Sack O'Ink

Sometimes everything works out just fine.

The afternoon began with a bleak moment. The Inkette and I had driven to Oxford for the day and enjoyed a splendid lunch in an Indian restaurant called Chutneys. So far, so good. With the spices still on my tongue, I then made the customary pilgrimage down High Street to Pens Plus, a fine pen shop that has previously featured in the endlessly thrilling narrative of Ink Quest. My heart began to beat a little faster when I saw the sign in the distance, and I bravely put to the back of mind the caffeine headache that was developing to fever pitch. (If I don't have a triple espresso in the morning, and then another one by around 2pm, I start to get horrendous withdrawal symptoms.)

I arrived at the shop in a state of frenzied anticipation. I pushed the door. It refused to budge. It was then that I noticed the total darkness inside. A sign on the window casually announced that the store would be closed until 4 September. Reciting Frank Costanza's 'Serenity now!' mantra silently to myself, I peered desperately into the shop, hoping that someone would be inside and take pity on me. There was, of course, no one in there. To make matters worse, I could see a display of the new Caran d'Ache 'Colours of the Earth' inks on top of the counter (I've been very keen to get hold of a bottle of the Grand Canyon, a lovely dark brown, but the new range is somewhat difficult to find in the UK at present.) I could see the object of my desire, but the Grand Canyon itself might as well have stood between us.

Walking back towards the city centre, I drowned my sorrows in a double espresso. Probably looking like the figure from Munch's The Scream (good to see that it's been recovered, inkidentally), I wandered woefully down Turl Street. And then, dear readers, a miracle came to pass. I suddenly noticed a shop that had, until that moment, escaped my attention. It was called Scriptum, and it had elegant bottles of ink in the window. I crossed the threshold with a fluttering pulse and found myself surrounded by leather-bound journals, inkwells, dip pens, and, of course, ink.

My eye was quickly drawn to a set of shelves in the back corner of the shop. Approaching, I discovered inks that I'd never seen before, some of them made exclusively for Scriptum. I enquired about a particularly beautiful bottle of sepia, but I was informed that it was only suitable for dip pens. The assistant did, however, immediately lift my spirits by pointing out precisely which of the mysterious inks upon the shelves could be used in fountain pens. After some deliberation, I settled upon a bottle of Abraxas 'Anthrazit'. This Swiss ink is completely new to me, and it comes in a rather shapely Herbin/Pelikan-style bottle with a built-in pen rest, so I decided to buy a sample without trying it out first. (The colour, I can now report, is a very interesting dark grey.)

From the moment that I approached the counter with my new object of desire (so fickle...), the Scriptum experience became even more magical. I'm spectacularly superficial, so packaging and other details that many people deem unimportant matter to me. I was delighted, then, to see that the shop writes its receipts by hand and uses distinguished grey bags with thick handles made out of string (think Tiffany & Co. and you're halfway there). But before it could reach this bag, my Abraxas ink was placed inside another bag. This latter object is best described as a small green sack with a drawstring at the top (think of what a Hobbit might use to carry spare change around and you're halfway there). I don't mean a jewellers' pouch; I mean a sack that measures (I've just discovered) 15cm x 22.5cm. (In case you don't believe me, dear readers, I've posted a picture above.) So stunned was I by this remarkable attention to detail that I forgot to ask if this sacerdotal item is used to package all inks sold in the shop or if it merely comes with bottles of Abraxas.

This happened about six hours ago. As I sit here now, back home West of the Wye, I can't help wondering if Scriptum was a miraculous, mystical apparition. Why a sack? (I'm not complaining; it's simply surreal.) And how had I walked down Turl Street on numerous previous occasions without noticing the shop? Was it sent by the God of Ink to lift me from my sack o'woe with a sack o'whoah!?

Ink in use today: Abraxas Anthrazit; Herbin Gris Nuage.

Dressed to Quill

I've even started dressing like my inks.

