Around 5,000 people gathered in San Francisco in August for an international fountain pen show. Many fans who grew up digital are remaking the culture, online and IRL.
Sep 2, 2026
Fountain pens are displayed at the Schon DSGN booth on Aug. 30, 2026, part of the San Francisco International Pen Show at The Westin San Francisco Airport in Millbrae, California. (Tâm Vũ/KQED)
Angelique Ramsey of Long Beach owns about 25 fountain pens. Her favorite is the Benu Euphoria, a glittering pen with a custom “architect” nib, a specialty grind that changes the shape of the line as you move the pen across the page.
“I was looking for something that wasn’t a throwaway,” said Ramsey, 38. “I like that intentionality of sitting down and writing a letter, having something that’s a possession that you take care of. And so, you know, you can go overboard with it, but you don’t have to.”
In this era of incessant, instant communication, fountain pens seem like a novelty from another, analog era. Perhaps this is exactly why millennials especially are flocking to events like the S.F. Pen Show at the end of August, to rub shoulders with an estimated 5,000 people in various stages of vintage writing instrument obsession at the Westin San Francisco Airport Hotel in Millbrae.
Though the San Francisco show isn’t the biggest in the country — that distinction belongs to the Washington, D.C., Fountain Pen Supershow — the S.F. Pen Show has become a major gathering for the Pacific Rim pen community.
Patrick Yandell, 31, manages U.S. business for the pen manufacturer OMAS, founded a century ago in Bologna, Italy. Like many vintage pen brands, OMAS has had a complicated corporate history. LVMH bought the company from the founder’s heirs in 2000. After subsequent ownership changes and a period of dormancy, the brand was revived by descendants of the founder, Armando Simoni.
Yandell says most people own digital devices to accomplish most of the practical tasks that used to be accomplished with pen and paper.
You can still find the sober black and navy blue pens similar to what your parents and grandparents wrote with, to be sure. But the display cases at the Pen Show are filled with iridescent resin, glitter and breathtakingly elaborate Japanese lacquerwork. The taste today is for pens — and accessories — that deliver maximum delight.
Fountain pens cost anywhere from a few dollars for something like a Platinum Preppy to millions of dollars, depending on a pen’s brand, craftsmanship, rarity and the precious materials involved. Your mileage will vary depending on your taste and bank account balance. That said, you don’t need to spend a lot of money to have a good time.
“What we’re seeing now is a lot of people who came to fountain pens, not out of any practical sense whatsoever, but just as a hobby,” said Yandell, who owns more than 200 pens himself.
“It’s part of a whole ecosystem that’s arisen.”
Traditional OMAS pens are still on offer, and newer models are made with materials and techniques that evoke the company’s hundred-year history. The old world is still there — it just has more glitter, to accommodate the fact that a growing number of the people doing the buying and selling are in their 30s and 40s.
That sparkle caught the eye of Gardena-resident Tracey Velasquez, who traveled to the Pen Show with Ramsey and another friend, Jennifer Harford. Velasquez has nearly 100 pens in her collection. Her favorite is also a Benu Euphoria, a gift from her husband called Vodka on the Rocks.
The resin body is striking, made from a silver luminescent resin and featuring multicolored holographic sparkles.
“I really like collecting things that are shiny,” Velasquez said.
In contrast with her friends Ramsey and Velasquez, 38-year-old Harford of Berkeley owned exactly one: a Pilot fountain pen widely celebrated as an entry-level favorite. That was her entry down the rabbit hole that is fountain pen collecting, one her friends watch with affectionate excitement. They traveled north just to see her eyes agog at the crowds and the vast array of pens on display at the S.F. Pen Show.
“My fiancé bought me my first pen and ink, and so he was kind of the one to push me into it,” she said. “And once I had that start, then I was like, I see what the hype is.”
The California Pen Show, held near Los Angeles each February, also has a particularly strong West Coast presence, but if the presence of Southern Californians at the Westin was any indication, the two shows complement each other as much as they compete.
That’s true for Fernanda Izidorio, who lives in Los Angeles and owns about 40 pens. She said the trip north is as much about community as it is machinery.
Izidorio is a member of the Greater Los Angeles Metro Pen & Ink Group, or Glampig, which has a presence on Instagram and Discord, as well as IRL groups that meet in L.A. and Orange counties.
“I actually really like meeting people in person,” Izidorio said. “It is, in a way, online. We get to contact each other, communicate through Discord. But then we actually meet in person and try pens. That’s very fun.”
There are careers in this universe beyond manufacturing and retail. Nik Pang, 43, for instance, is a professional calligrapher who repairs and sells vintage pens.
Pang and his wife have imposed a hard “cap” on his personal collection: 700 pens and pen-like objects.
About 500 of them, he said, aren’t particularly useful for writing, but he’s interested in the history of the technology. His wife once asked him a morbidly useful question: If their house were burning, and he had time to save just a few pens, which ones would he take?
Two of them are family heirlooms. His grandfather’s fountain pen was a Parker Duofold, commemorating 30 years on the police force. His father’s was a Parker 75, used while earning his doctorate.
That’s part of what makes the fountain-pen revival so multifaceted. The appeal is craftsmanship, as well as beauty, style and the pleasure of finding a community that draws in people from multiple generations, across the globe.
