The nib primer you have been waiting for!
from the fountain pen of Richard Binder

Fountain pen nibs are made in a bewildering array of sizes and styles. Of course, covering everything about every kind of nib in one article would be bewildering as well—I won’t do that—but there should be enough useful information to help you better decide what nibs might best suit your writing style. In this article, I’ll pretend to be knowledgeable about the following aspects of nibs:

• Nib tip shapes
• Nib sizes and types
• Problems

Nib Tip Shapes

There are three basic nib shapes: Round, stub, and italic. Ball point, oblique, and calligraphy nibs are merely slight variations of the round and italic shapes, and I’ll discuss these variations in their appropriate contexts..

Round Nibs: A round nib is ground and polished to have roughly a circular footprint, so that its line width is fairly uniform no matter what direction the nib is moving across the paper. I say “roughly” because the shape is rarely a true circle. Nibs are small, and hands are big. Grinding a nib to a geometrically perfect shape by hand just isn’t possible, but this is one area in which “close enough” really is close enough. Here is a magnified silhouette representing the basic shape of a round nib, together with a cross illustrating the uniform stroke width that this nib produces:

 

 

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This chart illustrates the concepts of flexible nibs as outlined in the Joy of Flex article, and is designed to be used in conjunction with the article. It consists of a series of lines laid down by flexible nibs, both vintage and modern.

Each block of lines shows how the lines "widen" as pressure is increased on the nib, eventually reaching the stage where the tines lay down a pair of parallel tracks. The type and date of each nib/pen used is written under the relevant block. The diagram on the left shows an annotated sample.

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