The Birmingham Pen Trade Heritage Association is a registered charity, located in the independent museum known as The Pen Museum in Birmingham, England. The charity is based within the museum, and the museum is run entirely by volunteers. The charity began in 1996 as an informal gathering of people with an interest in pen history within Birmingham, and became a registered charity in 1997.
Most of the volunteers at The Pen Museum are also members of the Birmingham Pen Trade Heritage Association. The charity’s members also include those who have visited or regularly visit the museum, those with an interest in history, pen collectors and those who worked in the trade.
Details of Membership scheme (part of the museum’s form of upkeep with running costs based entirely on donations) can be obtained by contacting or visiting the museum in the first instance.
Famous quotes containing the words pen, trade, heritage and/or association:
“Go on then in doing with your pen what in other times was done with the sword; shew that reformation is more practicable by operating on the mind than on the body of man.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“Teaching your child a trade is better than giving him a thousand ounces of gold.”
—Chinese proverb.
“Flowers ... that are so pathetic in their beauty, frail as the clouds, and in their colouring as gorgeous as the heavens, had through thousands of years been the heritage of children—honoured as the jewellery of God only by them—when suddenly the voice of Christianity, counter-signing the voice of infancy, raised them to a grandeur transcending the Hebrew throne, although founded by God himself, and pronounced Solomon in all his glory not to be arrayed like one of these.”
—Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859)
“It is not merely the likeness which is precious ... but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing ... the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever! It is the very sanctification of portraits I think—and it is not at all monstrous in me to say ... that I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest Artist’s work ever produced.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)