Today's Poor Almanack

Here's what's filling up space in the Post Style section today.

The Blowhard's Reading Corner

Comics aficianado, scholar & journalist extraordinaire Chris Mautner asked me for a list of the books on my bedside table, which I'm assumably reading, for the weekly What Are You Reading over at Robot6. 

These are the books on my bedside table, though some are by my drawing board, because I sometimes read when I’m in the middle of a deadline. I left off some of the books my daughters have left there so nobody'll think I'm reading Twilight, Horse Adventures or Captain Underpants (which, ok, I've read four times).

• The Art Forger’s Handbook by Eric Hebborn. Hebborn was a Cockney art forger and master of various art techniques who died under mysterious circumstances in 1996, and an entertaining writer. I figure this is a good skill to fall back on in case this whole cartoon thing heads south.
  

• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. I’ve never read much Dickens and I started this a year ago and I’m enjoying it very slowly.
  

• Ojingogo by Matt Forsythe. I just keep picking this up and looking through it over and over. It’s like a great silent animated fantasy you can hold in your hand.
  

• The Comic Worlds of Peter Arno, William Steig, Charles Addams and Saul Steinberg, by Iain Topliss. Topliss is an Australian academic and his prose can get a little dense, but he’s got a sharp eye and a sense of humor.
  

• Harvey Pekar: Conversations, edited by Mike Rhode. I’ve never read enough Pekar either, but I get a great introduction to the man in the 25 years of interviews Mike’s gathered here.
  

• Scoop by Evelyn Waugh. I reread this every few years, like I’m doing now, because it’s the greatest comic novel every written, along with A Confederacy of Dunces.

• Diaries: The Python Years by Michael Palin. Oh, this is fun to read! John Cleese says that Palin never shuts up, just yaps all the time. You can pick this up, read a few day’s worth of entries, and put it down a much happier man.

• Ordinary Victories, Parts 1 & 2 by Manu Larcenet. I wish I could draw comic realism as well as Larcenet, and tell a story so interestingly.
  

• The Complete Peanuts Volume 10 by Charles Shulz. Lucy gets mad at Schroeder and throws his piano to the kite-eating tree!!

• You Can Never Find a Rickshaw When it Monsoons: The World on One Cartoon a Day by Mo Willems. I wish I could do this too, but I’m glad Mo Willems did.
  

Booboo Revealed

This is either a booboo, a technical glitch or an editorial oversight, I drew a misdirected pointer, or "tang", on the final balloon, making it appear that it was being spoken by Mom, then drew a corrected one pointing to Alice. But I forgot to expunge the one to Mom. I'm sorry, ok?

More Late Night Nib Talk: My New Favorite Nib

Warning; this is mostly for appreciators of pen nibs, also known as nibophiles, pendemaniacs and nirds.


In an earlier post, I'd driveled on at length about my favorite pen nib, the Hunt ##101 Imperial, shown above. I use a dip pen nib every day of my life and am therefor a leetle obsessive about them; a bad one can send me into a funk that poisons the whole household and probably scars my children permanently, but give me a good nib and I sing & dance like Donald O'Connor (which also scars my chi- but, never mind). Nibs can vary in quality within their species. Get 30 nibs of the exact same kind and hold them in your hand; half of 'em are OK-ish, 10 of 'em are decent and 5 are sweet, and, if you're real lucky, one is immortal, a Nib for the Ages (that adds up to 31, I know, I know). It all depends what you're after, of course. I'm after one that draws fine lines effortlessly, on edge or square on, upside down even, and does fat lines without spreading out too far and compromising the ink flow. It's usually immediately apparent how well the nib is going to perform, just by the feel of it dragging on the paper, or the tiny variations in shape of the tines. It's this finely calibrated nib-sense that makes my wife's eyes roll audibly in her head if I so much as say the word "nib".

