[Scriptoris] Nib question

[Cat Clark]

> I'm working on a baronial scroll and was wondering what size nib you like
> using. It's going to be on a 8x10.
> Thanks
> Celestria

Well, there's the short answer and there's the detailed answer...

The short answer first:

Start on a practice piece - not on the paper for the final product.  
First, for 8x10, give yourself an inch of white space all the way around 
(I'm assuming the paper size is 8x10 - disregard this is that's your 
working space with a margin already subtracted). That gives you a 
line-of-text length of 6 inches.  I'd say start with a c-3 or equivalent 
for a quaddratus/"blackletter" or a bastarde formata and a c-4 or 
equivalent for a secretary hand (gothic or bastarda), a spanish insula 
or a italian rotunda.  Callig the whole text on the practice piece to 
see how much room you use up.  Then budget that much room for the text 
on the paper for the final product and then fit your 
art/cadel/seal/signature spaces around the text block as appropriate.  
Caveat: If you have a lot of text, consider going one nib size smaller 
to start off.

Now the long answer (also know as the over-engineered approach).  This 
is an interesting question actually.  My personal experience is that 
there are different approaches to picking nib size. 

I. Writ design by building up.

The first approach is to start off not by finished scroll size but by 
letter size.  This approach builds up instead of deconstructing down and 
is my personal preference to scroll design.  This probably won't be a 
good approach if you already have a paper size constraint ahead of time 
(for reasons that will soon be obvious) so I will be brief.  You start 
by saying: "I want the letters to be this big..."  For the sake of an 
example, let's say that you want letters where the body of the letter 
(e.g. the round bit of a "b" or all of an "e" or "c") is 1/4 inch tall.  
I start with that size and then I pick what hand I'm going to use.  
Let's pick anglo-norman secretary hand (also known as early gothic 
charter hand in some paleography books; it's the chancellory version of 
"early gothic" in Drogin).  In that hand, the body of the letter is four 
nib-widths tall.  So then I take out my nibs and find the one that is 
closest to [(four nib-widths tall) = 1/4 inch] (it will probably be C-4 
or medium if  you're using a Braun nib or "italic" if your have some 
Osmiroid or Panache nibs).  Now that I know how tall the body of the 
letters will be, that will enable me to appropriately size the ascenders 
and descenders of the rest of the ductus to fit the hand I picked - and 
that will tell me how much room I need per line of text (don't forget to 
leave some white space above the ascenders on each line).  Then I figure 
out how many lines of text I need, which multiplied by the room needed 
per line of text tells me how much room to budget for all the text.  
Throw in what ever room you need for signatures, seals, illumination 
and/or cadels, add at least an inch white space all the way around and 
that gives you how much paper/vellum/whatever you need for the whole work.

There's a variant of the above that starts with the nib size instead.  
Pick the nib. Then pick the hand.  The bodies of the letters in most 
medieval hands are usually 4 to 6 nib-widths high.  Picking the nib 
therefore controls the size of the letters and the size of the letters 
controls the line spacing and ultimately the amount of room those lines 
will take up on the scroll.  I mention this because most calligraphers 
have a natural letter size their own hands perfer - and that natural 
letter size preference has everything to do with how they write normally 
in their everyday lives.  This a topic of paleography that I can go on 
and on about so I'll stop here while I'm ahead.  I'll only say that you 
probably already have a preferred letter size that your writing hand 
prefers and you can make your life easier as a calligrapher by figuring 
out what that is.  Once you do that, then you'll have an idea what sort 
of nib size matches your naturally preferred writing style.  Did you 
notice that Carletta said she liked to use a c-3 on 8.5 by 11 scrolls?  
I read that and immediately thought "too big! Use a C-4 - maybe even a 
C-5!"  So there you have it: I like to write small...  Carletta probably 
likes to write bigger than I do.

II - Writ design by blocking down. 

You have a certain piece of paper/vellum/lochac pergammon/whatever and 
you need to fit a certain amount of text and illumination onto it.  
First, mark off the white space that needs to go all the way around.  I 
use an inch but if you're cramped for space, a half inch will do.  Any 
good framer worth their wage can frame given a half-inch "gutter" of 
white space.  Now block out space for signatures, seals, illumination 
and/cadels, etc., depending on how many of those non-text elements you 
need (every kingdom/principality/barony/other-group has different 
requirements).  What's leftover is your space for the text.  Now we're 
at the not-so-easy part.  You have a text and you have to fit it into 
the space.  Here's the painful part: you have to get the text into the 
space.  You know how long each line is going to be but you don't know 
how many lines yet because you don't know the letter size yet.  There is 
no easy way around this other than actually writing the text out.  (With 
short texts you can usually just wing it but with long texts it can be 
fatal not to write it out on a practice piece first)

At this point I ask myself what hand do I want to use.  Then I take out 
my nibs, make a guess at which one will work, and write out the first 
two or three sentences of the text in that hand.  That will give me an 
idea of how many letters per line I will use up using that hand.  Once I 
know how much text I can fit on a line, then I can estimate the total 
numbers of lines the entire text will take since I can count up the 
total number of letters in the text and do the math accordingly.  Once 
you do that, then you see if you can fit the number of lines you need 
into the space allocated for the text.  If you can, great!  If you can't 
and you need more room, then you have some choices to make: 1) decrease 
the room for the signatures and art to increase the room for the text; 
2) pick a hand that isn't as tall in the ascender/descender department 
so you can fit more lines of text into the space allotted; 3) decrease 
the nib size.  With choices 2 and 3, you have to repeat the "write the 
text out" step and recalculate the total number of lines of text, etc etc...

Regardless of approach, I almost always calligraph out the entire text 
on a practice piece before moving on to the 
paper/vellum/whiteboard/chunk-of-rock/whatever that I have set aside for 
the final piece.  For short texts on paper I may wing it, but for long 
texts and for anything on vellum, I will always do practice pieces for 
the calligraphy.  For any hand other than anglo-norman secretary hand or 
early gothic, I personally need to write out the whole text to make sure 
I can make the text fill out the whole line on every line without having 
to break a word in two (and yes, ligatures are my best friends!)

That was probably way more information than you were looking for...
;-)

ttfn
Therasia, old used-up scribe