How to make a Feather Quill Pen

We're here today in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, and I've got Brian Allison, and we're going to be talking about writing, why it's important, how we do writing, what the tools are, the whole concept behind writing, because we take for granted today. We don't do a lot of writing, do we, in the modern world, but in the 18th century, in the 19th century, writing was a very important part of life, so we're going to talk about writing. Brian, tell me a little bit about yourself before we get started. Well, I'm a professional historian. I've worked in the public history field for about 20 years at this point. I've worked at the Hermitage here in Nashville, Carnton Plantation, down in Franklin, Traveler's Rest here in Nashville, several local museums, and in fact, that's how I got into the writing and studying about it, is doing education programs for those sites, and one of the big things was to try to learn how to cut a quill pen so we could teach the kids that, and it launched me on this odyssey. Schooling? Schooling. I went to Austin P.E. State University. I have a degree in history. Okay, and we are here in Goodlettsville. What's this house that we're in right now? We are at the Bowen Campbell House at Historic Mansford Station, which is a rare survival for Middle Tennessee. This may very well be the oldest brick building left in Middle Tennessee. It was built around 1787, and it is a survivor. I mean, the city was only seven years old at the time this was built, and in fact, when this house was built, Nashville was part of North Carolina. It wasn't yet part of Tennessee, so a very rare site. It's part of the Mansford Station collection of buildings, the Bowen Campbell House, a recreation of Casper Mansford's original frontier fort, and this is all part of Moss Wright Park here in Goodlettsville. Yeah, a beautiful, beautiful location. It's an amazing house, so if you ever get a chance, you're ever in this Middle Tennessee area, make sure to check this spot out. So tell me a bit about the importance of writing. Well, writing was very important. Of course, we're talking pre-computer days. We're talking at a time when thoughts had to be put on paper. You had to do it the hard way with pen and ink and paper. One of the reasons I got so interested in this is as a professional historian, I'm a researcher first and foremost, and it struck me that this is the way they live. This is actually the way we know these people. This simple quill pen and ink was the way any of these ideas that we know about today were preserved for us, so it's a fascinating process. Of course, they weren't thinking about immortality. They were thinking about laundry lists and shopping lists and the day-to-day affairs of the neighborhood, but today, 200 years later, a lot of times those are precious historical documents that can give us major insight into historical events and figures. I want to back up and touch on that topic just a little bit deeper. We think about today. We've got video. We've got different ways of audio recording. We have computer records that have writing. People are typing things up. They didn't have any of those things. The sole way we know what they're thinking and saying is through writing. That's so important. That is an amazing point. It's the way I connect to the past. It's the way I learn these people and who they are. There's a quote that I've come to love, and I think it was from John Locke. I may be wrong on that, but he wrote in a poem right there why letters were so important to him. He said, because thus friends absent speak, and that's exactly the whole idea. You can hear them speaking right out of the past. Today, we have videos of loved ones that have passed on or what have you, but we've got their thoughts, their ideas, sometimes vivid descriptions of them from two or three or 500 years ago, and they come to life when they leap off the page. In a very real sense, writing was important to them, but to us, it's also a very valuable link to that past. Our main and vital instrument we have to have right up front is quill, right? Absolutely. We've got an arrangement of feathers of different breeds, different types that were used at the time. All of these would make suitable quill pens today, and a lot of these are readily accessible. That's something that we sometimes have to compromise on, and that's just the nature of living history. Some breeds are endangered or protected. For example, in the 1840s, President Polk signed the Treaty of Peace with Mexico in 1848 with an eagle quill pen. That is illegal to own. If you find one of the four, leave it where it is because you don't want to do that, and swan is hard to come by. Those were popular, but these are goose and turkey feathers, and goose and turkey, wild or domestic, will make excellent quill pens. That's a gray goose right there, wild. That's a domestic goose. There's a wild turkey, and there's a domestic turkey right here, but what you want is a large bird with a strong flight feather, and goose and turkey is probably the most readily accessible today. One thing to point out is, as one of my friends liked to say, that there weren't very many peacocks running around medieval Europe, so when you see that in a movie, it's obviously an anachronism, but any basically large bird. Swan was actually preferred because it has the largest of all the flight feathers that was readily available at the time. The problem is it doesn't give very well. It's got a very thick shell to it, and so it doesn't make a very forgiving pen. The goose was preferred by most writers just because it was strong enough to write with, lasted a long time, and it was flexible at the same time being strong, so it made for a very good writing point. Very good. So obviously, we can't just pluck a feather off a bird and start using it. What do we have to do to prepare? Well, what do we have to do to prepare? Well, you got to turn a feather into a pen, and the funny thing is it's not the same thing. The Romans, the word penna in Latin means both pen and feather, so it's actually where we get our word pen today. However, if it comes right off the bird, it's going to be too