“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” William Faulkner

As someone who has used vintage fountain pens for years, I’ve had moments of genuine frustration with their idiosyncrasies. They show their age in all the ways you’d expect: they burp ink at the worst moments and are astonishingly finicky. You can only use black or blue ink. They need constant maintenance and endless patience. But, boy, they’re beautiful. And their nibs have so much character, emotion, and uniqueness that you forgive their failings almost immediately.

I used to wistfully wonder about putting these vintage nibs on modern pens. Nibs, after all, are the engines that make fountain pens come alive. A great nib can make a humble pen feel extraordinary. It all became possible when I came across Mr-PFM on Reddit.

He gives vintage nibs from brands such as Sheaffer and Waterman new life by fitting them into JoWo or Bock nib units with specialized feeds. JoWo and Bock nib units are industry standards, which open the opportunity to adapt these nibs to different pens.

So, as a fan of vintage nibs, I have enthusiastically embraced the idea of marrying old craftsmanship to new bodies. Through tribal knowledge, I have learned that you can put a Montblanc 146 nib in a Bock 250 unit. I have also found that a Flexible Nib Factory custom JoWo unit that accepts a Bock feed is all you need to breathe new life into a pen with a Montblanc 146 or an Aurora nib.

And yet, beneath all the technical tinkering, the romance of vintage remains the heart of it for me. It is an odd dichotomy: I live in the future, yet I have reverence for these things from the past, because they remind me of how well things were made then. A hundred-year-old nib still works as promised, though a phone from a decade ago would find itself in an alien world.

Maybe I love old things because they are layered with mystery, softened by time. Marcel Proust wrote, “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of how things were.” I like the idea that vintage objects carry not just history but imagination. There’s something profoundly human about loving things that have lived before us.

To write with a vintage nib is to feel time collapsing ever so gently into the present. Some of my cherished vintage nibs now live in pens from makers I admire. They carry the patina of time, the traces of words written, stories told, and love letters never sent. They are silent witnesses to the ordinary history of people, which I find deeply romantic.

P.S. Here are photographs of some of my favorite pens with my favorite vintage nibs.