Whispers in Hindsight
- sandylichauco
- Aug 10
- 14 min read
Four months of writing, curating, designing, networking, discussing, arguing, laughing — and somewhere in there, actually having fun. Now it's over. “The Whispers of the Nib: The Pens That Wrote Our History” officially opened and closed on a Saturday that refused to stop raining. Right up until the program started, we didn't know whether anyone would brave the traffic and the floods to show up. Somehow, it worked out. It usually does.
A quick admission: I run this blog and was also one of the organizers of the exhibit. I hesitated to write about this while it was all happening — it felt wrong to use this space to talk something up when I stood to gain if you showed up because of it. I held off. This is the story, told only now that the exhibit is over.
Which is fitting, because that's exactly how the whole thing started, as a simple idea between one of the Philippines’ most accomplished collectors and me. His name is Melvin (remember the spoons: https://www.nineteenkopongkopong.com/post/the-enigma-of-the-silver-spoon-a-tale-of-passion-provenance-and-plastic-bins), and I can finally say it out loud. It felt like a long shot — a room full of pens, and who exactly would care? I didn't think people would believe in it, let alone show up. But the concept was simple: an exhibit about where pens came from, and not what they cost. We even had a working title, “When Vintage West Meets Modern East,” pairing what I collect — vintage pens from the USA, UK, and Germany — with the modern Eastern pens Melvin had spent months gathering.
That title didn't survive contact with the exhibit. Nothing about this project ever did. “When Vintage West Meets Modern East” gave way to “Whispers of the Nib,” borne of something simpler: every pen in the room had a story, whispering itself to whoever leaned in close enough
to listen. Then the Library gave it its final shape — Ortigas wanted a title that tied everything together under one word -- "history," fitting for an institution whose whole job is to keep it. So it became “Whispers of the Nib: The Pens That Wrote Our History.” We didn't know it yet, but that habit of letting things grow and shift on their own would define everything else about this exhibit. One small, slightly ridiculous upside to all that title-shuffling: I still have the prototype quarter-zip made for the exhibit, printed with the original title. A true 1:1, a relic of a name that exists nowhere else on earth. Probably headed to auction soon.
Here's a secret I can finally tell: somewhere in the middle of all this, I wanted to back out. I was going through a lot of noise; it wasn't just personal — it was professional, too, layered on top of a crisis I was dealing with then. But when the meeting with the Library came, and the dates were set, that was that. Once the dates are set, you can't back out. You can't disappoint. You can't give up. So we kept going — and, in a strange way, the exhibit itself became the perfect distraction from all that noise.
And then, as if the universe had been waiting for us to commit, things came alive. More senior collectors joined — legends, really — and their presence alone gave the project the credibility it lacked before, along with real hope that people might actually come and listen. In fact, these two pitched some of the exhibit's best ideas: an Ephemera table featuring handwriting from the distant past, including a sample from Dr. Jose Rizal himself, paired with the very pen he likely used; a table of iconic ink bottles, because — let's be honest — none of these pens would have worked without something to fill them, and some of those bottles carried more history than the pens they served; and vintage ads scattered around the exhibit, alongside two typewriters from an earlier era, ghosts to some visitors, old friends to us. All of it gave the exhibit the oomph it needed.
Then our event coordinator joined — a fighter, plain and simple, pushing things forward even as she wrestled with challenges of her own on a separate event. We moved our opening around hers: first two weeks, then three, safer. We also built the schedule around the due date of Melvin's wife, so he wouldn't be pulled away mid-talk to the hospital — something he'd have refused anyway, always happier behind the scenes than in front of a camera.
Then came a collector I deeply respect for his sheer command of the subject, there whenever we needed opinions or ideas. And finally, every project like this needs a lawyer to cross the T's and dot the I's. Ours went further, checking and rechecking every write-up for grammar. Except one thing slipped past her — past all of us, really — glaring, staring right at me all night. The clue: it wasn't just staring; it was hanging. I'll let you sit with that one. She stayed involved well after the event closed, too, weighing in on the legal side of handwriting and the idea that your handwriting really is you.
As the cast filled out, the week-by-week work of laying out the tables began: first week, then the second, then the slow realization that we'd never actually be “done.” An exhibit like this has to stay organic — collectors simply cannot help adding to what they've gathered, and every new
piece arrives with a story worth telling. That streak, in hindsight, was never really new. It was there from the start, in a title that reshaped itself twice and in tables that kept multiplying long after the first ones were set: an Ephemera corner here, a shelf of ink bottles there, ads and typewriters that simply showed up because someone thought they belonged. The exhibit was organic before it even had a name. So Parker Demonstrators joined after an eBay win. A run of 1970s Montblancs went in too — no roll call of fountain pens is complete without the “Colgate” of the category. And this week, an Underwood “Noiseless” manual typewriter will be joining the tables, a fitting addition to an exhibit about whispers.
