Nakaya
Nakaya Portable Writer Kikyo
Nakaya Portable Writer Kikyo
The flawless Kikyo (blue) surface is created layer upon layer by carefully building up and sanding the urushi lacquer. The result here is the Portable Writer fountain pen with a deep lustrous sheen and intense blue color.
If simplicity is the highest form of elegance, this is it. A Nakaya fountain pen achieves greatness by virtue of its streamlined design, excellent materials, flawless surface and saturated colors.
This Nakaya fountain pen is made of hard rubber and coated with urushi, a material made from the sap of a Japanese lacquer tree. The process of collecting the urushi (sap) and applying many layers of lacquer to this fountain pen takes three months to complete.
This is a full sized pen with exquisite balance.
The urushi tradition is historic and profound in Japan, where lacquer ware has adorned utilitarian and decorative objects for centuries. The Kikyo blue is a very compelling color.
The Nakaya Portable Writer is handcrafted from ebonite and Urushi lacquer, and comes standard with your choice of solid gold 14k single-tone nib in Extra Fine, Fine, Medium, Broad, or Extra Broad, with Fine Soft, Medium Soft, and Super Extra Fine nibs also available.
Nakaya pens ship in a solid softwood shipping box decorated with Japanese Kanji script and lined with decorative rice paper. A fabric pen ""kimono"" and starter box of Platinum brand cartridges are also included, making this pen a lovely presentation item. Sensible and elegant packaging has long been a hallmark of the Nakaya brand.
Unless requested otherwise, each pen or nib you purchase from us will be carefully examined, tested, and optimized for your personal writing characteristics before it ships. See our nib set-up and optimization page for more details.
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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.. |