Week 7 & 8: Paper Writing and Secondary Polling

Hello! Welcome back to my blog. I decided to combine weeks 7 and 8 because most of the work I was doing was the same. Mostly writing in the paper and finding sources to fill in the gap of anything I was missing.

While writing, something that I realized that I wanted to find more out about was the timeline of production for fountain pens. Although many users online claim that there was a large dip in nib pen production around the 1950s, I haven’t been able to find many concrete numbers for production sales. I want to try to compile a semblance of a timeline for production numbers with what I can find online alongside what professionals can tell me from their research. I’ve contacted Mr. Midkiff who has thoroughly researched fountain pen industrialization and he’s given me some insights into why pen production dropped drastically in the 1950s. Apparently, “two largest manufacturers of dip pens stopped their production in 1952” and other companies also never recovered the market after the introduction of the ball point pen. I will continue to try to find more data points to extrapolate into a wider world trend but currently, the amount of sources is small.

Otherwise, I’m working with Mrs. Blair, my external advisor to try to set up secondary polling in a local calligraphers guild. I chose to pursue this path because an ad would reach only a fraction of people that have tried both vintage nibs and modern nibs to give an accurate opinion while being costly and most instagram accounts advertising calligraphy are either unrelated to my topic, inactive, or too small for much data at all. After revising my poll, I hope that it will be a more accurate measure of pen nib quality over pen quality as a whole.

Thanks a lot for reading my blog!