Scriptus 2025

 

 

Life is so busy! How does anyone keep up! We are in November. I’m baffled and overwhelmed and displeased, while also very excited for the joys of the holiday season ahead. We all contain multitudes, although I mostly contain anxiety and existential dread.

 

We were at Scriptus a week ago, and what a blur it was. Scriptus is the annual Toronto Pen Show that takes place at the Toronto Reference Library, which is a beautiful space in the center of the city.

 

The two days before Scriptus, Friday and Saturday, Matthew was in our shop doing nib work, and it’s always fun to freshen up a pen with a tune or a new grind. It’s wonderful to give a pen a second life, or find a pen that was previously so-so now come alive.

 

 

But of course the big culmination of this weekend was Scriptus itself, on the Sunday. It was another busy and wonderful and exhausting and exhilarating day, with many familiar faces and getting to say hello in person for the first time as well.

 

In some ways, we are old hands at this now, with familiar routines and checklists, but in many more ways, it is the familiar panic of timelines looming and crunching towards us rapidly, printing postcards and trying to get things shipped and into the warehouse in time. For us there seems to be a big lead up to it, everyone on the team getting involved in different ways, strategizing the things we’re going to bring based on weight and size and inventory. As the years go by, though, I feel the pressure is lessening, as there are so many other terrific vendors and other tables to browse, and we’re happy to just be one in the throng. Or maybe that’s just the introvert in me.

 

Another early morning, snacks packed, emergency changes of clothes that we’ve never had to use, and likely never will until the year I decide to no longer pack them.

 

 

For the first time, I took the kids across the street to the Yorkville branch of the Toronto Public Library. The Reference Library holds research materials rather than a lot of regular material for borrowing, like kids graphic novels, but just across the street and over a ways is a neighbourhood branch, and I’m not sure why it’s never occurred to me to bring them before. With all the chaos and noise and attention of the day, it’s an excellent and quiet place to reset for a minute.

 

 

The kids love it. It’s a yearly tradition that’s become a surprising favourite for them, the pen show. They love running around the tables, Caleb making his buttons with devoted attention and enthusiasm, eating lunch in secret coves, sneaking around through the stacks, flapping their balloons into each other’s faces, getting in people’s way, getting offered free food and treats from customers, reading their books in places to trip the staff, waking up cranky from naps.

 

I sometimes contemplate how families make traditions, and all the normal traditions normal families have. I look at all these successful tiger moms around me and wonder what I’m doing in life, how come my children have lost their library books, why is Caleb attacking Naomi with 1000 Years of Death and then giggling, why is Junia scared of the toilet flushing, why can I not find anything in the clutter of my desk, of my life.

 

But these are my brightest days! I will take all I can get of it. A golden balloon filled to bursting, ready to fly off into the sky, or perhaps be trapped in the ceiling of the library. A metaphor for life.