Neil
Fellow
This coming Thursday to Sunday (I think!!!) Anyone due to go? Am exhibiting there, so if anyone is around, see you there.
Now unless thers a village just outside Milan called Bethlehem, I reckon there a big con going on there!
Knackered and back home from southport. By all accounts the show is going to struggle next year, no body had a good days trading there, even the food hall which is virtually unheard of. The nursery stalls were ordering more vehicles to come and pick up unsold stock, some had to order extra vehicles to come from suffolk! Not a show I will be repeating but managed to buy some cuff link boxes on thuja burr from a trader who has workshops in morooco and is hopefully going to get me some more raw material that I can cut into pen blanks. Also met up with a guy who imports olive wood, he runs out of his workshop in Lytham st Ann's. He imports the stuff three container loads at a time!
Interesting thread a while back, can't remember who was after Bethlehem olive wood but decided to settle on some other European source. Well the law about harvesting olive wood in Italy is that the tree must have ceased to produce a viable crop and the owner must replace the felled tree. Same in Israel I believe. Anyway, you may all have seen stocks of Bethlehem olive wood on eBay for silly postage prices.?? Well, the guy who sells to this guy I met (who incidentally managed to find a couple of feet of the end of a 25mm thick board, 300mm wide that he didn't want) told me after we had talked about olive wood for quite a while that his suppliers biggest customer was located in, wait for it, Israel, and the specified dimensions for the wood were as pen blanks. Now unless thers a village just outside Milan called Bethlehem, I reckon there a big con going on there!
Nice to meet Mike and his wife, Helen the sneaky photographer! There weren't too many viable customers milling around on Friday morning, the mornings were pretty dead, but it did pick up a bit in the afternoons. Saturday was a wash out, drainage at the show site was non existent, and I think I have trench foot!
tree must have ceased to produce a viable crop
Hello Brother Mike, just saw the pictures of your display table. I was shocked and amazed. Just a rough guess would put the number of pens between 300 and 400. AND, a small fortune invested just in the plastic pen holders. Where in the world did you find those beautiful posters above the display table, or did you design them yourself? I would almost come to England just to see it all in person and talk pens. But alas, at 85 I have to give up the dreams. Besides, my fountain pen would leak in my pocket on a plane.
I did wave at England however when our troop ship came down the channel in March 1954. The US Army Engineer Battalion I was in had spent a year in France assigned to the US Air Force building NATO air bases there.