Once Upon a Time, there was a pen company named Waverley. Waverley lived in England and was a very good little pen company. It made pens like this one, which it named Cameron.
What you can’t see from the photo above is what makes the Waverley so different from other pens of its time. The differentiating feature is the Waverley nib:
The idea behind this slightly upturned shape was that it presents the tip to the paper as if the pen were held at a somewhat lower angle above the paper, and that makes the nib write more smoothly. Among the small number of other pen makers who picked up on the supposed enhancement was Sheaffer, which began making its own version of the Waverley design in the latter part of the 1930s. Here’s a Sheaffer Waverley in a Balance Valiant from about 1940:
Yes, the feed really is white.
As you can see, Sheaffer took the geometry a little farther, actually turning up the nib instead of just shaping the tipping material to create the upward sweep. In addition, Sheaffer shaped the tip as a duo-point. This is a very, very sweet design. It’s sweet enough, in fact, that when Sheaffer developed the Triumph nib in the 1940s, the upturned tip made it into the design — and when the Inlaid Nib™ appeared in 1959, it too had the upturned tip. And these various Sheaffer nibs (excepting only the Inlaid Nib on the Intrigue, which is inexplicably straight instead of upturned) are famous for their excellent writing qualities, so clearly the Waverley enhancement works as intended.
Fast forward about 50 years. I was recently regrinding a broad nib to make it into a fine, and it occurred to me to try the Waverley thing. My regrinding, overall, came out about halfway between Waverley’s and Sheaffer’s designs, and it was remarkably successful. It was so successful, in fact, that I decided to go whole hog on one of my own pens, a Bexley 56 into which I’d slipped a plain 14K nib. Here’s what that pen’s nib now looks like:
The upturn is a little more pronounced than on a Sheaffer nib, but doggonnit, the thing writes like a buttered fingertip on warm glass — and it’s a good duo-point. So maybe it’s not all that extreme after all. That’s my story, and I’m not wavering from it.
