Research Triangle Pen Club
Durham, Raleigh, Chapel Hill
North Carolina
Updated: 02 JUN 2013
Research Triangle Pen Club News
Our next meeting will be at the Mad Hatter Bakery (Main
and Broad Streets in Durham, across from Duke East Campus, Swift Ave exit off
147/Durham Expressway) on Sunday July 14 at 2:00. Our topic will be
favorite recent pens finds. Everyone is welcome! No membership fees. The Research Triangle Pen Club meets every other month on a Sunday afternoon at 2:00.
Meetings are posted on Zoss, Pentrace, as well as the WWW.Rosspens.Com Home Page.
A Little History of the
Research Triangle Pen Club:
The Triangle Pen Club was spawned from Deb Kinney's notepad. Deb was the
pen manager at the late lamented Sharon Luggage & Gifts in Durham's Northgate
Mall (a Monday evening sort of job, and collected modern pens. In the summer of 1998, Deb
and I decided to have a local vintage pen show, and the upper management at Sharon Luggage
offered space at the store and a fair bit of print and radio advertising
(see above). We set up shop
on a couple of tables. I probably had 20 Sheaffers and maybe half a dozen Vacumatics, Deb
had some real pens. In a stroke of genius, Deb set a notepad down for interested people to
sign up so we could start a club. A few months went by, but we had our first meeting
February 21, 1999, at Elmo's, a local restaurant. We thought
Elmo's would be empty. Ha! We
barely had space to sit and compare notes. From a meeting (April 28, 2002): This picture was taken by Jim
Mamoulides, and shows (around the
circle from Jim's unoccupied chair) Mark Anderle, Deb Kinney's eyelids, Glenn
Jones, Trish Jones, Frank Kauffman, David Brown, Leigh Moser, Dean Moser, Ross
McKinney, Fran DeRespinis, and Doug Addington. Missing is young Daniel Addington.
This meeting was held at the Wellspring Grocery Store cafe, with a theme of
unusal nibs (stubs, obliques, etc). Lots of pens to pass around! Highlight from a pen club meeting: Adrian Jones
very nicely gave me my own Bic Stik. And it works!
This was a Club meeting in late 2000, when Fran brought along his digital camera. We were
missing a few steady members (Deb Kinney, Renard DellaFave), but we had a good turn out.
The group visible in the picture includes (standing from left): Fran DeRespinis, Doug
Addington, Ridley Kessler, Mark Anderle. (sitting from left) Krysta Chauncey, Daniel
Addington(Doug's son, who was given a Waterman CF for his enthusiasm), Peter Chauncey,
Ross McKinney, and Gretchen Schlager. My son Tucker took the picture, but he mainly hit
the bookstore looking for a birthday present for a female friend
Since then, we've met Sunday afternoons at the Regulator Bookstore, Elmos, and the Mad
Hatter, all in Durham, once every other month or so. Sometimes it's more frequent.
We've had special meetings - like dinner with Tom Zoss when he came to town, and around
the DC Pen Show so we could show off our new pens to each other. The group is interesting
and varied - all ages and backgrounds. We've often had themed meetings, like Renard
teaching us how to refill rollerball cartridges or our big ink festival (will the
Regulator ever forgive us?).
Anyone interested can get on our e-mailing list by contacting Deb (KINNEY@law.duke.edu) or
I (ross@rosspens.com). Membership is FREE,
and *everyone* is invited - no matter how far they have to drive!
These two pictures were taken by David Kelley at the August 17, 2008
Triangle Pen Club meeting as 14 of us met to talk about pens from 1985 to the present.
