Gold/Silver Calligraphy Set with Ink and 5 Nibs

Description of the Product

Classic handcrafted goose feather quill pens give you the opportunity to revive the lost art of elegant hand-writing and to surprise a special someone with a private and precious hand-written note or a letter. The set is beautifully packaged, making it an ideal gift for a special occasion such as graduation. The set is an excellent choice for a beginner calligrapher.

• Choose from either silver or gold colored feather
• Real goose feather quill
• Ink bottle with pen holder
• Five extra nibs
• Leaflet of different calligraphy styles and tips
• All pieces inside a nice presentation/gift box
• Hand made in Italy

Story of Calligraphy

The earliest ancestor of the pen was probably the camel or rat hair brushes used by the Chinese in the first millennium BCE. Running parallel to the Chinese advancement of a brush pen around 500–300 BCE was the Egyptian?s employment of a Calamus or Bamboo reed writing implement. The split, frayed, and carved ends of the reeds were used on papyrus reed sheets which could accept fine lines.

In order to save Christianity?s religious doctrines and ideals, monks (most in British monasteries) learned to split and shape the hollow end of moulted goose feathers to copy the earliest manuscripts of western civilization. Between 600–1800 CE quill pens became the principal writing instrument. Thomas Jefferson was said to have bred geese specifically to fill his own vast need for quills. However, quills required constant re-trimming and held enough ink only for a few words at a time.

It was not until 1830 that steelmakers from Birmingham, England developed a technique, still in use today, to produce cheap, long wearing steel pen nibs. By 1850 quills, for the most part, had been replaced by wooden styluses with steel nibs. The nibs continued to be improved upon by tipping them with hard alloys such as iridium, rhodium and osmium in order to last longer.

For practice, draw horizontal parallel lines about 2cm from each other on a piece of paper. Shake the ink bottle before use. The nib, filled with ink from immersion, first has to be tapped lightly in the bottle rim to free it of the excess ink that would immediately stain the paper on first contact with the nib. Before tracing any definite mark, always try a rough draft to verify the right ink quantity and the absence of any foreign body on the point. For a smooth and consistent release of ink from nib to paper, the pen should always be held at a 20–45 degree angle to the paper.