Making Friends And Buying Pens

Recent FPN outages prompted me to visit other pen fora and am I glad I did. The communities are small, friendly, and growing much like FPN when I first discovered it eight years ago. Amongst other advantages, there are far fewer rules to digest and follow. Yea! The disadvantage is the less active participation. Boo! But if some of you get involved, that could change rapidly.

There is plenty of pen and ink talk and each forum has a certain personality to it, but the most intriguing discovery was the variety of pens available for purchase. Not that I need more pens mind you, but another stub or two would be helpful to test several inks at one time. There are pens I could trade or sell, but that needs to be simple. Smaller fora seem well suited to the casual seller/trader so I’ve begun to monitor those sites for sweet deals. Where I buy matters less than getting a terrific pen. On this matter, I am pragmatic rather than fickle though forum loyalists may see it otherwise.

PenTrace Market Place, Fountain Pen Geeks, Fountain Pen Board/FP Nuts, and others might have just the right pen so don’t get stuck using only eBay or FPN. True, there are no seller ratings but it isn’t difficult to check whether someone has knowledge of the subject and participates in the community. A little due diligence applies.

Some lists and fora are linked in my side bar under Pen Community. Do let me know if there are others I should include. The more links in that list, the better.