After 93 years, Daly's Pen Shop will close its doors for good

WAUWATOSA - Daly’s Pen Shop is something of a museum.

It has custom-made cabinets dating to the 1920s; walls lined with old advertisements and photos; displays of vintage inks; and shelves stocked with pens that, with their gold nibs and gleaming barrels, could double as fashion accessories.

It has Sinatra, Mel Tormé and Ray Charles on the stereo.

What it doesn’t have is customers. Last Wednesday, there were three — all day.

“I’m just getting out of this before I’m forced out,” owner Brad Bodart said, explaining why, after 93 years, Daly’s will close its doors for good. “It’s tough to make a living now selling pens over the counter.”

RELATED:After 97 years, Black Bear Bottling files for receivership

For decades, Daly’s was part of a thriving retail scene in downtown Milwaukee, a fixture in the Plankinton Building in the heart of the city.  Then it was a lonely holdout in what had become a largely vacant wing of the Grand Avenue shopping center.

A stint at 7632 W. Burleigh St. followed, and for the last year and a half, Daly’s has occupied space near a George Webb restaurant in a little strip mall at N. 122nd St. and W. North Ave. Mostly, Bodart is there alone. He doesn’t have employees anymore.

He posted a sign last week announcing his store-closing sale. He expects to finally lock up sometime in the next couple of months.

“Walk-in business in general has declined every single month for the last three, four years,” Bodart, 51, said. “And now it’s just to the point where I can’t stay here.”

Daly’s situation is hardly unique. The number of pen shops in the U.S. has declined significantly in the last 20 years, in part as purchases have moved online, said Susan Bowen, associate publisher of Pen World, a magazine for enthusiasts.

There are exceptions. Anderson Pens opened not quite four years ago in Appleton and is “a very strong retailer,” Bowen said.

But earlier this year a Denver-based chain, Paradise Pen Co., closed its dozen or so stores. Even Manhattan now has just one high-end pen shop.

“There were 14 stores in New York,” said Terry Wiederlight, owner of the lone survivor, 71-year-old Fountain Pen Hospital. “We’re the only one left.”

The culprit, in Wiederlight’s eyes, is technology.

“Kids don’t write anymore,” he said. “They’re texting, texting, texting, texting. We survive because we made a lot of changes. You have to change with the times.”

Which is what Bodart is doing. While the market may not support the number of stores it once did, interest in fine-writing instruments remains. On Friday, eBay carried nearly 75,000 listings for fountain pens, including 6,100 auctions.

Daly’s was holding 13 of those auctions, and offering for sale dozens of ball point and rollerball pens as well.

This is where the money is. For the last four years or so, Bodart’s business increasingly has consisted of buying pens and selling them online.

With the closing of the physical store, he’ll be able to devote virtually all his time to what has become a booming little enterprise. Sales on Daly’s eBay site, Bodart said, are 40 times greater than those at the store.

Some sellers find Daly’s website and contact Bodart. Others bring their pens to him personally, during his visits to various cities in Wisconsin and northern Illinois.

He rents a meeting room in a hotel, advertises in the local newspaper that he will be there on a Monday or Tuesday to buy pens, and typically attracts 10 to 20 potential sellers a day.

“I buy about a thousand pens a month,” he said.

Two months ago in Beloit he found three rare prototype Parker pens — for more than a century Parker Pen was based in nearby Janesville — that he later sold for $4,000.

Another coup was finding a Parker “Duofold” so unusual that Pen World published a four-page article about it. Bodart sold the pen to a collector in Chile.

Most of his sales are within the U.S. But South Korea is a big market. So is China.

“China and South Korea and the Asian countries love fountain pens,” Bodart said. “I probably send out every month 75 to a hundred packages to China. They have a real fetish for pens.”

On average, Bodart said, he pays probably 40% of what he ends up selling pens for — enough to cover business expenses and yield a decent profit.

“I get repeat customers,” he said. “I pay really fair.”

Business has been good enough that he’s planning to branch into Iowa and Minnesota, too, using the same approach.

He’s sad about the demise of the brick-and-mortar store — he choked up a bit when speaking of it — but is eager to continue to scour the upper Midwest for pens and sell them online under the Daly’s name.

“I am absolutely making a living with the traveling around and doing what I’m doing,” Bodart said. “Unfortunately, the store is the dead weight … and that’s where we had to draw the line.”