When Quills Ruled The Earth

[rwilsonedn]

Something started me wondering recently--in the days before the triumph of steel pens, where did people get quills? Did they stock properly seasoned quills at the local stationers? Did one buy them at a poultry shop? And how much of the process did the user have to do: the drying and tempering, the rough shaping, carving the point? I have read that in large offices, they had individuals whose job was to re-carve quills to keep a supply of sharp pens available to the clerks. But what about in smaller establishments or private homes? Would the answer have been different in the city, a village, and the countryside? I wonder if there is any documentation on where people obtained their writing instruments.

ron

[graystranger]

This is a great question and I'm very interested in learning more about this.

 

I do know that nearly everyone who wrote with pens carried pen knives. The same knife blade that is now on billions of pocket knives around the planet, small with a rounded semi-point to it. Everyone apparently knew how to cut and re-shape the nibs on their quill pens as this was needed often. Maybe some of the wealthy just grabbed a new quill and had a servant re-shape the worn quills, but a lot of people did their own quills. I'm guessing that there was a lot of variation in how they were cut - some wanted long thin points, some shorter and wider - to match their preferred writing style.

 

And, not all the quill pens had feathers on them, a lot had the feathers trimmed off so they were just hollow reeds. There were also hollow reed pens analogous to quill pens, that were common too. I would love to know why some preferred quill pens and some preferred reed pens.

[markh]

Check out the book Pen, Ink & Evidence, by Joe Nickell. Quills are chapter 1.

 

Most quills were from a goose, though others were used. Quills were processed by heat to eliminate the outer layer, and dipped in a boiling alum solution. They were sold in a bunch initially tied up with a string, later in boxes, I think by the dozen.

 

"Quills from the left wing of the bird commanded a higher price because they were preferred by right handed writers."

 

Writing has been part of human culture for many millennium, and there is no end of history to learn......

 

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[virgilio]

They also had quill holders in order to economize on feathers; you could cut each feather into a lot of quills. They kept whole flocks of geese just for their feathers.

 

I once actually got a feather off of one of our ducks and used it to write with. They molt periodically; you don't have to pull the feather out yourself, which would be rather cruel. It made a nice fine line, and I could write several lines with it before re-dipping. It was also a lot smoother than I would have thought. I didn't try to remove any of the duck grease, and it still wrote fine, altho I know they used heated sand to remove it in the old days.

[Sasha Royale]

Geese are big, with large feathers. Goose was a common table bird. Other quills were expensive or too small. A bookkeeper, like Bob Cratchet, was allotted one quill per week. Pencils are much older than pens.

[markh]

Quill pens are much, much older than what we would call a pencil (wood cased graphite). The original pencils were pieces of raw graphite wrapped in a string, starting with a discovery of graphite in England in 1564.

 

Of course, other dry marking systems were used before this - charcoal sticks, pieces of lead (the metal) or silver (silverpoint).

 

According to Nickell's book, quills probably started in Roman times, though the first clear reference was in 624 a.d.

 

 

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[graystranger]

Maybe in 2024 we can have a 1400 year celebration of the use of pens!

 

I know hollow reeds were used as pens too, just like quills. I wonder what the date of the first clear reference of their use is.

[markh]

I now update the year when quill pens were first used to 100AD.

 

See:

https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/315038-quill-pens-in-england-100-ad/

 

 

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Edited November 13, 2016 by markh

[sidthecat]

I got curious about the reed pen recently. It seems to have been the tool of preference in Egypt and Ancient Greece, and papyrus the typical writing surface.

I've used bamboo pens, which look almost the same, but are very hard. So my question is: does anyone know what kind of reed the ancients used? I'm sorry to say that botany is not my strong suit.

[dcwaites]

It would appear that, at least in Egypt, the bulrush ( Cyperus papyrus ) was used not only to make papyrus, but the reed pens to write on it as well.

[sidthecat]

I watched a bit of footage of a calligrapher who works in Classical Arabic: his pens are bamboo, with wonderfully broad chisel points; he skates his letters across the page.

Lovely thing to see. In Islam the words have the same sacred presence as certain images in Christianity: not decoration but holy in their own right.