The Inkette and I happened to be in Bath for a few hours yesterday, and I managed to squeeze in a quick trip to Woods, one of the city's long-established stationery shops, where I bought a bottle of J. Herbin Gris Nuage. Ever since my precious bottle of Omas Grey went mouldy a few months ago, I've been looking for a replacement. It's pointless even to contemplate tracking down any kind of Omas ink in the UK, so I've been grazing and gazing further afield. Noodler's Lexington Gray kept me happy for a couple of weeks at the beginning of the summer, but I eventually realized that it's a little too dark for my liking. Gris Nuage, meanwhile, is a much lighter affair, and I believe that it's partially filled the gap left by the traumatic departure of Omas Grey from my desk. (I kept the beautiful bottle, of course; we'll always have Bologna.) It doesn't quite have the remarkable tones of its Italian counterpart -- what does? -- but it's light enough and nuanced enough to help me through the period of mourning.

I've been using the new acquisition in work today, in fact, and it suddenly struck me as I was admiring the delicate grey scrawl on the sheet of paper before my eyes that I'd unconsciously chosen from my wardrobe this morning a grey suit that perfectly matched my choice of ink. I feel, dear readers, that this could be the beginning of an exciting new phase of the Ink Quest. I'm going to need a shade of ink that exactly corresponds with every piece of clothing that I own, and I'm going to need a cross-referenced catalogue of some kind. People spend hours matching ties with jackets, or shoes with trousers, and I see no reason why the same sartorial code can't be extended to address choice of ink. This is the beginning of sinkchronized dressing. I will henceforth suit my ink, and my ink will suit my suit.

Ink in use today: Herbin Gris Nuage.

PS: A word of warning: I also discovered today that there is a slight problem with using a pale grey ink. I was writing with it in a meeting that went on until the room, due to a combination of clouds and evening's approach, became increasingly poorly lit. I eventually became unable to see my notes and had to ask if I could switch on the lights because my grey ink had become invisible ink.

Powdering, Ghosting, Ink Fly

Ink has its own secret language, I've discovered.

Yesterday afternoon consisted of a trip to Hay-on-Wye with the Inkette and the Inkette's older sister (let's call them the Inkettes, shall we, dear readers?). Hay-on-Wye, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the place, is a tiny town in the Welsh borderlands that is usually known as the secondhand book capital of the world. Even though there are only 1450 residents, there are about 40 bookshops, and it's estimated that these collectively house about 1.2 million books.

The most famous place in town is probably Richard Booth's, a huge, anarchic cavern of a shop (it was the world's largest secondhand bookshop at one point, but I have a feeling that it's since lost that particular crown), where you never know what you're going to find. Booth put Hay on the map when, in 1961, he started trading books from the town. He later caused a national scandal when, on 1 April 1977, he declared himself King of Hay, named his horse 'Prime Minister', and called for Home Rule for his independent kingdom. What was meant as a joke was actually taken seriously by the British media.

If you're lucky, you'll catch a glimpse of King Richard when you visit the town. He was actually serving customers when I walked into the main shop yesterday afternoon. By the time I got to the till with my acquisitions, though, he'd disappeared. (So had the Inkettes, in case you were wondering, dear readers. Even though surrounded by over a million books, they managed to buy nothing but jewellery and a couple of ornaments. Inkette Senior, when grilled, did try to claim that she'd been desperately looking for a Virginia Woolf first edition, but this was clearly a lie.) Anyway, let me tell you about the wonders that I discovered in Booth's. In the cramped basement, I found a late 1950s American paperback edition of John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer and a 1960s imprint -- also American -- of John O'Hara's Hellbox. (I've never read any O'Hara, but I recently learned that John Updike thinks that he's the literary equivalent of Edward Hopper, so I've been curious to take a look.) Upstairs, however, I found the real trophy: a hefty hardback book called Printing Ink Manual, published by the Technical Training Board of the Society of British Printing Ink Manufacturers in 1961. I simply can't understand why no one else had snapped up this 746-page beast.

