I've been thinking about this a lot lately. No pen stores near me, nor pen shows - and w/ the pandemic, I couldn't go to pen shows anyway. I'm not that much interested in vintage pens, so the barriers around that part of the hobby aren't as important to me. I have ordered and returned some pens that didn't work for me, but early on, it wasn't very clear that I could do that - or that the cleaning/restocking fees were too high to justify it. I don't quite remember my rationale for that. I'm selling some pens now on here to recoup costs or fund new purchases, but I'm not making any money.
Cost/money is definitely my biggest barrier. I wrote a half-baked blog post yesterday on how gold nibs are become so unaffordable
https://www.peninvestigations.com/ho...m-on-gold-nibs . There's so many things that I'll never be able to try because prices have gone up - not just on pens but on necessities too, thus shrinking my budge for hobbies. But like you, my biggest barrier is not really knowing what works best for me. It takes a lot of time and money to figure that out, neither of which can be recouped. And yeah, the journey and trying new things is a fun part of the hobby, but it's also just not as tenable for some of us.
I wish that the US had a pensharing program like the one that exists in the UK.
https://www.pensharing.com/ I would willing pay a fee to borrow someone's pen and try it out. I don't know what it would take to get such a program up and running, but, in my opinion, it would help lower a lot of barriers. We would get to try out a wide variety of pens without having to cough up the money to buy it up front. It would help us figure out what works best for us.
One of the main problems I see is that setting it up - and possibly using it - would require already being part of a trusting pen community. How do you protect against someone stealing a valuable pen?
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