip, but we have been doing some noteworthy (at least to me) stuff that I thought I would share. In early October we attended a gathering of the Ohlone peoples who were the original human residents of our area of th San Francisco Bay. A Dance, there were also food and crafts booths. Replica canoe Guide interpreter Dugout habitation, folks moved every spring. These houses got wet in winter Almost a then and now image. From here you can almost imagine what the land looked like before Europeans, except for the power stanchion.  About a week later I took my most ambitious walk since the surgery, up Flag Hill in Sunol. It rises about 1200 feet in a mile and is pretty rugged in spots. Two images from a random drive along the Great Highway to the west of downtown San Francisco And, finally, after the November Ohio Pen Show I visited Cincinnati to see my old...

This final day of our trip (we head back home beginning Monday), we finished the Scenic Drive out to Capitol Gorge, walked the gorge, and then returned to park headquarters to pick fruit in the orchards and eat more pie at the Gifford House. An interesting note on this area, the first American settlers here were a band of Mormons who, apparently, sought to put some distance between themselves and the formal church in Salt Lake.  They found an arable little valley irrigated by the Fremont River,where the park headquarters now are, and began raising tree fruit. When the lands came to the National Park Service in the 1920s they decided to preserve the orchards, so today you can pick fruit here, and we did, about 4 ½ pounds of apples and pears. Were we to do this trip again (and we might) I would want to have a four wheel drive vehicle and the ability to walk more than the three miles we did today. Only then could we more fully explore this wilderness wonderland. ...