My real interest, as you know, dear readers, is in fountain pen ink, but I couldn't resist buying the Printing Ink Manual, and for several reasons. First, its opening chapter offers a concise history of all forms of ink. Second, it has some gloriously technical information packed into its pages. The chapter entitled 'Varnishes' is particularly bewildering to a reader with no scientific background, as it contains diagrams, formulae, and sentences such as the following: 'On the whole it will be found that the proportions of styrene or vinyl toluene in the co-polymer should not be very high and that the vinyl toluene co-polymers have certain advantages over similar styrene co-polymers' (p.580). What really made me part with my £10, though, were the parts of the book that reveal the secret language of ink. Chapter 21, at first glance, would appear to be particularly informative in this respect, as it conveniently explains what is meant by, among other things: powdering, fluffing, non-trapping, ghosting, non-bottoming, frothmarks, scumming, catch-up, plate blinding, gear marks, picking, and ink fly.

There is, in other words, a language of ink in which I must become fluent if the Ink Quest is ever to be a success. Ferdinand de Saussure tells us, in his Course in General Linguistics, that language is what allows us to think, to conceptualize, to understand the world. 'Without language', he writes, 'thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language.' It follows that I must learn the language of ink if I am genuinely to understand ink. Everyday conversations must, from this moment on, casually refer to 'frothmarks' and 'ink fly'. Not an hour must elapse without the phrase 'plate blinding' falling effortlessly from my lips. I wonder if it's possible to buy a Linguaphone-type set of CDs called 'Teach Yourself Ink'. You know the type of thing I mean: Repeat after me: The frothmarks are non-trapping the ink fly. I believe that I have entered the realm of linkguistics.

Ink in use today: Levenger Cocoa.

The Brotherhood of Ink

If the person who designs Venetian blinds for Ikea is reading this, I owe you an apology. I have called you every name under the sun this afternoon as I struggled to install three of your creations in my living room.

I should have been cursing my own inadequacy in the realm of DIY all along, of course. I have only myself to blame for attaching the brackets the wrong way up, the purchasing of completely inappropriate screws, and the lack of crucial implements in my attempt at a toolbox. My biggest failings when it comes to such activities are my total lack of interest in buying any kind of tool and my parallel belief that all DIY tasks can be approached with a basic Swiss Army penknife. (Is this, inkidentally, why Switzerland is neutral? Do Swiss soldiers carry nothing but a penknife with a corkscrew, nailfile, and toothpick?)

I soon realized that my miniature screwdriver was going to be of no use today, so I reluctantly went to the DIY shop and bought a few items. Later, in the full flurry of construction, I decided to amuse the Inkette by casually wedging behind my ear the pencil that I had been using to (mis)mark drilling points, as if such a muscular gesture were second nature to me. Her laughter spoke volumes.

My fooling around, though, made me realize just how quickly and easily a pencil lodged behind an ear conjures up a whole persona. But why can't we do the same with fountain pens? Wouldn't this be the perfect way for someone to signify his or her commitment to the preservation of real ink, his or her foppery (I'm stretching the dictionary definition of 'fop' to include women, as I see no reason to limit foppishness to men), his or her immaculate and nuanced wit? We would know each other at a glance, dear readers, on trains, planes, buses, pavements. No longer would we need to scrutinize the fingertips of strangers for tell-tale ink stains. No longer would we need to lurk in dark corners of stationery shops, one eye on the ink shelves. Our pens would be our badges, our sign of undying commitment. It's not unusual to see people here in Wales wearing little orange badges in the shape of a speech bubble on their lapels to show that they're learning Welsh (some of the badges, in fact, also have 'Dw I'n Dysgu Cymraeg' -- I'm learning Welsh -- written around the edge). Our fountain pens wedged behind our ears would mark our desire to preserve something that's similarly threatened by an invading force. We, the Brotherhood of Ink, will not be colonized by the biro! We will fight for our right to write! Lend me your ears, brothers and sisters!

Ink in use today: Noodler's Walnut.

A Postcard

Apologies for the silence, dear readers -- I've been on holiday. What did you do for entertainment and sparkling wit in my absence?

