Fountain Pen Esoterica: the world of pen nibs

Photo by Rose Miller on Unsplash

NOTE: This is not an encyclopedia entry, so I can't list EVERY single nib available. 

One of the more interesting aspects of fountain pen collecting is the wide nib variation available, and the existence of custom nibs, so you can truly customize the writing experience. 

What is a Nib?

To put it plainly, the nib is how the ink, stored in your fountain pen's reservoir, gets down to the paper via the feed. It's the metal bit. 

Most bits are exposed, but there are also integrated nibs (built into the barrel), recessed nibs, and even retractable nibs (Pilot's Vanishing Point is the most famous). 

Some nibs are integrated into the feed, creating nib units, so you must replace them together. While other pens allow you to mix and match different nibs and feeds, as long as they fit together back into the barrel. The feed itself can be made of plastic or ebonite, which is a type of rubber. 

Then we come to nib "sizes", "materials", and "tips" or "grinds". 

Nib Sizes

The first fountain pens were hand-made, and only when industrial age came along that nibs are mass produced, and became standardized. However, each penmaker has their own designation for certain sizes, depending on the pen barrel size they offer. Bock nibs, for example, have a single digit number, like #6 nib, while JoWo nibs, have a 3 digit number.  

A single penmaker can offer nibs in multiple sizes. Sailor, for example, offers 3 different nib sizes, one per product line, each of different material and tip design availability. 

Generally speaking, the larger the nib, the more "flexible" it would be (see next section on material), and the more ink it can deliver, resulting in "wetter" and smoother writing experience. However, the material used will also matter. 

Nib Materials  

The nibs can be made of different materials. The earliest inks are corrosive, which means you can't use hard metals like steel. Instead, gold-laminated or gold-plated metals all the way up to gold alloys are used for their anti-corrosive properties, and that drives up costs. To increase hardness in the softer nibs, the tips of nibs are often made of iridium. But the high cost of iridium lead to it being replaced with cheaper metals since the 1950s. A common replacement is Rhodium. However, some pen makers still make iridium tipped pen nibs as a part of their premium line (with corresponding high prices). 

NOTE: the color of the nib does NOT indicate the material of the nib. Nibs can plated with other metals to present as silver/steel, gold or even black. Some tips are two-toned. 

The nib material affects the amount the nib tip flexes, which can be either a good or bad thing depending on your writing style. A rigid nib means your writing will exhibit the same width no matter which direction you write, while a flexible tip (or just "flex nib") means your writing will appear to be more ornate, more resemble older style dip pen output or calligraphic output, as because you can vary the line width by varying the pressure you exert on the tip, which then affects the amount of ink transferred to the paper. But exerting too much force on the can damage the tip. 

NOTE: An "ideal" fountain pen should require ZERO effort to write... as you simply move the pen, the tip barely touching the paper, ink flow smoothly, and line was created effortlessly, no matter which way your pen stroke goes.

Nib Tip Designs

The nib tip design itself, the part that actually touches the paper, affects the final delivery of the ink, and thus have great effect on the final output. The "shape" of the contact patch (where tip touches the paper) affects the line being drawn, in both size and shape. And one can further change the contact patch by either changing the angle the pen is held, or use a non-round tip which will produce output that differ depending on the direction of motion. And this lead to a whole range of tip designs for different purposes. 

If you want to see the output of these nib tips, go to GouletPens.s "Nib Nook" which contains sample output from most of the pens they've ever sold, all tips, and all nib materials, and put several pens side by side for comparison. 

The tip designs are sometimes called nib grinds, as it is possible for "nibsmiths" to modify an existing tip into a custom grind (which we will discuss next section "Custom Nibs"). 

Generally speaking, the finer the tip, the less ink it delivers, and therefore the "drier" it will feel. Conversely, the wider the tip, the more ink it uses, and the smoother and wetter it feels.  

Most tips you see and buy nowadays are round, and the most popular sizes of the round tips are named EF (extra fine), F (fine), M (medium), and B (bold or broad).  But there is no standard definition of such. Generally speaking, a Japanese pen would have thinner lines than their their European counterparts, even if they have the same tip size label (F, for example), due to Japanese emphasis on smaller tighter and more complex characters, and generally Chinese pens lean the same way. Also keep in mind that the exact width of the line drawn will depend on the ink and paper combination as well. 

Kaweco offers a "double broad", or "BB", which obviously, is even broader than broad, and relatively rare. Pilot has a "coarse" (C) nib which is roughly equivalent to double broad. 

A somewhat less common tip design is called "stub", sometimes "italic". This tip is not round at the bottom, but it's actually flat, or more accurately, a rounded rectangle. This generally results it writing fat vertical lines, but thin horizontal lines, and may be available in multiple sizes, and sold as "calligraphic fountain pens", due to its ability to write a Gothic type script. They are often available in 1.0 or 1.1mm, 1.5mm, some may go as far as 1.9 / 2.0 mm.  If you add a slant to the stub/italic tip, you turn the tip into an "oblique" tip. Lamy's "left-handed" (LH) nib is considered an oblique nib, making it one of the few "factory" oblique nib available.  

