(Kimberly (she/her) took the express train down the fountain pen/stationery rabbit hole and doesn't want to be rescued. She can be found on Instagram @allthehobbies because there really are many, many hobbies!.)
It’s Thursday morning after the 2024 San Francisco Pen Show and I think I’ve recovered enough (from all the shenanigans and late nights) to be able to sit down and write this recap. There is a lot that is similar from last year’s SF Show, so if you haven’t read that recap yet, maybe take a quick peek. Or we can just dive right in.
Disclaimer: 2017 SF Pen Show was my first show, has been and still is my favorite show on the circuit. I’m also a member of the SF Pen Posse who helps out at the show. Which means that it is really difficult for me not to be biased but I promise to be as objective as I can.
Like last year, I did not work for any vendors, which freed me up to do whatever, whenever, and however much I wanted. Which is both awesome but dangerous for the wallet, lol.
Many of the vendors go to a lot of the US shows, so I tried to focus on vendors that were either first-time vendors, international vendors, or both.
Last year, there were about 100 vendors and this year the number grew to more than 130. The show did cut back the maximum number of tables any single vendor could have, so they could accommodate more vendors at the show. They also moved some of the classes to other conference rooms (more on that later) so that they could fit more vendors. To no one’s surprise, this didn’t help with last year’s crowding issue, but first, let’s take a look at some of these vendors!
One of the things that sets the San Francisco Pen Show apart from others on the circuit is the sheer number of vendors that come from abroad, especially from Asia. There are vendors from Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, India and probably others I’m missing. Many of these vendors don’t go to any other US shows. We also get folks from the other side of the pond like the UK, France, and Turkey, to name a few. It is this variety of vendors that really attracts both attendees and other vendors to this show.
Aesthetic Bay came all the way from Singapore with their stunning collection of pens and you know it’s got to be some good stuff if Bryant Greer (right) of Chatterley Luxuries is looking around!
The calm before the storm at the Toyooka Craft table. Toru Yamazaki-san had a ticketing system, like you might find at the deli, so people didn’t have to stand in a long line like in years past. It was nice to check the number whenever I walked by, so I had an idea if I should come back in 30 minutes, or hang around and wait my turn.
This is what was left after Friday’s carnage. It definitely sold out early on Saturday. Toru hopes to be able to bring more to next year’s show!
Look at these cute lil pens from Eboya! The little purple one was calling my name and thankfully someone snagged it so my wallet didn’t have to. 🙂
In addition to beautiful urushi pens, Seypen also brought pen cases and trays made with traditional kimono fabric! Stunning!
I managed to get a picture of the folks from Glassophy (who also came from Hong Kong) before the hoards of people mobbed their table and bought nearly everything in sight!
I had to take a selfie with Hiroko (center) and her assistant Toru because this is her last international pen show for the foreseeable future (so she can focus on her work). I wasn’t able to get a picture of them at their table because everything sold out so quickly!
These artfully designed pens from Stanford Pen Studio (South Africa) was represented at St. Jon’s table! It was also John Foye’s first time at the SF Pen Show and he said he had a great show!
Musubi introduced folks to Halus and Japanese bamboo paper, both meant for art & play, and had the talented Leigh Reyes demonstrating how the papers behave with her beautiful artwork.
More SF Show first-timers Mikayla Jackson (right) of White Bear Pens and Rob Sanchez from Rob’s Penworks!
OMG, Ian! These anodized Monocs are gonna be the death of my wallet! They look so good!
Some cool new stuff from Franklin-Christoph, including handpainted designs as well as laser-engraved pens!
The new limited edition Parker Jotter Global Icons collection! I already have New York and Rome, now to find Tokyo and the soon to be released Sydney!
Bruce Eimon from Bungubox is showing off their Calvados Inkwell - looks good enough to drink, but don’t drink the ink!
Syd Saperstein of Pensbury Manor is one of the owners and organizers of the SF Pen Show and he was full of smiles all weekend.
The show had a plethora of nib workers to choose from, including some who had never worked the SF show before! In alphabetical order by first name, they are:
- Anabelle Hiller of Opus Cineris
- CY of Tokyo Station Pens
- Damien Alomar of All in the Nib
- Gena Salorino of Custom Nib Studio
- Josh Lax of JJ Lax Pen Co
- Kirk Speer of Pen Realm
- Matthew Chen of Matt’s Nib Works
- Mike Masuyama of Mike It Work
- Thomas Ang
This list doesn’t include Audrey Matteson who does the grinds and tunes for Franklin-Christoph (though not doing any grinds at the show) and Salvatore Matrone of Leonardo Pens who also tuned Leonardo’s.