soft. I made that mistake when I was a I started out trying to write like a pirate when I was about nine years old, and I picked up a feather in a gift shop at a museum, and the moment I touched knife to pen, the whole thing shattered like glass, and I thought I was the problem there, and I got discouraged and stopped doing it for a long time after that. Found out later the vital step is tempering, and there's a number of ways you can turn a feather into a pen. The simplest and the oldest method, going back to the Middle Ages, is simply leaving it alone. If you leave it for a year or more to dry in the sun, it will eventually turn hard. So you put it in the windowsill, sun shines on it, and it just ages. And we can probably speed up the practice today because we have cars, so if you leave in a hot place like in a car, it'll probably maybe half the time it takes to temper. Just push that in your dash or in your back window, just age them right up. Exactly, and you can tell they're right to go because they turn yellow and almost like plastic is what you're looking for. Now as the years went on, they came up with artificial aging processes, and probably the most common of those, the best one to use today, was developed in the 1830s, it appears, and that is the soaking in hot sand method, and that's the one I usually use. You soak the feather overnight in a glass of water or whatever it is, and that's going to soften this thing up so it's nice and pliable, and then you take a can of hot sand, take that, put it in the oven, heat it up for a little while, let it get hot. When it comes out, plunge it in the hot sand and just walk away. Leave it until it's cool, and it almost instantly, within a few hours, you'll have that same process that it would take a year or more naturally. Interesting, so and you believe that's actually a 19th century development? We do. From the documentation I've seen, in the late 17th century, you see people come up with a process called dutching. Dutching is difficult, and to get it right, the way it was done is, and of course it was invented in Holland, and so it makes sense, dutching. You want to do the same, sort of the same thing. You wrap this thing in a damp cloth, or sometimes they dig a hole in a damp cellar and stick it in the dirt, and that's going to soften it a bit. Then they said build a coal fire, dig a hole in the middle of the coal fire, and then spread it around, and then stick that in just for a few seconds, pull it out, crush the feather, move it back up into a round shape again, and then basically let it cool. Why would you crush it and then re-round it? Well, rounding a round feather, I don't usually have a problem with this, but a round feather does not make for a very good, if it's too round, you won't be able to get much of an edge on this. Okay. That was just an extra step to make sure it was as flat as possible. You want to do it before it dries up. You're trying to get a flat part and a round part, sort of. Yes. Now, I have crushed too many feathers permanently for me to try that again. I've found that most of the time, I'm able to get, just with a rounded barrel, I'm still able to get an adequate point. But I could see how, if you had a larger feather, the radius is flatter, so that makes it easier to work. Exactly, and the smaller the feather, the more that's going to be an issue. More difficult. First thing you're going to do to prep this is you've got to get rid of all the natural gunk that's left from being a bird. There's going to be a membrane on the outside of this, and that's oily and greasy. That's why if you're cutting it originally, that's not going to work. You've got to get rid of that membrane. Luckily, when you dry it, it starts flaking off. You see this white powdery substance? I take the back of the knife and just go all the way down and get that out. Next thing you'll do is inside here, inside the hollow part, there's another membrane that runs up within there. That's going to dry up when you do the tempering process to a really yucky yellow mess. Like the pith of a bamboo or something. Basically, a little reminder that this was once a flight feather. So what you'll do is take a rod or something and break that up, and then I've got a tiny little hook that I can put down inside there and just pull the debris out. The worst thing in the world is if that's in there and you dip this in the ink and suddenly a piece of that debris falls into it, you've got to start over. And you'll need a sharp knife. Now, that's a quill knife. I'm not going to be using that today just because this one's not been tempered correctly. I need to work on this a little bit more. But this is what a period knife. Sometimes they'd have a little pocket knife or they just have a little special knife. As to the actual cutting of a quill. This is the hard part. This is the hard part. When I was starting this out, I had an instructor tell me, don't worry. He said the first 10,000 are the hardest. And I found him just about right. It took several hundred tries, but don't give up. It can be done and I'll show you. That's a lot of feathers to burn. Pretty much. Yeah, there's left and right handed feathers. This is a right handed feather. It comes from the left side of the bird. And you can see it curved around his side. Well, when you're writing that tends to angle away from your face. I'm left handed. I don't really have a problem with this because I can still cut this short and use it. But you want to figure out what the top and the bottom of your feather is. And it's just natural. You see the curve. This is the top of your feather. This is the bottom of your feather. The first cut you're going to do is actually counterintuitive. You're going to cut downward and away. Let's start it that way. I'm going to cut down. It almost seems backwards. Yeah, it does. Because let's say that's the first cut right there. If you notice how it is, it's cut downward and away. And a lot of people think that's going to be your writing point because it makes sense. That's your writing point. You haven't gotten there yet. So the writing point now is the very back. Right. The very back and upper part of the feather. So it's got to angle