Giovanni Abrate comes to Tokyo with Filcao Pens

Pentracer Giovanni Abrate paid a visit to the Tokyo Pentracers last night. Mikiko, Luc and I met him in the lobby of his hotel, and as he had promised, he brought a collection of beautiful Italian hand made Filcao pens. He's the American distributor for the Filcao company, and the president is his close friend. These pens were gorgeous! After a great time of examining these beauties right there in the lobby, we started to claim which ones we wanted to take home (Giovanni had told us earlier that he would be letting us have them at 50-60 percent discounts, and the prices on his Web site were already very affordable). I held up a beautiful cracked ice celluloid "Leader 1918" pen shaped like a Duofold and asked how much it was, and broke into a big smile and said "Just take it!" Each of us ended up with two new pens each before the evening was over! My other pen was a transparent green celluloid "Nuova Verbana" pen with touches of blue, orange and black. It was like Santa had come to Tokyo in January! These were my first hand made celluloid pens

Then we visited Shosaikan Aoyama Pen Boutique which was not far from the hotel. The owner there was very familiar with Filcao pens, having bought a Filcao KIKA Micro Pen in America. This Kika Micro Pen is the World's smallest fully functional Fountain Pen.

After Shosaikan, Giovanni treated us to dinner at a nearby French restaurant, where we talked about pens, passed around pens from our own collections, and had a great time. I tried out one of my new pens on the paper menu and was reprimanded by the waiter.

In the hotel lobby Giovanni shows Mikiko a Filcao pen as Luc looks on

Luc and Giovanni at the restaurant

Handmade Leader 1918 celluloid pens (I got the cracked ice model second from the right)

Filcao Web site