The Nib Grinder Hallway where many of them were BUSY all weekend, including Gena (foreground, Mike Masuyama, Matthew Chen, CY, and Kirk Speer.)
I think Josh Lax needs a snack because he’s about to eat one of the nibs. 🙂
Damien Alomar of All in the Nib was located in the same room as Anabelle and Thomas (pictured below.)
Nib workers Anabelle Hiller (left) and a not-yet-inky-handed Thomas Atemlicht were some of the nib folks that weren’t in the nib grinder hallway.
Speaking of Anabelle, she is not only a nib worker but also a goldsmith/designer. I got to try her gorgeous, handmade Harmonic nib - it is an amazing writer too!
What a pleasure it was to meet Salvatore Matrone of Leonardo Pens! I especially loved having our conversation in Italian - buying/using Italian pens helps fluency, right?!
Bryce Gillett (on chair) and John Gillett of Luxury Brands of America did raffles on each day of the show. They made it a little more fun by having the rest of us yell back with each number called – like if the number was 728, he would yell “7” and anyone who had the number 7 would yell back “7”, and then 2 and then 8. If no one yells back, then he pulls another ticket. This was a LOT Of fun, even if you didn’t win.
This lucky attendee picked out a gorgeous Waldmann Xetra Vienna ballpoint that was specially engraved with the Golden Gate Bridge!
One of several ink testing stations throughout the show - there are 49 tester pens with inks from Diamine, Robert Oster, Muze Pens, Nagasawa (Kobe inks) and more!
These Kuretake brush markers are beautiful and only cost $10! (no, they aren’t refillable though). Chartpak (US distributor for Pelikan as well as a bunch of art supply brands) started distributing Kuretake about a year ago.
In addition to a lot of international vendors, the SF Show also has quite a few local vendors too!
Mr. Not Rick Shaw, aka Mark Dwight, of Rickshaw Bagworks is a tired but happy fella cuz they sold a lot of products AND launched the new Fillmore (shown in blue.)
Louis Basel of Goby Designs, which is a local, Berkeley-based company that makes notebooks and notebook covers.
Louis is putting in the grommets into a green leather notebook cover.
Pen Wearsch of Enigma Stationery in front of their super cute display! I can’t believe they’ve gotten so tall already! (Posted with permission from their parents.)
San Francisco-based Fog Cats brought all their fun fog, cat, bear, and San Francisco-themed goods to the show! Fun fact: the SF fog is so famous it even has a name - it’s Karl the Fog!
Jaime Perez and Jeremy Saumure of Flax Pen to Paper drove up from Los Angeles with lots of fun goods, including products from Saiko Stationery!
This is one of the smaller rooms that held quite a few vendors who sold stationery, ephemera, PET/washi tape, and accessories too.
Angela He of InkyConverters always brings the cutest merch, including some SF-themed goods!
Jinhee Seo of A Thousand Words designs cute stickers and postcards.
I love that Jinhee’s designs are inspired by “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”!
The lovely folks from Pinky Elephant came to the show for the first time and brought a lot of super cute stuff with them, including Littlelu!
Mai (left) from Paper Treats decided to make this show all about Harumi of 4legs who is most known for Mushroom Cat!
Look at all this Mushroom Cat goodness!
The show hosted several different meetups and swap/destash events, where folks could give away products they no longer wanted and/or pick up some new-to-them stuff. There was a destash event hosted by the SF Pen Posse, a Bay Area Planners meetup, SF Stationery meetup and Postcrossing Meetup. Aside from being a great way to get rid of or acquire more stuff, destash events are great ways to meet other enthusiasts too.
Look at all the washi tape on this table! People even brought playing cards, so you can wrap washi samples around them!
As with past years, there were also a plethora of free seminars, the aforementioned meetups, auctions, and paid classes. I never got around to taking pictures of any of the classes, including my own! I was so excited to teach a handwriting improvement class, and even more excited that 30 people signed up and paid to take the class, that I forgot to take a selfie with the class when it was over! Huge shoutout and gratitude to my friend Tori of Stationery Universe who encouraged me to do this last year and also took the class too!
From what I understand, this year’s SF Show had significantly more All-Access pass holders than they had in the past. Some shows are busier on Fridays and others on Saturdays. SF has always been busier on Friday in terms of sales, but busier on Saturday in terms of number of people. More locals come on the weekend as well, and like last year, they ran into problems trying to find parking. The show did try to mitigate some of this by buying out 80+ employee parking spots, but that still wasn’t enough. They had information on their website encouraging folks to carpool, park at nearby hotels, or take public transit or park at the public transit parking structures ~ 1 mile away and then Uber over. Short of buying out parking spots from other hotels and/or paying for their own shuttle service (and likely needing to raise prices to cover the costs), I don’t know how the show could address this issue.
