A stub nib is not a shortcut to good handwriting
Entry 41 · nibs
I bought a 1.1 mm stub convinced it would make my notes look deliberate. It did, for about a page. Then my hand sped up, the pen rotated a few degrees, and half the downstrokes went thin and scratchy. A stub rewards a steady angle and punishes everything else.
What helped was not practice sheets but slowing the first line of every page. If the first line is written at the pace the nib wants, the rest of the page tends to follow. If I start fast, I never recover.
The nib does not care what you meant to write. It only reports how you held it.
After three weeks I use the stub for headings and dates only. Body text went back to a plain fine nib, and both look better for it.
Cheap paper, honestly tested
Entry 40 · paper
Seven office pads from the supermarket shelf, one wet medium nib, one page each. I wrote the same paragraph, waited a minute and turned the sheet over.
| Pad | Weight | Feathering | Show-through |
|---|
| Yellow legal pad | 56 gsm | heavy | unusable reverse |
| Spiral A5, grey cover | 70 gsm | moderate | visible |
| Recycled A4 block | 80 gsm | heavy | visible |
| School exercise book | 60 gsm | light | strong |
| Squared pad, blue cover | 80 gsm | none | faint |
| Laser printer ream | 90 gsm | none | none |
| Kraft-cover notebook | 100 gsm | light | none |
The surprise was the printer ream: dull to look at, perfectly behaved. Weight alone predicted little. The 100 gsm kraft notebook feathered more than the 80 gsm squared pad, because sizing matters more than thickness.
Flushing a pen that sat for a year
Entry 39 · maintenance
Found in a coat pocket: a piston filler with a centimetre of dried iron-gall ink. The routine that worked, in order:
- Cool water through the piston until it ran pale, about forty cycles.
- Section left nib-down in a glass overnight, water changed twice.
- A drop of dish soap in the last soak, then ten clean rinses.
- Dried nib-down on a paper towel for a full day before filling.
No ammonia, no ultrasonic bath, no disassembly. Patience did the work. The feed still shows a grey tint and writes exactly as it used to.
Why I date every page
Entry 38 · habits
Not for the archive. I date pages because inks change: a blue-black that goes down bright is nearly black in a month, and a note without a date cannot tell me whether I am looking at the ink or at time. The date in the corner is a measurement, not a diary habit.
The ink log grew out of those corners.
The notebook I keep failing to finish
Entry 37 · paper
It is a good notebook: sewn binding, cream pages, a ribbon. That is the problem. Good paper makes me write carefully, and careful writing is slow in the wrong way, the way that edits before the sentence exists. I get through a cheap pad in three weeks and this one has lasted two years.
The fix was to demote it. It now holds lists: groceries, things to repair, phone numbers. Nobody edits a grocery list. Forty pages went in a month, and the handwriting in it is the most relaxed I own.
Three converters, one winner
Entry 36 · maintenance
Squeeze, piston and push-button converters, each used for a month with the same ink. The squeeze type held least and was impossible to see into. The push-button held most and leaked once in a shirt pocket, which is one time too many. The plain piston converter was unremarkable in every respect, and I have stopped looking for anything better.