Walk through the room and here's roughly what greeted you. The main tables carried the exhibit's founding idea, still intact under all that later addition: vintage American, British, and German pens on one side, modern Japanese and other Eastern makers on the other, West and East laid out exactly as it was first imagined. Beside them sat the Ephemera table — handwriting spanning generations, Rizal's among them, paired with the pen he likely used to write it. A few steps down, the ink bottles: some purely decorative, some carrying more history in their glass than most of the pens around them. Vintage ads leaned against the walls nearby, and two typewriters stood like quiet elder statesmen at the edges of it all. And toward the back, the auction table — fourteen pieces, waiting for their evening under the gavel. Here’s how they all look:
Then came the real question: what's next? We had an exhibit, a library in need of additional funding, and a team with a plan. Making that plan work was the hard part — and that's when the doubts crept, telling me it was a bad idea and that no one would come. But another voice, though quieter, was more persistent: the voice from Kevin Costner’s movie, A Field of Dreams. “If you build it, they will come” (slightly revised to fit our requirements). In the end, that voice outlasted the others.
And then, almost as an afterthought, came one more last-minute addition: food. It wasn't part of any grand plan, just something we decided we needed days before opening. It turned out to be one of the quiet hits of the night, giving people one more reason to linger at the tables.
The last piece was the auction. We believed in it fiercely, and a number of collectors generously let go of pieces they treasured. The doubts didn't quit — "no one will bid," "no one will show up" — but we believed anyway. Again, and again, and again.
From the auction block
Fourteen pieces went under the gavel that rainy Saturday afternoon, every peso going straight to the Library. All of them worth knowing:
Honey Noire — a hand-turned Conway Stewart ebonite pen by Pens by Cal, its near-black barrel fractured with honey, amber, and caramel streaks, from a maker whose earlier models pioneered piston-fill pens in the Philippines. Starting bid: ₱5,000.
Beautiful Chaos, Bottled — a pistachio green ebonite pen from Punla Pens’ Laro collection, made entirely in the Philippines. Starting bid: ₱4,000.
What the Horn Remembers — a carabao horn fountain pen from Banwa Pens, carved from an increasingly rare material and set in a hand-woven abaca-and-rattan case. Starting bid: ₱10,000.
A Seal, Not a Signature — a lacquered presentation box bearing the enamel Seal of the President of the Philippines, holding a gold-plated Jinhao 163, said to have once been a government gift. Starting bid: ₱2,000.
Two Cherry Blossoms, One Whisper Apart — a pen rest carved from genuine cherry blossom wood, forming an unplanned echo with the exhibit’s own Balayong (Palawan Cherry) pen. Starting bid: ₱1,000.
A Kimono’s Quiet Keeping — a Taccia pen case in kimono-pattern brocade, built to protect delicate hand-lacquered Urushi pens. Starting bid: ₱3,000.
A Rarity That Holds Rarity — a pen stand carved from a single uncut slice of Amboyna burl wood, sourced from trees fifty to a hundred years old. Starting bid: ₱5,000.
Writes Dry With Wet Ink — a 1947 bottle of Parker Superchrome Permanent Red Ink, engineered for the Parker 51’s hooded nib, valued today as history rather than usable ink. Starting bid: ₱2,000.
A Small Green Witness — a 1920s–30s glass ink bottle from Ogura’s Bonton Ink, sold in prewar Manila’s Osaka Bazar, a surviving trace of the city’s Japanese-Filipino trading community. Starting bid: ₱3,000.
A Pen That Never Wrote — a 1934 Parker Vacumatic Lockdown Junior in laminated pearl celluloid, showing almost no wear after 92 years. Starting bid: ₱5,000.
A Shout Rendered in Yellow — a 1920s–30s Eagle Pencil Co. fountain pen in bold Mandarin Yellow with a genuine 14K gold nib. Starting bid: ₱7,000.
The Desk That Kept Listening — a circa-1932 Art Deco Parker desk set donated by novelist Butch Dalisay, who kept it on his own desk before offering it up. Starting bid: ₱3,000.
The Sixteen-Petal Whisper — a Sailor fountain pen bearing the Imperial Kikumon crest, commemorating Takayuki Tsubouchi’s Blue Ribbon Medal, housed in a paulownia wood box. Starting bid: ₱14,000.