As you can imagine, if the parking lots are full, the show would be as well. The show was packed pretty much from the first minute of Friday All-Access at 9am til probably midday Sunday. It might be hard to tell from my photos because I tried to take vendor photos before the All-Access folks came in, or on Sunday when it was a little less crazy.
The registration/ticket line was, to put it mildly, very long. Unlike for big races or conventions, hotel lobbies don’t have enough room to handle long lines, or have multiple lines for prepay vs cash at the door vs PayPal, etc., or have different entry times (this is also more common in large conventions where they have the space to put people in different lines, as well as staff to check people’s entry times, etc.). I can’t think of an easy solution for this that doesn’t require additional space, or more staff
This line went from one end of the lobby all the way to the other end, and that was 15 minutes before the show opened for public access! 10 minutes later, the line was winding itself back towards the middle of the lobby!
As part of Pen Shows 101, I did a tour of the show floor so that folks could see the lay of the land and know that there are hallways and side rooms, in addition to the main ballroom. It was hard enough for me to walk around, let alone lead a group of people through the show, and talking at a reasonable volume was next to impossible.
There were some flow issues too, the biggest of which was at the PLOTTER table, where folks lined up around the table, out the door and down one of the hallways. This resulted in some attendees thinking it was the line to get in (and it wasn’t), and also prevented folks from getting access to the vendors in the hallway. I did like that they put more of the nib workers in the back hallway, which made it easier to get access to them. They also moved the PLOTTER “corner customization” to that hallway, so some folks moved out of the main ballroom while they waited for their PLOTTERS to be customized with pretty corners (which, btw, is a show-only customization).
The show also eliminated some of the classrooms that were located near the main ballroom and used that space to add more vendors. This also meant that some of the classes had to be held elsewhere. There were classes on the 3rd floor of the Westin and also at the Aloft across the parking lot, which is a bit disjointed, but I totally get it - there’s only so much space on the main floor. Even the Bayshore Ballroom hosted two classes in the same room, with some panel screens separating the two; I heard that it was a little disruptive because you could hear what’s going on in the other class. For what it’s worth, I didn’t have any issues teaching my class while sharing the room with Abbey Sy who was also holding a journaling workshop, but I could see where it could be noisy if the class had a lot of questions or was particularly loud.
Despite the crowding issues, most of the attendees that I talked to said that they had a great time and couldn't wait for next year's show. They loved the variety of vendors and the ability to talk with folks they had only ever seen online. I also spoke with quite a few of the new and returning vendors who told me that they had great sales, and they really loved meeting their customers in person as well as showing their products to new folks. In fact, some of these vendors told me it was their best show this year, which is great to hear. Many of the first-time vendors are already making plans to come back again, which is awesome because despite being at the show all weekend, I still didn't do as much shopping as I wanted to! :-)
Considering it’s only the show’s second time at this hotel, I do appreciate that the show has been trying to find new ways to fit more vendors who are banging down their door, while working on different places for some folks, while also trying to placate existing vendors who want to stay in their spots, and while trying to make it work for attendees who just wanna be able to wander the show and blow their budgets. These are tough problems for any show to handle, but especially one that seems to have already outgrown the hotel that they have a multi-year contract with.
A couple things that attendees could do to make it a little better:
- Bring slim bags to the show - Backpacks and other large bags take up a lot of aisle room, especially when bending over. And if you do have a big bag because you should definitely NEVER leave anything visible in your car, put it down by your feet because it takes up less room. (Pro tip: putting a bag ON your feet means you’re less likely to walk away without it.)
- Be aware of your surroundings - Make sure you’re not blocking the aisle, don’t stop abruptly, or back up without looking. It’s easy to trip and step on feet/bags/etc.
- Use the app - the Starbucks app, that is. The hotel has an actual Starbucks, so it was much easier and faster to order via the app and be notified when your order is ready, instead of wasting precious shopping/selling/resting time while waiting in line.
As many of you may have heard, COVID has been rearing its ugly head again. So it was good to see a fair number of people who were masked at the show. It wasn’t as much as back in 2021, but certainly more than at any other show I’ve been to this whole year. Aside from Odin’s PSA on masking, the show also provided masks at the registration & entry tables for anyone who wanted one. As someone who travels a lot and doesn’t wanna get any kind of crud (COVID or otherwise), it was a welcome sight to see more people masking. And I get that not everyone wants to wear one (or can’t for medical reasons), but don’t judge or belittle folks like me who choose to do so. I won’t belabor the point, just be safe out there.
