Our pen group scheduled an official meetup in preparation for this year’s official Pelikan Hub the following month. This time, the whole group was invited, and having only met a handful of members before at a mini-penmeet, I was still pretty nervous going in.
The Pre-Pelikan Hubs meet was held at a local restaurant. A long table was reserved for around 20 people, but we ended up borrowing a second one once roughly 30 members showed up. People came and went throughout, but I had the chance to talk to nearly everyone.
What Is a Pelikan Hub?
Pelikan Hubs is an annual event organized by Pelikan, the German pen brand that’s been around since 1838. On the same day each year, fountain pen fans in cities around the world gather at the same time, with each hub hosted locally by pen groups and specialty stores.
Our pen group had already been around for a while before I joined, so this wasn’t a first launch. This dinner was more of a warm-up before the year’s Pelikan Hub, a chance for everyone to get comfortable with each other again before the bigger, branded event the following month.
Bookbinding and Ink Swatching, Explained
The meetup was lively, with everyone busy doing their own thing. One small group was enjoying some bookbinding, which is a craft that involves folding sheets of paper into signatures and stitching them together into a cover. It’s a slow, tactile hobby that pairs naturally with people who already care about paper and pens.
After watching for a bit, I moved to another table covered in ink bottles and joined in on the swatching. Ink swatching means dipping a brush or pen into a bottle and recording how the color actually looks on paper, since ink often looks nothing like its bottle once it dries. Collectors keep swatch cards the way some people keep paint chips, as a personal reference for a color they might forget otherwise.
Older Schoolmates I Didn’t Expect to Meet
I was delighted to discover how connected everyone already was. Aside from sharing the hobby, a lot of the people I talked to turned out to be schoolmates from both college and high school, just from batches years ahead of mine. A few others were even in the same line of work as me. It was genuinely fun meeting everyone who came.
By the time the sun had set, people started heading home one by one. With the Pelikan Hubs talk out of the way, it was about time to call it a day. I went home satisfied, new friends made, and a page full of new ink swatches.
For our pen group, the real next stop was the official Pelikan Hubs meetup itself.
Around that same stretch of the month, a separate but overlapping crowd, the local sketch group, was busy gearing up for its own outdoor meet at Plaza Libertad on National Heroes Day.
Quick Answers
What is a Pelikan Hub? It’s an annual fountain pen gathering organized by Pelikan, held on the same day in cities around the world and hosted locally by pen groups and specialty stores.
What is ink swatching? It’s the practice of testing a fountain pen ink on paper and keeping a record of how it actually looks once dry, since bottled ink often looks different from its written color.
What is bookbinding, at a beginner level? At its simplest, it’s folding sheets of paper into small sections called signatures and stitching them together into a cover to make a notebook or journal.