I've had this Taft letter in my collection of historical items for some time...was wondering if you could tell me what kind of pen it was written? I'm thinking either a dip or a very early FP. It is dated 1896, well before he was President, but I find it an interesting piece nonetheless.


Al

This is definitely a dip pen, you can see that the color slowly gets lighter, then suddenly gets darker, this is because he was writing, then the pen ran low on ink, and he dipped it again.

On Taft's handwriting, that's better than mine.

Very neat! Now what was the ink he used? It looks a burgundy color - is that the correct shade?

It is definitely a dip pen as Eric072691 said. There is a little line thickness variation but not much, I would say it was written with a fine, ever so slightly flexible general purpose nib; a nib with a rounded/curved up point.

Nice laid paper. Some speculation: The quality of the nib seems notable for its lack of ink retention and just average flow, steel perhaps, government issue , ink well may have been down a ways so the inking of his nib was inhibited. The light/dark patterns of ink are fairly regular (frequent redipping to continue writing) on the page and repeat them selves left to right. I think the post script below the signature might have been written with a different pen/nib, certainly at a later moment, as it is more uniform and smooth in appearence and appears to follow a dip per line pace.

Check these sites: http://www.kamakurapens.com/Presidents/Wil..._Taft_Pens.html

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=htt...l%3Den%26sa%3DG

Also look at the quality of the handwriting of these two samples one from Taft and one from someone who had been taught a style of business hand: