First month with a pointed nib: pressure, splits and a ruined desk

2024-09-15 · 3 min read

Four weeks ago I bought a straight pen holder, five pointed nibs of two kinds, a bottle of black ink and a pad of practice paper, and sat down to learn copperplate. This is a record of the first month because I suspect I will want to remember how bad it was.

Week one was almost entirely about getting the ink to flow at all. New nibs come with a thin coating that stops them rusting in the box, and until it is removed the ink beads up and refuses to leave. I did not know this. I spent an evening convinced the ink was faulty. The fix is to wipe the nib with a bit of toothpaste on a cloth and rinse it, or to pass it quickly through a flame, and after that the ink sat on the nib properly. The first stroke that actually worked was on the third evening.

Week two was pressure. A pointed nib is two tines that spread apart when you press down on a downstroke, letting more ink through and making the stroke thicker, and come back together on the upstroke to make a hairline. My downstrokes were fine. My upstrokes caught, sputtered, dug into the paper and sprayed tiny dots of ink across the page because I was still pressing. The exercise that helped was a page of nothing but upstrokes, pen held so lightly it felt like it would fall out of my hand. About half a page in, they started to glide.

Week three I split a nib. Too much pressure on a downstroke, and the tines sprung so far apart that they stayed slightly open, and every stroke after that was a double line. I did it again two days later. Two nibs gone in a week, out of five. The remaining three are being treated with more respect, and I have learned that the shade on a downstroke is meant to be a swell, not a stamp.

Week four was the desk. I knocked the ink bottle over on Tuesday evening with my elbow, about 20 ml of black ink across a pine desk, into the grain, under the practice pad, and through to the carpet beneath. The desk is now permanently stained in a shape I have decided to find charming. The ink bottle lives in a heavy ceramic cup on the far side of the desk now, and I write with the bottle on the opposite side from my elbow. The letters are still bad. The habits around them are improving.