A love fest for the mighty pen

CARY -- You might guess Susan Wirth fancies fountain pens by the black and blue ink staining all 10 fingers. But if you miss that, note the small blot on her lower lip.

For Wirth, making a curlicue with a vintage Waterman feels like sculpture. And stagecraft. And geography. Forgive her for gushing, but when she writes with a pen thick as a thumb, she never runs out of words.

"It's like dancing with someone," said Wirth, a collector from Milwaukee. "There's some people you never want to dance with again, and there's some people, every time you do it, it gets better."

This weekend, the nation's inkiest pen geeks are gathering in Cary for the fifth annual Triangle Pen Show -- the nation's sixth largest.

Inside, you'll find a 1910 Parker Aztec selling for $40,000 -- a model that has only five or 10 known copies worldwide.

You'll find a $12,000 pen, designed and assembled off Six Forks Road in Raleigh, made of solid gold and ox horn.

"They also use woolly mammoth horn," said Scott Franklin, the designer with Franklin-Cristoph. "It's rare."

Among those jewels lay hundred of jumbled oddities selling mostly for less than $100: 1920s Art Deco and 1930s Art Nouveau pens that look like miniature versions of the Chrysler Building.

"For me, it's this guy here," said Ohio pen restorer Aaron Svabik, pulling a gold Cross Signet from a glass case. "Made right in the Depression. It was such a majestic pen made at a time when the whole world tanked."

Ballpoint pens trickled into stores after World War II and by the 1960s had almost taken over the writing landscape.

Fountain pens glided back into use by the mid-1990s, aided by easy online trading.

"I woke up one day with $1,110 in my PayPal account," said Svabik, who sells pens online. "Some guy from Saudi Arabia bought four pens off my site."

Luxury tastes are also fueling the return of fountain pens. These days, they come covered in diamonds. Worldwide, fountain pen sales top $5 billion a year, a figure spurred on by pens such as the limited edition series commissioned by the Sultan of Brunei as a tribute to Princess Diana.

Prices for those pens topped $60,000. But they are Ferrari pens, outnumbered by Studebakers and Nash Ramblers.

Nostalgia for the written letter inspires collectors who grab up these pens. Fat as fingers, the Watermans, Sheaffers, Parkers and Crosses spring from the age of the solid oak writing desk and the inkwell.

On Wirth's showcase, this sign appears: Angry with your mouse? Upset with your ISP? Relax and enjoy life with a proper writing instrument.

"Your vertical lines are fat," Wirth said, demonstrating. "Your horizontal lines are skinny, and you get the contrast without thinking about it. All of a sudden, it makes me look like a grown-up."

A ballpoint line always looks the same, she laments.

Mark the fountain pen's return as a point for variety, for style.

Mark it as a victory, Wirth said, for the thousands of schoolchildren forced to abandon their left-leaning script, scrap their wobbly letters and write like everybody else.