Ok, enough about that, let’s move on to my favorite parts of the SF Pen Show!
It’s no surprise that I love dogs (I love cats too but I’m allergic to them) and I love that the SF Pen Show is a dog-friendly show! The ones I encountered were all sweetie pies that didn’t bark or pull or anything of the sort! In fact, some were even shy! I couldn’t get pictures of them all but rest assured, I gave them lots of pets, scratches and boops!
I love them all, but especially the backpack corgi, and Odin, the SF Pen Show mascot (bottom right!)
My dog, Bungee (English Cream Golden Retriever), made it to the show on Sunday afternoon and got lots of attention! I love that Bungee was smiling at me while Lisa Vanness was taking a selfie (top left), my heart melted when Bungee leaned in for a hug from Mike Masuyama (upper right), she always smiles when Audrey Matteson gives her love, and her squinty smile when Judy of Tokubetsumemori gave her hugs!
We all know that one of my favorite parts about pen shows is what happens AFTER show hours! I never left the show to go out for dinner, but I had a couple of good meals at the show followed by good beverages and even better company!
The Westin lobby was the preferred choice for folks who wanted a chill place to hang out. People were still having a great time chatting and checking out each other’s purchases.
*Kelly Henick enjoyed her very first TimTam! *
More folks noshing on TimTams while having fun with swatches, stamps and things. The Westin had several of these cozy nooks.
If you wanted a livelier scene, the Aloft was the place to be. They had games spread out throughout the lobby/bar area, including gigantic Uno cards!
Behind the Aloft lobby area, there was more space for gathering and hanging out by the fireplace. It was also nice to get some fresh air out back.
Hanging out with old and new pen friends (PC: Bettina/windwaterandflow on IG)
Look at all these smiling faces! Is anyone surprised I spent most of my after-show time here? (adult content warning, don’t zoom too closely, or do it anyway and have a chuckle.)
To say that I had a blast at the show doesn’t even begin to capture my 7th SF Pen Show. It isn’t perfect, there are still issues to sort out, but it is still my favorite show and my heart is fuller than it has ever been. I waited until Thursday to write this recap because I didn’t want it to end (it’s well after midnight on Friday, the day it’s going to be published, and I’m still writing). So many people from near and far, making new friends and enjoying old friendships, so many hugs, so many smiles.
I may have spent more on inks than I did on pens this year! Clockwise from top left: Monteverde inks from Yafa table, Kobe inks from Nagasawa, Pierre Cardin inks from Muze Pens, Robert Oster Fire on Fire on Fire from the Bossman, Vinta Palaisipan,an Enigma Stationery exclusive, and the SF Pen Show exclusive ink from Colorverse.
Left to right: SF exclusive PLOTTER paper pads, pocket and A5 notebooks from Curnow Bookbinding and Leather, Cosmo Air Light notebook from Paper Mind, a purple engraved Franklin-Christoph Model 03, and a cute little Wancher PuChiCo pen from Pen Realm.
This one needed a floor shot! Clockwise from top left: InkyConverters, Paper Treats/4Legs, Tokubetsumemori, Kubo and Lucy, Colorverse stickers from LBA, stamps and washi from Everyday Explorers, pins, stickers, patches, and postcards from Fog Cats. Not pictured: the stickers and postcards I bought from A Thousand Words cuz I’m still unpacking and I haven’t found them yet 🙂 Also not pictured: Rickshaw Bagworks show lanyard (pictured at the end) and a pen show t-shirt that’s in the laundry, lol.
At the end of the day, at the end of a pen show, it’s the people that make pen shows so special. This is the real pen show haul. ♥️
Karas Kustoms always hides a giveaway pen when they leave a pen show, and this was no exception. I found this stunning red rollerball off the Bay Trail across the street! What a perfect way to end the show!
Thank you to everyone who made the SF Pen Show the funnest one yet!
Whether you’re the organizers (BIGGEST THANK YOU), vendors, helpers, attendees, friends, or a pup, thank you for giving me the best weekend ever! I’m sad to say that the SF Pen Show is a wrap, but all good things must come to an end. I’m still recovering for far too little sleep but am looking forward to the Dallas Pen Show in a few weeks. Until then, stay safe and stay inky!
(PSA: The SF Show has several Lost-n-found items from the show. If you lost (or found) something at the show, please contact them at https://sanfranciscopenshow.com/contact. Also, check with the vendors you shopped/chatted with, as vendors may have also found items at their tables.)
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