downward and away from you that first cut. And then we're going to put our slit in. Now this is the tricky part because a slit has to be very small. We're going to start by doing a tiny little. Oh, there you go. Just barely split there. And you want to widen that to maybe about half an inch or so. So splitting it back. Right. If you go too far with this, you will split the whole feather and it's no good to anybody. This isn't cut. This is actually opening a crack. Yes. Cutting it. You can cut it, but I've had mixed results with that. The proper way to do it is to split it. And the best way to ensure that you're not going to split it too far is you put your thumb down very, very hard at the point where you want it to stop. So this looks like about three eighths of an inch. Just about. Yeah. That in there. It's not exact science, but because everyone would be different. Right. Let me put it in there and a little crack. Oh, there it goes. And that's just about right. It almost went too far, but that's just about right. And then the next thing we're going to do. So we've got our first cut here. We've got our split in the middle. Find where the end of that split is. Rotate around over into the back and move your pen maybe three quarters of an inch up, half an inch up. And then it's one scooped cut. But we're not going terribly deep yet. No. There you go. Yeah. You want to go about half the dimensions of the of the feather of the barrel. So now it's starting to look something. It is. And now you can see what I said earlier. And I do that when I turn it back over. There's the point of your pen. Right. All this gets cut out from underneath. Now, here comes the difficult part. We're going to have to turn this into a point. And what you have to do is create what they call the shoulders of the nib. And that's a couple of of curved cuts. Now, again, an expert can do it in two curved cuts. This is from the side or from the bottom? This is from the side of the side bottom basically going forward. So here we are going to start here and we're going to try it. OK. And don't worry if you didn't cut far enough because you can always kind of trim it up. I'm doing it kind of awkwardly. If you notice, I'm doing it from way up here, which is difficult. Usually. Right. This is close work. So be careful about flying chips. You might want to wear safety glasses. Yes, because I've gotten these in my eye before and it's not fun. So there's our first shoulder. If you notice, it's a rather ragged shoulder, but that can be trimmed up. Then our next shoulder. You do the same thing. Turn the pen over, cut from here and start trimming it down. And you'll start to see you're getting what looks like an actual pen point. Now, the most important part of all of this is what comes after once you've got it comfortable. And this is just for demonstration purposes. That's kind of a rough looking pen point. The most important part is what they call the nibbing cut. And that's the part most people leave off. You want to get it to a fairly good point here and trim it up just a little bit there. By the way, if you're going to cut like this, I find this cut. Watch how I do it. Using that thumb. Yeah. Put your back, your other thumb against the back of the blade and you can pivot and you can get extremely precise cuts. You can get, you have a lot of control and you have a lot of power. Yes. At the same time. And that's kind of what you want here is you want some power and some control. Now here's where that stick comes in handy. Stick that inside there. And now we have a hard surface we can cut against. Right. And what you're going to do is find where the ragged point stops and you want to angle it. Kind of sliding down. Exactly. So it's kind of a chisel cut. You heard the tip. And it went snip. Yep. And now you've got a little flat point. Exactly. Now this one's still going to need to be trimmed. You'll get the, as you do it, you go through and you start judging how much is too much, what's too long, what's too short. I can tell from looking at this, this won't cut right yet because it's too long. Okay. So if that's the case. Shorten that up. Yeah, just go back in. Shorten it to a thing. Now it's too thick there and you can just trim that down. Once you get it the perfect combination of flat and long. So this angle kind of is important. You don't want it to be too steep. But in doing that you end up with a pen. Now you can see it's very much like an 18th century quill should look. Now there's a couple other things you can do here. For one thing, if it's still ragged at the end, it's still splattering or something like that, they would use shark skin to do this. I use sandpaper. Very fine thousand grit sandpaper. You can take that and just basically give it a few brushes over the sandpaper like that and take any ragged edges off. And to make it more comfortable to write, you can also see that. That is not going to make a good for pen because all this is going to tickle your hand when you write. So you want to cut a lot of the fletchings back. You can also cut the shaft up anywhere you want to. All this can be trimmed with scissors to make it look more neat. A lot of times you see in old paintings, they've done that. They've severely cut back the fletchings to the point where it's still there, but it's trimmed into a more pleasing sight. But also keep in mind, a lot of times they cut all the fletchings off at all. They don't need them to write with. This is a perfectly acceptable pen right there. So all that needs to be, that's all aesthetics. That's all how you want to shape your pen. But essentially, those are the major points of cutting one. And there we go. A completed quill pen. Amazing. You know, it looks simple, maybe, until you do it. And I've failed many a time making a pen. And so it's amazing to watch somebody who's done it many, many times do it. So thank you so much for that wonderful instruction. I hope you have luck if you're trying to make a quill pen or make one right. Wow. Amazing. Thank you, Brian, for bringing us that. We will be doing more writing things in the future. So stay tuned. We'll be working on ink. We'll be talking about paper. Lots to cover. Thanks for watching.