Concept
A quill is a writing tool made from a moulted flight feather (preferably a primary wing-feather) of a large bird. Quills were used for writing with ink before the invention of the dip pen, the metal-nibbed pen, the fountain pen, and, eventually, the ballpoint pen. As with the earlier reed pen (and later dip pen), a quill has no internal ink reservoir and therefore needs to periodically be dipped into an inkwell during writing. The hand-cut goose quill is rarely used as a calligraphy tool anymore because many papers are now derived from wood pulp and would quickly wear a quill down. However it is still the tool of choice for a few scribes who have noted that quills provide an unmatched sharp stroke as well as greater flexibility than a steel pen. The shaft of a flight feather is long and hollow, making it an obvious candidate for being crafted into a pen. The process of making a quill from a feather involves curing the shaft to harden it, then fashioning its tip into a nib using a pen knife or other small cutting tool. A quill pen is in effect a hollow tube which has one closed end, and has one open end at which part of the tube wall extends into a sharp point and has in it a thin slit leading to this point. The hollow shaft of the feather (the calamus) acts as an ink reservoir and ink flows to the tip through the slit by capillary action. In a carefully prepared quill, the slit does not widen through wetting with ink and drying. It will retain its shape adequately, requiring only infrequent sharpening; it can be used repeatedly until there is little left of it. The strongest quills come from the primary flight feathers discarded by birds during their annual moult. Although feathers from the left wing are supposedly favored by right-handed writers because the feather curves away from the sight line, over the back of the hand, the quill barrel is cut to six or seven inches in length so no such consideration of curvature or 'sight-line' is necessary.
