Nakaya
Nakaya Naka-ai Cigar Enjoying The Moon Cat
Nakaya Naka-ai Cigar Enjoying The Moon Cat
The whimsically titled Enjoying The Moon Cat is one of Nakaya's most popular motifs, and is now being made available for the first time on our own exclusive Naka-ai model. Each pen is hand-finished in exacting Yakou Maki-e techinique in a process that can require a year or more.
Our complimentary nib tuning personalizes your Nakaya experience by adjusting pressure and ink flow to match your personal preferences. Nakaya 14k solid gold nibs also make excellent starting points for our exclusive nib customizations - choose the Fine Soft for our noted Spencerian modification, or a Broad or Extra Broad for the Architect's Point customization.
This wry and lyrical motif, originally intended as a one-off design for a dedicated cat lover, has become one of the most popular offered by Nakaya. Both Yakou Maki-e and Tame-sukashi techniques are utilized to realize the evocative scene. Each pen is hand-painted by a skilled artisan in the traditional craft center of Wajima on the west coast of Japan.
The Nakaya Naka-ai model, a nibs.com exclusive, was designed by company founder and owner John Mottishaw in conjunction with Nakaya master pen designer Shinichi Yoshida. The pen utilizes Nakaya's convenient cartridge-converter system - it can fill with any bottled fountain pen ink when fitted with the reusable converter, provided by us free of charge with your order, and can also use Platinum brand disposable ink cartridges.
Each Nakaya pen ships in a special softwood presentation box decorated with kanji-style script. A fabric pen kimono and starter box of ink cartridges is included along with the converter. We are the sole authorized Nakaya dealer in North America.
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Customization Guide
Stub
 
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Above is the same size nib after a regrind to Stub. A regrind to Stub is often a good place to start for your first customization. Â A Stub nib provides broad down-strokes and narrow cross-strokes while writing, and is less position-sensitive on the paper than the crisper and slightly more demanding cursive italic.
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Cursive Italic
 
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More demanding, but also providing crisper edges and more line-width variation, is the very popular customization to Cursive Italic. This also provides broad down-strokes and narrow cross-strokes, but is also more position-sensitive in terms of how the pen is held and requires more skill on the part of the user. This is a common customization for artists and calligraphers, but is still smooth enough to make for a good everyday writer.
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Formal Italic
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Formal Italic is an even crisper and more demanding customization than either cursive italic or left oblique, and is usually utilized for calligraphy and by the most experienced users. This provides broad down-strokes and narrow cross-strokes, with even crisper corners and edges than a cursive italic - this is an extremely position-sensitive customization.
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Left Oblique
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 Commonly used for signatures and correspondence, the Left Oblique customization provides broad diagonal strokes and narrow cross-strokes, and like a cursive italic, is more position-sensitive and demanding than a stub. The whole pen must be rotated to the left in order to write smoothly, without skipping. The "Left" in Left Oblique refers to the cut of the nib itself, and does not refer to the handedness of the writer. |
Architect's Point (Also for Arabic and Hebraic writing)
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A more exotic regrind is that to Architect’s Point. Named after the style of writing used by Frank Lloyd Wright, this regrind is the opposite of cursive italic, and provides for broad cross-strokes and narrow down-strokes. This also tends to be a particularly useful customization for those practicing Arabic or Hebraic calligraphy. |
Spencerian
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Perhaps our most popular customization, but also one of the most advanced, the Mottishaw Spencerian Customization has gained special attention from being featured in a customer's YouTube video which has now received over twelve million views! The Spencerian starts from a semi-soft 14k nib and adds additional flex and a regrind to needlepoint to create a specialized writing point used for copperplate calligraphy. For more details, visit our special Spencerian page.. |