Finding Home — a Sailor fountain pen hand-painted by Filipino artist Erikson Arcilla, depicting two birds returning home to a weathered mailbox at the end of autumn. Starting bid: ₱15,000.
This was the welcome speech I'd planned to read for the exhibit. In the end, I ad-libbed the whole thing. But the parts that matter — the takeaways and the "thank yous" — need to be said exactly as they were meant to be said.
"So here goes, for the takeaways: Three small lessons, learned whether I was ready for them or not — and honestly, they need to be said out loud in this exhibit, in front of all of you in this room.
So here they are. My three takeaways from helping build all of this. The first: a good story never gets old. The second: our handwriting was once our original selfie. And the third, the one that matters most: this exhibit belongs to the community. Let me walk you through each one.
A good story never gets old
We're pen people, which means, deep down, we're story people. Give us an object with a past, and we fall for it every time. Every pen in this room has one. Some have survived decades. Some outlasted owners who never quite knew what they had. One or two, I'd bet, survived a relative who almost sold them at a garage sale for twenty pesos, no questions asked. There's a red Parker Duofold they genuinely don't make anymore — not the paint, not the plastic, not the era it came from. There's a Vacumatic built on a 1933 patent, designed by a man who apparently believed even a pen clip deserved his signature. There's a pen from Japan, lacquered by hand so many times that the wood barely remembers it was wood. And there's another from Japan, made by a celebrated maki-e artist — not for a client, not for a collector, but for himself, inspired by the birth of his own son. Imagine carrying that in your pocket. A father's joy, sealed in lacquer.
Plus, somewhere in this exhibit sits a silver quill with a direct line to Jose Rizal. The most important pen in this room was never about the price tag. It's about what it wrote and who was reading it when it did. So in this exhibit, we're not really the hosts. We're just the lucky ones standing in the room as these stories finally get to be told out loud.
Handwriting was our original selfie
Now, the second thing. And this one is personal, so please indulge me: My late mother wrote for the Philippine Star. For years, I was her ghost typist. Every Thursday night, without fail, she'd sit down with a yellow pad and fill six pages with her handwriting so they could be submitted by Sunday evening and printed that week. I'd type them up after her, and somewhere along the way, I learned that handwriting better than I knew my own. I knew the way her letters leaned when she was in a hurry. I knew the way certain words were underlined twice when she really, truly meant them. That handwriting was her trademark — nobody else could have written those pages the way she did, because nobody else was her.
That's what we hope this part of the exhibit does for you. We want to bring you back, even for a moment, to a time when your handwriting was your selfie. Before filters. Before fonts. Before autocorrect smoothed everything into looking like everyone else's.
Butch said it best: before, “your handwriting was you.” — unedited, unfiltered, impossible to fake. It simply was you, in ink, exactly as you were that day.
One more thing to add to this takeaway — this one came to me just as I was writing this blog, courtesy of the lawyer in our cast of characters: "Your handwriting is your personal signature, and when used for a holographic will, it can stand on its own without notarization. It's your handwriting. It's you. It's indelibly you." Thank you, Attorney, for this.
This exhibit belongs to the community
And finally, the third thing — the one I want you all to sit with for a moment: None of this happens without all of you. Every single piece on these tables is here because a collector trusted a stranger with something they love for months, with no guarantees, just the faith that it would come home the way it left. That is not a small ask. That deserves real applause, so let's give it to them right now.
This isn't a finished exhibit, either. It's a growing one. It gets a little bigger, a little richer, every time someone in this community walks through that door with another piece, another story, another reason to keep these tables full. So if anyone's still asking who really deserves the credit in this exhibit — it's not us up here. It's all of you.
And while I have you, there are a few people I need to name and thank directly because this exhibit simply would not exist without their support.
First of all, to John, to Betty, and to every member of their staff here at the Library — thank you. You generously gave us your time, even though you had every reason to be busy with a hundred other things. You opened your beautiful display tables to a room full of strangers' pens and trusted us to fill them well. And these tables are perfect — genuinely — the kind of setting that makes even a simple Bic Cristal look like it belongs in a museum. For the next few months, this library gets to hold something a little unusual within its walls. Thank you for saying yes to that.
To Yen — for the quiet, constant support most of you will never see. She lent us her legal and journalistic expertise to make sure that when the auction gavel comes down later, we're doing it right, cleanly, and above board. But it wasn't just the law. She helped me cross my T's and dot my I's more times than I can count, and never once made us feel small for needing it. That kind of care, working away in the background, is easy to take for granted. We don't.