Lamy Cursive / Architect nib
photo courtesy of Jetpens

An even less common nib is the "architect nib", also known as "Arab/Hebrew nib" due to it often used to write the cursive required in those languages. Very interestingly, Lamy calls their version the "cursive" nib, also nicknamed the "Hanzi" nib because it's labelled with the CJK character 漢 implying that it's better for Asian writing, I guess? FWIW, architect nibs are really named after the blocky print style architects often use. And even these come in variations, as some are curved, so it's more forgiving, while others are optimized for a single holding angle and going off it means the pen will no longer write properly.  

Another rare nib is the "fude nib", as it looks like a nib with a upward bent tip at the very end, as if it's broken. But it's that way because it can vary the line width DEPENDING ON the angle it's held at. Hold it steeper, and it will produce a thinner line, while holding it flatter to the paper, and and you get broad strokes. It is meant to emulate a Japanese brush pen. There are Chinese "art pens" that are very cheap with this nib.  

Lamy has a special "beginner nib" called the "A" nib that's VERY round and spherical, and very easy to write with on their beginner fountain pens, the Lamy ABC series, designed for children, but it's also available for their Nexx and Pelikano lines as well, all of which fits below the popular Safari line. 

Recently, some new interesting nibs came out of China: the "heartbeat nib", and the "long knife" nib. In most nibs, the dividing line that separates the nib into two tines is a straight line. But the heartbeat nib added two "heartbeats" to that. Long knife nib, aka "long blade nib", is marketed by Hongdian / Kaigelu brand of pens (same group of penmakers as Asvine). It is not clear whether long knife and long blade are the same nib, or are they referring to two different nib families. One Reddit post claims "long blade" is a Chinese take on the architect nib (see above), while "long knife" is a Chinese take on the naginata-togi nib (zoom + architect) which is explained below under custom nibs. 

For those who find EF is not thin enough, Platinum has an UEF nib (ultra-extra fine) that is even thinner. 

Sailor pens of Japan is probably best known for having some exotic tips for their nibs. In addition to the "standard" EF, F, M, and B, they also have MF (medium fine), Z (Zoom), and MS (Music). Thanks to Brian Goulet of GouletPens.com, we know that Music is a special stub nib optimized for steep angles that gives wide variations in line width depending on pressure, and was for a while used to write music notation on music sheets, while Zoom is a tip that varies its line width depending on the angle held, similar to a fude tip, but more versatile and smoother. 

Pilot actually has two more very rare tips called "posting" (P) and "waverly" (W), which are variations on their F (fine) tips. Posting nib has an upturned tip that if you apply slight pressure, you get a VERY thin line, and thus, is used on very thin paper to reduce feathering, while Waverly is a combination of "fude" and "oblique" tips, more suitable for lefties. However, they are only available on the Custom Heritage 912. 

Sailor has an ultra-premium "naginata" line of 23K tips reserved for their top-of-the-line pens and not available separately. They come in the following variations: "naginata togi", "naginata emperor", "naginata fude de mannen", "naginata concord", "naginata cross point", naginata cross music, and naginata cross concord. The most famous and known of the naginata nibs are probably naginata-togi tips, which are sometimes abbreviated as NAG tips, but are also known as kodachi nibs. It is physically composed of multiple LAYER of tips. Kyuseido call their own version of this tip Sankakusen (triangle grind) as naginata togi has been trademarked by Sailor. 

Custom Nibs

Most nibsmiths are subtractive artists. They can take a large nib, and grind away bits, creating a new tip that's smaller. But a few nibsmiths are also additive... and they can ADD bits to the tip to create new tip designs. Nagahara, who worked for Sailor, was the first, and many of the aforementioned naginata cross nibs are in fact, "stacked nibs" (multiple layers of nibs combined into a single nib). 

One of the best contemporary stacked nib nibsmiths is Ralph of Regalia Writing Labs. And his experimental nibs are either insane or ingenious, probably both. He had a custom experimental triple-stack tip (made by welding 3 separate nibs together!), each of which is cut into 3 separate tines, so you see NINE tines in a 3x3 grid... which he called Ninth Symphony. And he has many experimental nibs that are even more elaborate. 

There are other custom stacked nibs that can be used both right side up and upside down, or unique combination of angles that produce very interesting variations.

While these ultra-premium naginata-tipped pens from Sailor can cost you THOUSANDS of dollars each, a relatively simple architect grind can be done in less than an hour at a pen show, and typically cost less than $100, with the pen owner supplying the nib. Needless to say, this will completely void any warranty thereof.  

White-label Nibs and Nib Units

Nib makers are a lot fewer nowadays, and may penmakers simply buy nibs from other makers. Some of the more famous nib makes are BOCK nibs from Peter Bock AG, JoWo, and Schmidt, all of whom are in Germany (and Lamy, of course) , but others that sell nibs and nib units to penmakers includes Kanwrite and Magna Carta of India.   

Indeed, some of the more famous pens you buy may be using a "white-label" nib from these makers. Visconti used almost exclusively BOCK nibs. I read somewhere they try to bring it back in-house with the new gold nibs, but they have to ask Bock for help with quality control. 

Japanese and Chinese penmakers tend to make their own nibs.  

In Conclusion

That covers 99% of stuff you need to know about nibs, well, maybe except how to adjust them if they don't feed properly. I think GouletPens and Goldspot pens have videos on that, and if you're in New York, Fountain Pen Hospital can adjust them for you. Or wait for the annual pen show to come to a city near you. Usually multiple nibsmiths will be attending, so book some time and let them take a look if you want a pen working right. 

If you have questions about fountain pen nibs, comment below and maybe I'll add them to the list.