Courtesy of Emily Wong
In the 2010s, Earl Small was perusing eBay when he found a green Esterbrook fountain pen—the same one he remembered his mother using to sign checks and write letters in the ’50s. After he bought it, his passion for pens spread faster than ink from a tipped bottle.
“I love learning about the history of pens and how they’re developed,” says Small, a retired accountant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, who owns, he estimates, about 150 rare and luxury pens. At a pen trade show in 2013, Small learned of the Norcross-based Southeast Pen Collectors’ Club; he’s been a member ever since.
The pen club, which is going on 30 years old, meets monthly in an office building lent by a member. At their gatherings, the collectors show off their stylos, share nib knowledge, and help each other fix irritable instruments. Sometimes they even take field trips to nearby pen makers, such as the Carolina Pen Company in Aiken, South Carolina. The members—87 at current count—are as diverse as their pen collections, ranging from youthful Gen Zers craving something outside a screen to boomers who still use bona fide pens at work.
Emily Wong, a 30-something civil engineer in Atlanta, is one of the younger members. A lifelong journaler and stationery fan, Wong heard of the Southeast Pen Collectors’ Club at a pen show; she joined in 2025. While she has only 15 pens so far, she has cultivated a club reputation for being partial to finer nibs and Japanese pens.
“I really enjoy the tactile feeling of writing something on paper,” says Wong, who also uses her pens for a good cause: She writes mail to elderly Americans as a volunteer for the organization Letters Against Isolation.
Membership in the club costs $25 a year—about the price of a bottle of ink—and includes a monthly e-newsletter detailing meeting minutes and member profiles, penned (ahem) by longtime member and Dunwoody resident Rich Lapin.
A member since the late 1990s, Lapin’s stylophile commitment is reflected in his collection, an estimated 500 to 700 pens.
“To say ‘collection’ suggests discipline, which I don’t have, so I’m more of an accumulator,” jokes Lapin, a retired marketing professional who still works a few pen shows a year, including the Atlanta Pen Show.
Over the decades, he has honed an instinct for what makes a good pen: aesthetics, comfort in the hand, how well it writes. Cost can be deceiving, he adds: Pens ranging from $5 to thousands of dollars can all meet the mark. To him, it’s not really about the perfect pen, but about what it enables the writer to do.
“Writing with a fountain pen forces you to focus,” he says, “and allows you to engage your hand and your mind at the same time.”
This article appears in our August 2026 issue.