To Imma — for a fighting spirit that, even through a difficult month, never once wavered and ensured we moved the needle each day. Every sign you're reading in these tables, every story printed in these tables, is her hand, her eye, her work. Without it, frankly, none of these pens would have had a voice.
To Melvin — the senior among all of us when it comes to exhibits, yet the quietest. He's been curating exhibits since before I even knew what the word meant, and he carries that experience with a humility I can only hope to learn someday. To be honest, the very idea for this exhibit traces back to him — to a simple belief he's held for years that the love of things and collectibles shouldn't belong only to those who can afford the most expensive one in the room, but to anyone willing to lean in and listen to the story. Everything you see here grew from that one generous idea. Melvin, thank you.
To Raph, who quietly stayed in the background, answering some of my questions about pens and making suggestions. Your presence was deeply missed.
To Toto — a man I've come to think of as an older brother, who walked with us from a bare, empty hall into the room that now holds this exhibit and brought more stories along the way than any of us could have imagined. This exhibit simply wouldn't be what it is without his help and experience. Toto, you're the man.
And, of course — to our Jedi Master, Butch Dalisay. Our North Star. The one we all gather around to hear his stories and, through him, learn to love these vintage pens as he does. There's a line Chadwick Boseman once said—“there's no Black Panther without Denzel Washington.” He said it years ago, onstage at a tribute honoring Denzel (search it on YouTube), long before any of us in this room knew we'd need to borrow it. I'll borrow that line today because it's simply true: there is no Whispers of the Nib without Butch Dalisay."
After the rain, the floods, the traffic, the mood changes, and then more rain — here's how it ended
Every lot found a bidder that night. All fourteen pens, ink bottles, and desk companions now belong to someone new. Lot 13, The Sixteen-Petal Whisper, closed at ₱40,000 — nearly triple its ₱14,000 opening. Lot 3, What the Horn Remembers, wasn't far behind at ₱30,000, exactly triple its opening. Lot 4, A Seal, Not a Signature, saw the largest relative jump, from ₱2,000 to ₱13,000 — six and a half times its opening. And Lot 10, A Pen That Never Wrote, sold for ₱21,000, more than four times its opening.
When the dust settled, the room had raised ₱220,000 — every peso going directly to the Ortigas Library Foundation to keep its shelves open, its programs running, and its doors welcoming whoever walks through them next.
Here's where every lot landed:
● Honey Noire — ₱16,000
● Beautiful Chaos, Bottled — ₱13,000
● What the Horn Remembers — ₱30,000
● A Seal, Not a Signature — ₱13,000
● Two Cherry Blossoms, One Whisper Apart — ₱5,000
● A Kimono’s Quiet Keeping — ₱6,000
● A Rarity That Holds Rarity — ₱7,000
● Writes Dry With Wet Ink — ₱4,000
● A Small Green Witness — ₱9,000
● A Pen That Never Wrote — ₱21,000
● A Shout Rendered in Yellow — ₱13,000
● The Desk That Kept Listening — ₱13,000
● The Sixteen-Petal Whisper — ₱40,000
● Finding Home — ₱30,000
I used to keep repeating the Costner line to myself, back when this was still an idea Melvin and I were almost embarrassed to say out loud. A room full of pens? Who's going to care? But looking back at a rainy Saturday that filled up anyway, at fourteen lots that all found bidders, at collectors who let go of prized pieces on faith, at a lawyer who cared enough to fix our grammar, at an event coordinator who pushed through her own hard month for ours — the old line isn't quite complete. It was never just about building it.
If you build it with love, they will come — and they will bring more love with them than you gave away.
That's the real culmination of Whispers of the Nib. Not the ₱220,000, not the exhibit tables, not even the fourteen pens that found new homes. It's the proof that a room built with love doesn't stay quiet for long, rain or no rain.
Thank you — to everyone who lent a pen, wrote a sign, corrected our grammar, opened a library, told a story, placed a bid, or simply walked through the door on a very rainy Saturday and leaned in close enough to hear. This exhibit was never really ours. It was always yours.
But this isn't quite the last page, either. We're already talking, us organizers, about putting together a book — or at least a booklet — a proper souvenir holding everything this exhibit gathered: the pens, the stories, the handwriting, the ink, all of it. It'll be sold too, once it exists, proceeds going right back to the Library, same as the auction did. Not just so it's remembered, but so the story, and the whisper, keep going long after these tables have been packed away.
Until the next whisper.
Exhibit Opening Photos:
Thank you to Mr. Francis Lumahan for all the photos.
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