Now, the Hunt Imperial nib is good for drawing, but it was designed for ornamental calligraphy, specifically copperplate or Spencerian calligraphy. This style, popular in the 19th century, used a fine pointed nib with flexible tines allowing for great variations in line width by hand pressure instead of nib width and angle, and it demands great skill and a good bit of flair to pull off. The 19th century was an explosive period for steel nibs, as I'm sure you'll remember from your high school history book, chapter 21, "The 19th Century; An Explosive Period for Steel Nibs". Though steel nibs (actually often bronze) had been around for a while, maybe as long ago as ancient Egypt, they were inferior in line-quality to reed pens or, later, quills. Quill pens were cheap and fairly easy to produce as long as enough geese were handy, but didn't last long and needed sharpening often. By the early 19th century, steel nibs were much improved in quality, but were horrendously expensive, costing about two day's pay for a laboring man. And they were produced laboriously by hand, being carved one at time out of a block of steel with a putty knife (this part's not true). But, as with the manufacture of most things during the Industrial Revolution, improvements were made.

Birmingham, England was a center for the production of small metal objects, toys, jewelry, buckles and such, in fact it was one of the first manufacturing towns in the world, and the Jewellery Quarter is now an historic neighborhood. It was there in the early 1820s that John Mitchell began to apply button making technology to nib making, using a series of hand presses to shape, pierce and slit the nibs. Within ten or so years dozens of nib manufacturers had sprung up in the area, among them the firms of the Mitchell Brothers, Josiah Mason and Joseph Gillott, and at their peak they employed over 5,000 workers and produced an astonishing 1,500 million pen nibs a year, which wasn't too short of the world population at the time. Needless to say, the price of a steel nib dropped, from 12.5p each to 1.25p for a gross (144). At least one historian has said that this sudden affordability democratized writing and certainly it boosted literacy.


Though John Mitchell may have been the first (there's some conflict in the sources I've found; most such advances are simultaneous impulses), Joseph Gillott (pronounced GILLott, his bust pictured above) seems to have been the man who most perfected the art & science of nib manufacture. From the book "Forty Years of Ink";

It was Joseph Gillott, however, originally a Sheffield cutler, and afterwards a workman in light steel articles, as buckles, chains, and other articles of that class, who in 1822 gave impulse to the steel-pen manufacture. Previous to his entering the business the pens were cut out with shears and finished with the file. Gillott adapted the stamping press to the requirements of the manufacture, as cutting out the blanks, forming the slits, bending the metal, and impressing the maker's name on the pens. He also devised improved modes of preparing the metal for the action of the press, tempering, cleansing, and polishing, and, in short, many little details of manufacture necessary to give them the required flexibility to enable them to compete with the quill pen. One great difficulty to be overcome was their extreme hardness and stiffness; this was effected by making slits at the side in addition to the central one, which had previously been solely used. A further improvement, that of cross grinding the points, was subsequently adopted. The first gross of pens with three slits was sold for seven pounds. In 1830 the price was $2.00; in 1832, $1.50; in 1861, 12 cents, and a common variety for 4 cents a gross. About 9,300 tons of steel are annually consumed, the number of pens produced in England alone being about 8,000,000,000.

Gillott's firm produced many varieties of pen nibs, especially nibs designed for copperplate lettering. Their #303 was (and is) one of their most popular. But their greatest creation, their gold standard, was the fabulous Gillott Principality.


Jeez, just look at that sweetheart, isn't it a pisser? As far as I can tell, it was only in production for a little over 20 years, but it was unmatched for flexibility and ease of ink flow. If you compare it to the Hunt Imperial, you can see the similarities, but also some differences, like the grinding marks and size of the vent hole. And how it just looks better made overall. One mark of a well-made nib is a slight concavity of the tine's outer profile; it means they fit together evenly and therefor will work better.


OK, my eyes are starting to roll audibly in my head. Suffice it to say, the Principality is one of the peaks of a now-diminished craft, and it's one that people who collect such things pay good money for. God knows how many hundreds of thousands, or millions, of these fine bits of steel were produced in the late 1800s, but the day when you could buy a gross for a few bucks are long gone. About six years ago a collector sold a gross of the Principalities as fund raiser for the Leukemia Society on eBay for $1,525, and individual ones go for about $20, or two days wages for a laboring man, if he has a crummy job.

