A Happy New Year to you all.  Now that the festivities are over it’s a good time to think about this blog – what I’ve done over the years and where it might go.  Despite the many years that I have had an interest in pens, I remain a generalist.  I don’t have the knowledge about any one manufacturer that the more avid collectors will have.  However I do have quite a wide knowledge of pens and my pen buying always includes the unusual, whenever I can get it, as that provides subjects for discussion in the blog.  It’s nice to get a hold of something rare and old.  With some of these oddities, there’s nothing to refer to on the Internet, and I feel that if I can get at least a basic description of such a pen, it gives buyers something to refer to if they come across another example.

In the last quarter of last year, or so, I was posting less than I had been from the beginning.  That was mostly down to my workload which was pretty intense, and there was some ill-health in there as well.  I hope to do more this year.  It’s certainly not that I’m running out of ideas or pens to write about; there’s plenty more out there to discuss.

When I started this blog I was only interested in old pens.  Though they remain at the core of my interest, new pens have begun to catch my attention.  Some of them are not as bad as I assumed all new pens to be, and in fact the pens on my desk, for the last few weeks, have been a cheap Chinese pen with a very nice fine nib and a Monteverde Invincia Stealth which is a very pleasant writer.  Once the ink runs out they’re likely to be replaced by old pens again, but I think that new – or at least recent – pens will feature here a little more.