I started my life with fountain pens 30 years ago and began to collect them, what I would call, by incident. My brother in law, Eric Steen Pedersen, who unfortunately and unexpectedly died in 2011, gave me a Montblanc 256 he had found. I tried to stay cool using it on my job, though it leaked ink because of a crack - and I got my first "ink fingers" as an adult. This was his way to try to awake my interest and he told me more than once, that I should start to look for old fountain pens in the region where I lived. I couldn't see why. I had known him since 1971 when he started seeing my older sister and I found out that he collected old brass weights, which I, as an 11-year-old boy, found very weird. In the years to follow, Eric started collecting a lot of different things, going to flea markets and antic stores and I saw it as a part of him - the weird guy side :-) But a little of his passion in Danish lamp & furniture design and quality watches, he managed to pass on to me. One day in 1991 he phoned me, as he had done several times, to get me started finding pens. During the talk he told me, that he just had sold his collection of beer openers for quite a sum of money and I remember thinking "OKAY!" that was a lot of money  - maybe I should try and look for pens. I looked up "Antic stores" in the phone book (for youngsters: it's a huge book we used in the old days to look up other peoples phone numbers) and the first store I visited, had some pens. I think it was 5 fountain pens and I didn't have a clue of what the makes where. It turned out, that one of the pens was a Montblanc 122PL, but without the star. Eric had met Poul Lund and started attending pen shows in Germany. He brought my 122PL and sold it for several times the price I bought the 5 pens for. But the best was, that he bought me a legendary book at the pen show - Andreas Lambrou's "Fountain Pens - Vintage and Modern". I read it the from the beginning and back again, learning all about the fountain pen makes and the history combining with the exciting catalogues from the pen auctions at Bonhams, I learned a lot about pens. My new knowledge helped me a lot when I searched for pens. My plan was to buy pens and make a little money at the side, but I had never imagined that I ever could be a collector, never ever. Eric persuaded me to attend my first pen show. It was in Cologne, one of the first (if not the first) arranged by Stephan Wallrafen in the legendary tennis club by the river, and I was really overwhelmed by all the fountain pens and fascinating and very accommodating people from the pen community. The following years I met, in addition to Poul Lund, the Danish collectors Claus Holten and Peter Sommer and the 4 of us had some exciting years at the pen shows in England and Germany. But what finally sparked my interest in collecting, I'll never forget. I have had a lot of pens through my hands and one day, I found an excellent red Montblanc no. 30 and it hit me "you'll never find another one in this condition again - you better put it away for later". From that day on, my number of pens has increased. I do not know, how many I have managed to "pull-in", but I have enough for a couple of years, when I retire, to keep myself busy restoring them.