[AAAndrew]

The quill did not die quickly. They were still common even in 1889, according to American Stationer in November 7 issue, "The proportion of quills to steel pens purchased by Her Majesty's Stationery Office is about one to four. In government offices quills as writing utensils will die hard, as the mending of them is said to constitute the principal occupation of some of the clerks."

 

You would buy pre-made quills from stationery offices. You may "mend" your pen with a pen knife, but the original nib would have been cut for you by a professional. And not everyone was very good at mending pens.

 

Millions of quills were produced for the pen business around the world. I read somewhere that Russia was a major producer of goose quills. In the US goose was still predominant, but turkey was also valued. And that a clerk doing extensive writing could go through several quills in a day. A large law office, for example, could go through hundreds of quills a week. These could be repaired a few times, but after a while you run out of prepared length of feather.

[rwilsonedn]

Thank you for the detailed information. It is amazing for me to think of quills being produced on that grand a scale. I wonder if the need for writing tools influenced the supply, and therefore the price, of geese for eating purposes--turning them from a delicacy, of which a farm family might indulge maybe a couple of times a year, into a staple source of protein for city dwellers. Of course there was also a market for the down and the fat, I suppose.

Was it you who posted a couple of years ago a piece written by someone in the mid-19th century complaining about the lumberjack who was responsible for reshaping the quills in his office, leaving the staff with a huge variety of points, none of them usable?

ron

[Ink Stained Wretch]

I got curious about the reed pen recently. It seems to have been the tool of preference in Egypt and Ancient Greece, and papyrus the typical writing surface.

 

Yes, so thousands of years ago. And I think that reed "pens" or maybe more properly styli, were used for writing by the ancient Mesopotamians, although they wrote on clay tablets. And the cuneiform writing is really old.

 

Interesting that lots of the clay tablets survive to this day despite having been in the way of a lot of wars and other things. They're less delicate than the papyrus scrolls, too. Paper is such a newcomer .

[dcwaites]

Qalam reed pens available here --

 

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/10pcs-Calligraphy-reed-pens-Qalam-kalam-made-of-bamboo-reed-handmade-Pakistan-/182228949753?hash=item2a6db11af9:g:3jwAAOSwyQtV11Ji

[GuilhermeAtencio]

Such an interesting topic.

Thank you!

[Polonium9]

There were a few poems from the mid 1800's in England that mentioned reed pens, and mostly told the poor of the time to make them from said reeds and write with them to show the upper classes what was going on.

[AAAndrew]

To give you an idea of the number of quills used, here's an ad from a stationer in New York City in 1827, before steel pens really started to take off. He periodically would get in shipments of quills from Europe, augmented by American quills, and he would publish adverts like this. Most of the time the number he quotes is around 100,000, sometimes 50,000 and once 300,000 quills.

 

 

 

I've seen a receipt from the same stationer in 1836 where two "bunches" of quills (I believe this means 200) are sold for $1.75, and right below it a dozen (steel) pens are $1.

Edited March 28, 2017 by AAAndrew

[rwilsonedn]

With that big a price difference, it's a wonder steel pens ever managed to get a foothold in the market, even though they didn't require continual carving.

ron

[AAAndrew]

It wasn't until Perry and Gillott began mass producing pens and the price fell dramatically that they really caught on. By 1850 you could buy a gross of top-quality pens for less than that dollar. The pens that cost $1 for a dozen were hand-made one-by-one. Some of the early ones were made by rolling a sheet of thin steel into a tube, using the two edges as the slit and then filing away what wasn't needed to create a tube pen. Very laborious. And most of the early pens were notorious for being stiff and scratchy.

 

One of the earliest pens that claimed flexibility, because it incorporated three slits, the main one and then two side slits, was made from around 1808 or so up to the teens by Peregrine Williamson in Baltimore. Later, in 1830, Perry would patent the three slits as well as the punched hole at the top of the slit to prevent splitting as well as add to flexibility. And when Perry, Mason and Gillott figured out how to mass produce steel pens with screw presses and rolled steel, and add the flexibility, then the price came down and sales went up, up, up!

 

An early Williamson ad from 1809 with a testimonial from president Thomas Jefferson.