Buying & Selling NOS Pens
Serendipitous Flea Market Buys
A historic building, Western Market in Sheung Wan has been repurposed as a mini shopping centre housing textile and fabric stalls selling bales of cloth for suits, dresses and curtains. Few Hong Kongers probably know how to sew their own clothes these days. So shop assistants outnumbered the numbers of visitors when we visited.
I remember Western Market had a thriving weekend flea market in the forecourt in the 1990s. Among other bric a brac, the flea market was a favourite place for me to buy New Old Stock fountain pens.
My stash of OMAS NOS pens came from Western Market. They included a boxed set of a OMAS Tokyo fountain pen in Persimmon with a 14K nib for HKD 200+,plus a few Ogivas and Paragons. I resold them 20 years later at 3-4 prices what I paid. But I gave away the OMAS Tokyo to my son who I hope still has it. It's now a rare collectors item. Click on the picture below for more pictures of a OMAS Tokyo Persimmon for sale at StJohns Pens.
☝️A selection of OMAS NOS pens I bought from Western Market and later resold on Carousell. I remember the buyer of the coral red Ogivas was a secondary school student with very good taste. The pens he bought are now probably now worth 2-3x more because OMAS has ceased manufacturing.
I also picked up several NOS St Dupont Rendez Vous fountain pens and ballpoints from a small stationery shop at the Central Market overpass in the late 1990s in the aftermath of the 1998 stockmarket crash. The Rendez Vous range came in editions of 200 each for the Sun (red and gold lacquer) and Moon (blue and gold lacquer) and were based on St Dupont's Montparnasse luxury pens.
At HKD2000 for each limited edition Chinese lacquer pen, I bought 5. I later sold a fountain pen for HKD 7,000 on Carousell. That was the highest price I ever got for a pen I bought at rock bottom prices.
In a later post I will cover the topic of selling fountain pens at auctions and the reasons why eBay asking prices for limited edition pens are almost always inflated. Even after factoring in 20% buyers premiums for pens bought at auctions you can probably acquire LE pens for cheaper than from eBay.
