SCRIBO Fountain Pens

The difference between the SCRIBO 14kt and 18kt nibs is flex. Both are gold and run SCRIBO's ebonite feed. The 14kt "Feel the Flex" nib is a highly-responsive flexible gold nib that rewards a lighter touch and gives you beautiful line variation. The 18kt "Feel the Writing" nib is smoother, firmer, and built for everyday writing.

Choose the 18kt standard nib for everyday writing and the 14kt flexible nib for deliberate line variation. Most people are happier starting with the standard 18kt SCRIBO nib. It's smooth, predictable, and easy to enjoy every day. The flexible 14kt nib is for someone who wants writing to become part of the experience rather than simply the way words reach the page. It's wonderfully expressive, but it also rewards patience and practice, and will politely remind you to slow down if you try to write at ninety miles an hour.

The differences among the SCRIBO Feel, La Dotta, Piuma, and Flow are in the shape and filling system, not the nib. Feel is the original flat-sided piston filler, twelve facets. Flow takes the faceting further with 24 facets, also piston-filled. La Dotta is a rounder piston-filled pen. All three piston fillers draw bottled ink into the pen with a 1.42 ml ink capacity. Piuma is slimmer and lighter, and it uses a standard international cartridge/converter system, so you can use cartridges or fill from SCRIBO bottled ink with the included converter. The nib options stay the same, so this choice is really about how you want to fill the pen, not which one writes better.

SCRIBO fountain pen nib sizes cover an unusually wide range, especially on the 18kt "Feel the Writing" nib. It is offered from extra-extra-fine all the way up to triple-broad, plus a 1.1mm stub italic, so there's room to get very specific about how you like your line. The 14kt "Feel the Flex" nib keeps to the finer side, from extra-fine through broad, where the flex has room to do what it was designed to do.

The SCRIBO "Feel the Flex" nib is genuinely flexible, but it is not trying to be a vintage wet-noodle. It gives real line variation with a light hand, especially for writers interested in pointed-pen styles like Copperplate. The tradeoff is that it asks for a little patience. If you write quickly or press heavily, the nib can feel more sensitive than expected. If you slow down and let it respond, the "Feel the Flex" starts to perform.

A SCRIBO fountain pen is worth the money for a writer who wants the original OMAS nib character in a modern, hand-finished pen. These are not pens you choose just because you want a recognizable logo on the cap. You choose SCRIBO because you care about how the nib feels on paper. The hand-turned bodies, numbered runs, and Bologna-made craftsmanship all matter and support the writing experience.

The SCRIBO nib is not an old OMAS-branded nib. It is a new nib made by SCRIBO today, using OMAS tooling and knowledge passed down by artisans in Bologna. When OMAS closed in 2016, its former artisans founded SCRIBO in Bologna and acquired the Bock tooling to reproduce the discontinued OMAS nib, which is why the flex character reads so close to the original.

A SCRIBO compares to an Aurora or Visconti on the nib rather than the catalog: the OMAS-derived gold nib and ebonite feed give SCRIBO a distinct writing feel, while Aurora and Visconti bring longer histories and wider ranges to choose from. SCRIBO builds in small numbered runs from former OMAS artisans, so each pen is a narrower, more deliberate proposition. All three are established Italian makers, and the choice comes down to which writing feel and which house you want.

The best model to start with is usually the SCRIBO Piuma. It's the slimmest and lightest of the four, and the standard international cartridge/converter filling system keeps things simple. No piston mechanism to learn, and it still uses the 14kt flexible and 18kt nib.

Yes, every SCRIBO fountain pen we sell is genuine and backed by the manufacturer's warranty because Goldspot is an authorized SCRIBO retailer. SCRIBO provides a 3-year guarantee from the date of purchase on the craftsmanship of each pen.