A modest gaggle of us hit the second day of the show this year, and found it quiet enough to make contact with a quite a few firms we’d like to work with in the months ahead – so here’s a quick summary.

Starting with well-known brands, Sheaffer / Cross have some pens which are more impressive in the hand than you might have expected, and we’re going to see if we can test some out soon. Similarly, Montegrappa’s nibs turn out to be better writers than we’d realised and we might be trying some of them too. Oh, and Lamy are astonished that we’ve not reviewed the Safari yet so we shall what happens…

Meanwhile, those Ystudio pens are still looking quite tempting, the new rose gold version of the aluminium Kaweco Sport is really rather impressive, and the limited edition colours of the Silvine Originals are quite classy too.

The Manuscript stand was a joy as ever, complete with Joyce’s ‘Artsynibs’ calligraphy tutorials and the interesting site of Bock nibs making an appearance in the Helit-bodies Clarity fountain pen (very similar to the Dex we have reviewed in the past). But more outrageous than any pen was their latest remarkable breakthrough – yes, they’ve only gone and invented the italic mechanical pencil! We’ll be putting that to the test as soon as we can get our hands on one.

Finally, we encountered some rather delectable paper too.  Ludlow Bookbinders had made some really cute leather-bound pocket notebooks – expect to see more of those – and another Italian paper-maker were launching their PuntoRiga brand in search of a UK distributor, which surely can’t be hard to find with such a good writing surface and some very interesting binding  ideas too.

As ever, a good opportunity to meet some old friends and make some new ones!