Lillian Yoshimoto keeps her fountain pens in a glass-fronted oak cabinet that she bought at a Salvation Army warehouse in southeast Portland in 1986 for nineteen dollars. The cabinet has eight shelves. She has fitted each shelf with a custom pen tray made by a Eugene woodworker named Robert Mendenhall.
The cabinet is in her dining room, between the back window and the door to the kitchen. She is in the room three or four times a day. She rotates the pens in the trays about once a season so that no single pen sits at the back forever.
The collection numbers 814 pens. About two-thirds of them are American, the rest divided between English, German, Italian, and Japanese makers. The oldest pen is an 1888 hard-rubber Waterman with a fourteen-karat nib. The newest is a 1965 Pelikan 400NN.
Yoshimoto does not collect anything made after 1965. She drew the line in 1992 after reading a long article in the Pen Collectors of America Newsletter on what she calls the moment fountain pens became nostalgic about themselves.
After about that year, she said, the makers were no longer building pens. They were building pens that look like pens. That is a different thing to collect.
She began collecting in 1984, when she inherited her father's Parker 51 on his death. The pen, a black 1948 model with a Lustraloy cap, is the first pen in the cabinet. It is still in her regular rotation.
By 1990 she had thirty pens. By 2000 she had two hundred. She passed five hundred in 2011 and has slowed her acquisition rate deliberately since.
The collection's strongest area is American flexible-nib pens of the 1920s. Yoshimoto has 247 Waterman flex-nib pens, 142 Parker Duofolds of the 1920s in every standard color, and a complete run of the Wahl-Eversharp Gold Seal Personal Point series from 1929 to 1932.
She also has 58 Japanese maki-e lacquered pens by Namiki and Pilot from the 1930s. The Namiki group is the most fragile in the collection. She keeps it on the top shelf, behind a small interior curtain of cream linen that protects the lacquer from direct light.
Yoshimoto uses about fifteen pens in active rotation. She writes in a hardcover notebook every morning for thirty minutes, and she does household correspondence in pen and ink three or four times a week.
The pens in rotation are inked. She refills them from a glass inkwell of Diamine Onyx Black ink that she has been using since 2003. She keeps a notebook of which pen has been inked for how long, and she flushes any pen that has not been written with for thirty days.
Ink dries, she said. A pen with dried ink is harder to bring back than a pen that was never inked. The collection is alive only if the pens are.
The remaining seven hundred and ninety-nine pens are kept dry. They are stored nib-up, in their trays, with no caps cross-threaded. Yoshimoto inspects each pen once a year and checks the sac, the nib alignment, and the cap fit.
She does her own restoration. She learned over the course of about eight years from a retired Portland pen repairman named Stanley Glück, who took her on as an informal student in 1996 and continued teaching her until his death in 2004.
She replaces sacs with latex of the correct diameter. She straightens bent nibs on a brass nib block. She does not regrind nibs. She does not replate. She does not repaint.
Her catalogue is kept on three-by-five index cards in a wooden file Glück gave her in 1999. There is one card per pen. The card records the maker, model, year, source, price, condition at acquisition, and any restoration work.
She also keeps a separate file of correspondence with other collectors. There are about three hundred and twenty letters in it, the earliest from 1987, the most recent from a Japanese collector in Okayama in March 2026.
Yoshimoto is sixty-nine. She worked for thirty-four years as a research librarian at the Oregon Historical Society. She retired in 2018 and now spends most weekday mornings on the pens.
She has not made formal arrangements for the disposition of the collection. She has two daughters, both of whom write with pens, neither of whom collects. She is considering a gift to the Pen Collectors of America in trust, but she has not committed.
I want the working pens to be used, she said. I do not want them in a display case where no one ever puts a nib to paper. That would be a kind of small death for each pen.
On the day of the visit, she was writing a letter to a collector in Glasgow with a Parker Vacumatic in golden pearl, filled three days earlier with the Diamine ink. She was on the fourth page. She said she would post the letter in the afternoon.