Turning A Feather Into A Pen - Historical Writing Series Part 1

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 the whole concept behind writing because we take for granted today we don't do a lot of writing do we in in the modern world but in the 18th century in the nineteenth 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 lip the public history field for about 20 years at this point I've worked at the Hermitage here in Nashville Carlton plantation done a Franklin Travelers 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 from 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 I could punch me on this Odyssey so mm-hmm schooling schooling I went to Austin Peay State University of the degree in history ok and we are here in Goodlettsville what what's this house that we're in right now we are the bone Campbell house at historic man spur 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 that part of Tennessee so so a very rare sight it's part of the massacre station collection of buildings the bone Campbell house a recreation of Casper massacres original frontier fort and this is all part of mosrite Park here in Goodlettsville yeah a beautiful beautiful location is 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 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 right this simple quill pen and ink was the Ray I think of these ideas that were that we know about today were preserved for us so it's a fascinating process and of course they weren't thinking about immortality they were thinking about laundry lists and shopping lists you know 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 this major insight into historical events and figures I want to back up and touched on this topic just 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 and saying is for writing that's so important that little that is amazing extremely there's a you know it's the way I connect to the past now 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 that why letters were so important to him he said because thus friends absent speak and that's exactly the whole idea here that I'm speaking right now but today we have videos of loved ones that have passed on or whatever but we've got you know their thoughts their ideas sometimes vivid descriptions of them from 2 or 3 or 500 years ago and they come to life when they leap off the page so in in a very real sense right it was important to them but to us it's also a very valuable light to that past yes so our main and vital instrument we have to have right up front is quill right look we've got an arrangement of feathers of different breeds different types that were used at the time all 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 that's just the nature of living history some breeds are in danger to protect him for example in the 1840s President Polk signed the Treaty of Peace with Mexico in 1848 with a an eagle quill pen that is illegal to own yeah do not if you find one of the floors leave it where it is you don't want to do that but and Swan is hard to come by those were popular but these are goose and turkey feathers and goose and turkey wild or or domestic will make excellent quill pens so 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 as one of my friends like 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 basic that large bird Swan was actually preferred because it's 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 pin the goose was preferred by most riders 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 mm-hm so obviously we can't just pluck a feather off a bird you know and and start using it but you have to do to prepare well what do we have to do to prepare well you got to turn a feather into a pin and the funny thing is it's not the same thing although the Romans the word Penna in Latin means both pin and feather so it's actually where we get our word pin today however if it comes right off the bird it's gonna be too soft I made that mistake when I was a kid this is where I started if you don't mind a personal story 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 - - been holding shadows like glass and I thought I was the problem there and I've got a scourge and stop doing it for a long time after that found out later the vital step is tempering now there's a number of ways you can turn a feather into a pin the simplest and the oldest method going back to the Middle Ages is simply leaving it alone if you leave for a year or more to dry in the Sun it will eventually turn hard and so you put it in the windowsill Sun shines on it and just age 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 and you're back way directly just age them right up and 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 and 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 and pliable Kleinman and then you take a can of hot sand take that and put in the oven heat it up for a little while let it get hot when it comes out plunge it in the hot sand then 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 mmm hmm interesting so and and you believe that's actually a 19th century development not we do earlier from the documentation of 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 so it makes sense Duchy 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 gonna 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 mm-hmm pull it out crush the feather move it back up into a round shape again and then basically let it cool and I would you crush it and then rebound well rounding a round feather I don't usually have a problem with this but around feather does not make for very good if it's two rounds you won't be able to get much of an edge on this okay I was just an extra step to make sure this is flat as possible you want to do it before it dries up so you're trying to get a flat part and or and round yes sir now I have crushed too many feathers permanently for me to try that again found that most of the time I'm able to get just with a rounded barrel in my but I'm still able to get an adequate two point but I could see how if you had a larger feather you know the the radius is flatter there so that makes it easier to exactly and kind of the smaller the feather the more that's going to be an issue they're 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 with the from being a bird there's gonna 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 right 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 gonna dry up when you do the tempering process to a really yucky yellow my bamboos basically a little reminder that this was once a flight feather so what you'll do is take a rod or something and kind of 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 and that way it doesn't 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 flies into it you're there you just zip 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 okay I need to work on this a little bit this is what a period a period yeah 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 ten thousand to the hardest I've 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 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 curves 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 line either first cut you're going to do is actually counterintuitive you're gonna cut downward and away let's start it that way I'm gonna cut down it's almost seems backwards yes okay it does because let's say that's the first cut right there if you notice how it is it's cut downward away and a lot of people think that's gonna be your writing points because right makes sense that's your writing point you haven't gotten there yet so writing point now is the very back right the very back and upper part of the feather so it's got an angle downward and away from you that fresh cut and then we're gonna put our slit in this is the tricky part because a slip has to be very small we're gonna start by doing a tiny little oh there we go just barely split there and you want to widen that to maybe about half an inch or so vespa so it's splitting it back right okay yeah 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 okay 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 3/8 of an inch to just about yeah then in there it's not exact science but because everyone would be different right yeah when they put it in there and a little crack doesn't oh there it goes and that's just about right and almost went too far but that's just about right and then the next thing we're gonna do so we've got our first cut here we've got our split in the middle fine where the end of that split is rotate around over into the back and move your PIP and maybe 3/4 of 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 the feather of the the barrel so now I'm starting to excel it is and now you can see what I said earlier do that when I turn it back over there's the point of your PIN 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 curved cuts now again an expert can do it in two curved cut this is from the side or from the bottom this is from the side that side bottom they say they going forward so here we are gonna start here and we're gonna try it okay 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 since it's really right this is close work so be careful about flying chips you might want to wear see 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 butter looks like an actual Bend point mm-hmm now the most important part of all of this is what comes after once got it comfortable and this is just for demonstration for visas that's kind of a rough looking pen point mmm the most important part is what they call the Nibin 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 gonna cut like this I find this cut watch how I do it using that phone yeah put your back foot do 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 I've just seen 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 Andy stick that inside there now we have a hard surface we can cut it right and what you're going to do is find where the ragged point stops and you want to angle it mm-hmm kind of slightly down exactly so it's kind of a chisel cut your the tip mmm and I went Steve yep and now you've got a little flat point exactly now this was still gonna need to be true 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 or too short I can tell from looking at this this won't write yet because it's too long okay so if that's the case 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 ends 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 18 like an 18th century quilt should look you know there's a couple of the things you can do here for one thing if it's still ragged at the end it's still spluttering or something like that they would use sharkskin about 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 pen because all this they don't 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 saying 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 you 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 you are 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 it a cool printer make one right Wow amazing thank you Brian for learning 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

Channel: Townsends

Views: 403,690

Keywords: townsends, jas townsend and son, reenacting, history, 18th century, 19th century, jon townsend, 18th century cooking, writing, ink, pen, handwriting, quills, quill pen, quill, author, paper, typography, brian allison, cursive, pensmanship

Id: k3aPOXkzNPk

Length: 17min 38sec (1058 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 15 2019