Some of these pens are more expensive than the sword

Fountain pens, the things people once wrote with, are getting written with all over again.

That’s a fairly revolutionary thing for fountain pens, which for years were locked up in display cases and tucked into storage. Fountain pens are coming out of the closet. These days, people are putting ink in them and not all of that ink is leaking into their shirt pockets.

It’s the dawn of another golden age, say the hundreds of fountain pen fans who jammed a hotel ballroom in Redwood City for the San Francisco International Pen Show.

“About half the people here are using their fountain pens to write with,” said show organizer Todd Eberspacher. “The collectors call them ‘users.’”

Everyone at a pen show admires the beauty of a fountain pen, even if not everyone seeks to muck the thing up by filling it with ink. Only a few years ago, nearly everyone at the show was a collector.

The ballroom was full of folding tables and the tables were full of metal pens, resin pens, engraved pens, 100-year-old pens. There was every kind of pen except a cheap pen. In all, organizers said, there were tens of thousands of pens worth millions of dollars inside the hall.

The average collectible pen costs well into three figures. Many cost four, and some cost five.

Stephen Mandell, a pen dealer from Miami, had seven Mont Blanc fountain pens in his right shirt pocket and eight Parker fountain pens in his left shirt pocket. He also had several hundred other pens in display cases arrayed in front of him. He wasn’t sure exactly how many pens he had.

“Nobody needs fountain pens,” Mandell said. “What people need is to eat and to sleep. People buy these because they want them. And why not? We’re all going to the same place, eventually. Why not have what you want?”

Few pens had ink in them, partly because a dealer doesn’t put ink in a collectible pen unless the buyer tells you he actually wants ink in the pen, and partly because a dealer doesn’t fly across the country in a pressurized airplane with hundreds of things that often leak inside pressurized airplanes.

Mandell had a pen with a silver snake on it — the famed Parker snake pen of the early 1900s— that he was selling for $20,000. He had a pen set given to Dwight Eisenhower that he was selling for $30,000. So far, nobody was buying. But Friday was only the opening day of the three-day show, and the early crowd seemed to be largely looky-loos.

Pen dealer Hirsch Davis of Rockville, Md., also had a lot of unfilled pens. Davis told a reporter that taking notes with a fountain pen would probably not make his story any better, and the reporter tried it, and Davis was right.

Pen fans say fountain pens are smoother, more elegant and hark to another age. A ballpoint requires pressure. A fountain pen doesn’t. Sure they can make a mess. So what?

“An inky finger is a badge of honor,” said veteran Carmel pen dealer Detlef Bittner.

Most of his customers, Bittner said, are users. A user is bad only when it comes to drugs and relationships, not pens. Bittner did say fountain pens are “habit forming,” and he had a $400 black one and a $900 yellow one that were just the things to get hooked on.

“Your thoughts will connect so much better to the paper,” Bittner said.

Nobody at the show knew exactly why fountain pen users are on the increase. Maybe, some said, it’s a backlash from the fast digital world to the slower world of five digits and a wrist. Maybe everything old is new again, especially to a young person with dough. Maybe Grandpa was onto something.

The other thing pen fanatics do at a pen show is check out ink. This is no small thing. Ink “testing stations” were scattered around the hall. There were no fewer than 780 different inks to try. Only a couple of them were “blue.” The rest had names like “vintage bordeaux” and “imperial purple” and “ancient copper” and “peach haze.”

Kaori Ogawa, a professional calligrapher from San Ramon, said she intended to try all 780. She scribbled samples in a notebook. The decisions would be made later, in private.

Kristine Phelan of Vallejo said she “wanted to like green ink,” but so far, she didn’t.

She said she owns 50 inks and 150 pens and needs more, badly.

“Am I more profound when I write with a fountain pen?” Phelan asked herself. “No. It’s still drivel.”

Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SteveRubeSF