Does anyone know why most Vintage Pen come with EF or F Nib?

I believe it was because that was the preferred nib size 50+ years ago.

Ron

I think this issue has been discussed a couple of times, but it is always fun to revisit. It seems that EF and F nibs really were preferred for business writing and largely for personal writing. In an era when most people could only afford one or two pens, there was not a lot of messing about with various nib sizes. Stub nibs were available for signature pens, but they seem to be very infrequent in today's vintage pens.

hi Weiying,

First off welcome to the forum.

These observations are based on having several thousand pens from many countries pass through my hands in the last 40 years, places as far apart as Japan and the UK, taking in most of Europe, Russia on the way and then on to the USA, and from looking at the 400 or so that I have kept. Other people in other places might well find different proportions at different times so this is in no way definitive, nor is it intended to be.

The nib sizes in vintage pens vary the world over due to different styles of writitng and alphabets used as well as with time and the purpose for which they were used.
Different countries and even different companies had different versions of what a fine, extra fine or whatever should be, this is still true today.

Here in the UK many, if not most of the vintage pens,( a very difficult title to define by the way, but for the purposes of this post and not to ignite a bonfire of argument and counter argument 1930s-mid50s, post vintage later, veteran earlier) tend to have a medium width medium flex nib.

French pens tended to have rather more flex and a little less width than UK pens of the same period.

Book-keepers etc used stiffer fine nibs. Shorthand writers seemed to favour specialist nibs and those who had to deal with multi layer carbons used very stiff fine to medium nibs called in many cases 'Manifold'

The broader and Italic nibs tend to crop up on more expensive pens of the period, probably those not used for work-a-day ledger entry or general clerical duties, many medics and solicitors (attorneys,lawyers and not door to door charity collectors) seem to have used broad and italic nibs, certainly more than the pen using population at large.

Vintage pens from the US side of the water do indeed seem to have a higher proportion of fine nibs at the same period. The preference seems to have been for F or VF nibs, broad nibs being much less common.

Most of the really flexible nibs that I have come across, those that go from fine to paintbrush width well beyond BBB in some cases with the bigger nibs, wet noodles or whatever else one likes to call them, seem in general to come from the early 20th century (veteran) up to about mid 30s with a few going on into the 40s but becoming much less common.

In many Asian countries the nibs tended to to be finer in general than in much of Europe and the US, the same is true today, due probably to the fact that the characters used are much better formed using fine nibs. In Arabic using countries and those with a similar set of characters and styles, ie parts of India etc different nibs are used,see the various debates and discussions in earlier threads in this forum involving those who know far more about this topic than I do.

Please excuse the over long post but I hope it helps.

Cheers, John

Great post, Oxonian. Thanks.

Thank you, very helpful information.