People approach this hobby/passion/calling from many different angles. Some love pens because they’re collectors, and amass impressive archives of a specific brand or model that cover every variant released over decades (if not a century). Others take a purely utilitarian approach, treating their pens as tools, often settling on a single pen that meets their writing needs and never feeling the need to branch out to anything else. I take a middle approach: I definitely have my favorites that I use more than others (75% of the time, perhaps?) but I also have a bit of “collector” in me as well.

If You Make It In Yellow, I Will Probably Buy It

I collect in two ways. First, I try to have at least one example of major vintage pens in my personal collection, and sometimes more if different variations - usually colors - of a specific model interest me. For example, I currently have one Parker Vacumatic, and a handful of Parker 51s. While I might add some more Vacumatics after my prized blue one broke during a botched vintage pen repair (long story that I will tell later), I don’t feel the need to collect and example of every Parker, and the ones I do have are very much user-grade examples. To me, part of the fun of writing with a vintage pen is the idea that I can use an item in the same way that it was used by the original owner 75-100 years ago, and remark on how little has changed. The pen doesn’t need to be pristine or valuable to give you that experience. As I noted in this recent video, the Parker 45 I showed off cost me $65, even with a 14k nib!

A picture of six more yellow or almost-yellow pens from my current collection — Some of these fall into the “almost yellow” category. From left: Nakaya Long Piccolo, Kasama Una in Ultem, Mark’s Tous Les Jours metal gel pen, Leonardo Momento Zero Maestro in Omas Burkina Celluloid, and my Conway Stewart Model 100 in Honey Noire.

Second, I tend to accumulate and, yes, “collect” pens by color. You might think from the overall visual theme of T.G.S. that most of my pens are some combination of red and black. While I do have a lot of red pens, and a deep red is one of those tones that makes me happy, so does yellow. Not necessarily a bright yellow, but anything that’s a more muted mustard, saffron, or even a yellow-green is more often than not an insta-buy. There isn’t any real strategy behind this collection. It’s not organized my model, brand, or even type of pen. It’s just something I enjoy, and these days I’ll take that because it’s exactly what I need.

That said, I do my best to avoid mindless accumulation. I currently have several binders of pens, most of which I own not because they fit into some overall “theme” but simply because the design/color/backstory makes me happy. I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot lately, as I’ve made a commitment to unload a significant number of pens (5 per month) throughout 2025. While there will be some harder choices in the year to come, right now the standard is “does this particular pen make me want to use it, and does it make me happy when I use it?” (I refuse to use the phrase “spark joy.”) Through March, I’ve sold off 15+ pens and have only added two or three. I’m actually excited to see what my collection looks like by year-end!

Kaweco Sport Honey, Perkeo Indian Summer, and Kuru Toga Alpha Gel Switch — Those pens I have added this year haven’t been very expensive, including the new Kaweco Sport Honey (right) and one of the remaining Kaweco Perkeo “Indian Summer” fountain pens. The mechanical pencil is the Uni Kuru Toga Alpha Gel Switch. The yellow and black version is my favorite.

SO WHAT’S next for the collection? A couple of recent additions

Do I really need another Kaweco Sport? No, but since the new “Honey” color is the exact shade of yellow that I enjoy, I added one to the collection anyway and inked it up immediately. No regrets. I also had the opportunity to re-acquire a pen that I regret selling: the Kaweco Perkeo in the yellow/green and black “Indian Summer” colorway that was so popular a few years ago. At NY Now in January, I found out that the distributor had a few remaining in stock and I managed to acquire some mediums. What do I think I’m going to pass on? The Lamy Scarlet fountain pen. While they’re great looking pens, and I’m glad to see Lamy move to more muted shades like Scarlet and Steel Black in the standard lineup, It’s not really that exact shade of red that speaks to me. I may claim one of the mechanical pencils, though, as I really love my Lamy AL-Star mechanical pencil and I don’t have a Safari version.

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It’s funny - over the years I’ve managed to pick up many pens, notebooks, and pencils on clearance, only to have these surplus (and often heavily discounted) items turn into coveted “grails” years later. Over the past couple of weeks, as I’ve been pruning back my collection, I realized two things: (1) I have a ton of pens in an “anise green” shade that people always comment on (if not try to purchase off me), especially when they see them in person; and (2) this same shade of yellow-green tends to sell very slowly at retail, and often makes up the last of a lot whenever I stock it, even though it’s arguably the best-looking color in products like the Quo Vadis Habana Notebook or the Clairefontaine 1951 Classic Series. On the pen side, Nakaya discontinued their “Nanohana-Iro” urushi finish, and Pilot stopped selling the “Harvest Yellow” Decimo that I’ve been clinging to for dear life over the past few years, as people have tried to pry it from my hands. It’s even become difficult to find pens in a solid shade of yellow-green ebonite, unless you order the rods yourself and have a custom pen made.

From left, my Wakakusa-Iro Nakaya Long Piccolo, Pilot Decimo in Harvest Gold, and the Platinum Plaisir in Bali Citrus.

So I’ll pose kind of a silly question: Is yellow-green/anise green/pea green the most underappreciated color in stationery? Or to frame it for broader discussion: Why do people only seem to appreciate some things after they start to disappear from the market? I suspect that part of the issue with this particular color is that it’s very difficult to accurately photograph, and even if you get a good picture, vast discrepancies in calibration across computer monitors can make it look much too pale, robbing it of its depth, or on the flip side, too dark, making it look flat and boring. I’ve also heard it’s a hard color for manufacturers to consistently reproduce, so you will get a lot of batch variations across a single product line. That said, this isn’t the only “cult color” that disappears only to become insanely popular on the secondary market.

I guess this is yet one more example of me subconsciously building a “mini-collection” that in this case extends across different product categories. In addition to my Nakaya Long Piccolo in “Wakakusa-Iro” (which was a store exclusive from Aesthetic Bay in Singapore), the Harvest Gold Decimo, and other pens such as my Visconti Van Gogh “Vincent’s Chair” and a green-gold Platinum Plaisir in “Bali Citrus”, I ended up purchasing a gross of the Camel 2B pencils from the CW Pencil Enterprise closeout sale because I couldn’t bear to be without a stash of the green ones.

What colors do you think remain underappreciated in the stationery industry? For a while, it seems as though everyone was moving towards matte-black everything, then the clear demonstrators became popular, and now the trend is towards sparkling acrylic/DiamondCast. When manufacturers focus on outdoing one another on the latest trend, we seem to miss out on these more offbeat colors that don’t get a lot of attention, and might attract more fans if companies were willing to take a bit more risk and give these products a chance to distinguish themselves. That said, as participants in this community we also have a responsibility: If you like a particular product, and find yourself wishing that “more companies made something like that,” then buy it if you can. Manufacturers and retailers can’t pay their bills on admiration alone, and we shouldn’t wait for these “cult hits” to go out of stock before everyone starts scrambling to find them.

If you’d like to read more on the subject of “Mini-Collections,” and how I’ve focused my own pen and ink collecting, check out these posts on the Parker Sonnet (one of my favorite under-appreciated pens), and my obsession with red inks, among other things.

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