It's too late to make a long story short, but I just bought one of these things, unused, on eBay for less than $20, and I'm scared to touch it. And not just because the oil on my hand might effect the surface (many nibs have a coating that should be removed somehow so ink won't bead up on the metal; some old-time penman supposedly used to pop the nib into their mouth and let saliva do the trick, and no, I'm not going to try it). What I'm going to do is, seal it in lucite and put it in a tank filled with helium then bury it in the backyard. And when the economy heads south and nobody's buying cartoons, I'll trade it for fuel, liquor, breadfruit and copra.

But in the meantime, guess what? The nib manufacturing firm Hiro Leonardt has started producing a nib closely based on the old Principality. It's called the Leonardt EF Principal, and I bought a handful of them, and dang, it's a nice nib to draw with. I'm sure I'm not using it correctly, as it's meant for ornamental lettering on smooth paper with iron gall ink instead of drawing goofy cartoons on vellum bristol with India ink, and I can feel it pulling ahead of me, like a racehorse forced to pull a garbage wagon. Maybe it's embarrassed. But it's also more responsive and better made than most of today's nibs, which for the most part are stamped out of aluminum foil by poorly-trained lemurs. So there ya go, a ray of hope in a dark world.

Mozart's Birthday

A cheap & lazy repost.

Deadline Zombie, and a Question

The above is a current self portrait, except my hair is actually longer and I'm wearing socks.

And I have a question that anyone who uses drawing ink might be able to help me out with. I have a bottle of ink that's about to go bad; it has a slight sour smell that'll likely just get worse. It's the good kind of ink, Dr. Ph. Martin's High Carb, and I hate to dump it out. Is there any way to prevent it from spoiling? It's in a 30 ml bottle that I'd cleaned out, poured from a larger bottle, and I'm not short on ink. But these days I don't want to waste ink, especially the expensive stuff. Anybody got a suggestion?

Last Chance

One last shot across the brow. This was for the New Yorker a few years back.

Saturday's Almanack

I did one like this for Bush, too, and I'll post it if I can find it.

Morning Sing-Along

Good morning! It's 12º in Arlington. Let's warm up with an Ann Telnaes sing-along! 

First Cul de Sacs

This is the first Cul de Sac, which appeared in the Post Magazine on February 8, 2004.

This is the second.

This is the rough for the third, which I'd planned to be the first (note paste-overs).
And here's the third.
More TK, as us print journalists say.

Saturday's Almanack

If you live in the DC area, you know what I'm talking about.

The Elderberries

Today's Elderberries by the mad comic genius Corey Pandolph has a shocking development. If Dusty and Boone think I can fix a radio, they're in for an awful let-down. And my thanks to Corey for drawing my nose not too big.

Battle of the Bands

Hey Kids! Let's go to a rock 'n' roll concert! Featuring Titanic Tom Toles of Suspicious Package on drums! YAAAAAAAAAAAAY!

Go here.

Saturday's Almanack

The "Corrections" in a newspaper can make entertaining reading, like the animal report column, or the restaurant closings. I've done one of these almost every year since 19-ought-97, and I'll keep doing 'em until somebody laffs.

Happy New Year

When I was a kid, we'd watch Guy Lombardo and at midnight, under the watchful eyes of my parents, we'd go outside, bang pot lids together and yell Happy New Year. And we still do, only without Guy.

The Rest

Here are the other 2,500 drawings I did for the Dave Barry piece. As you can see, I didn't exaggerate the work involved. My many thanks to the mighty J Porter, Art Director nonpareil, who somehow managed to shoehorn all these into a 30 page magazine and still leave room for the words.

Year In Review

The Wash Post Mag with Dave Barry's Year In Review comes out today. Here are some of the 5,000 drawings I did for it.

Francis Pharcellus Church

I did this in 1997, on the 100th anniversary of the editorial. It's all true, though I might've exaggerated the moustache.

Stay Tooned

This was for Mr. John Read, who edits & publishes Stay Tooned, with the combined energy, charm & talent of ten men. Plus two!

Today's Cul de Sac

This is the original version of today's Sunday strip. It ran in the Post Magazine two years ago. What I like is the tree vender, who's pretty much a funeral director, if not an outright mortician. Weirdly enough, yesterday's Lio plays around with a Frankenstein tree too, only differently http://www.gocomics.com/lio/2008/12/20/. I'd sure like to arrange a playdate with Mark Tatulli's kids.