We went to the beautiful Cornish village of Padstow for the week. Here are some highlights of the stay:

- Tasting the finest crème brûlée of all time in Rick Stein's bistro at St. Petroc's Hotel. I challenge anyone to find a more nuanced specimen.

- Being entertained for several hours at a demonstration evening by Mr Stein himself. I did, though, manage to create a Costanza-like situation by politely declining, as a teetotal vegetarian, to taste any of the dishes and wines that the King of Seafood was offering. I could see a puzzled Why on earth are you here? expression on the faces of the other members of the audience, but it's not as if my presence hasn't provoked such a response on numerous occasions in the past.

- Visiting the tiny Padstow Cinedrome, a still-operating cinema dating back to 1924 that has been preserved in all its velvet-curtained-and-seated glory. The woman from the ticket office even came out to say goodbye to everyone as they left. I did, though, briefly fear for my safety as a foreign citizen (unless, of course, you want to go down the old Cornwall-and-Wales-are-both-Celtic route) when my query about the availability of salted popcorn resulted in my being told that 'the locals don't like it'.

- Watching a friend -- let's call him Nixon -- who happened also to be on holiday in the area taking his first surfing lessons in Watergate Bay, where the Inkette and I were having lunch at Jamie Oliver's Fifteen (great food and atmosphere; dubious espresso). The day after we watched Nixon riding the waves like a master, a spectacular 'wipe out' sent him off to Newquay Hospital with an injured ankle. Get well soon and get back on that board, Nixon!

- Racing through John Updike's great new novel, Terrorist, in a day or two, but then realizing that I'd forgotten to bring anything else with me. (I believe that a lost Heidegger manuscript discussed the existential horror of being-without-book.) Luckily, I spotted a copy of Martin Amis' The Information in a secondhand bookshop in Bude, so I'm currently enjoying my first return to the gloriously misanthropic text since it came out in the mid-1990s.

- Meeting a friendly Cavalier King Charles Spaniel called Muffin on the Ferry over to Rock.

- Eating, on the side of the harbour while the water lapped its approval, the finest portion of chips and curry sauce ever produced.

As you can see, many of these highlights involved food, so I'm currently feeling a little taxed in the belt region. Back home yesterday evening, I ate a very healthy dish of chick peas and rice -- that counts as a suitable period of dieting, doesn't it?

While the holiday was wonderful, I do have one small complaint. And you'll be pleased to learn that it's ink-related, dear readers. Seaside towns in Britain are exceptionally good at turning every possible aspect of the ocean into a tourist souvenir. One of the shops in Padstow, for instance, sells nothing but shells. I could not, however, find any ink-related gifts for sale in the village's shops. As both the cuttlefish and the squid produce their own ink, I see this as a missed opportunity. Wouldn't people queue up in their hundreds to buy a bottle of cuttlefish ink with which to write their postcards? Wouldn't it be a nice touch for a hotel to provide a small bottle of squid ink with the 'Please Rate Your Stay' form left in your room?

Or is there a major ethical dilemma here? I know that a cuttlefish squirts out a cloud of its ink when it feels threatened or scared, so presumably giant underwater screens showing something like The Blair Witch Project could be used to produce the desired effect. But is it possible to extract the ink from a squid without harming or killing the creature? And do cuttlefish have a limited supply of their protective fluid? Perhaps my plan to revolutionize decades of seafront-souvenir tradition is dangerously irresponsible. (I heard the owner of Padstow's shell shop telling an inquisitive customer that it's now illegal to sell sharks' teeth, for instance.) Perhaps my dream shop, Ink or Swim, would have to be run from a shady smugglers' cove under cover of darkness. My code-name would be Du Maurier, and I would wear a trenchcoat and smoky glasses. Secret phrases -- The squid squirts at midnight, for example -- would be whispered in the moonlight. Funds would be wired to a bank account with neither name nor number. I would need my own protective cloud of ink to throw the coastguard off my trail and cover up any inkcriminating evidence.

Ink in use today: Diamine Prussian Blue.

Limited Ink

I've signed myself away.

I'm technically on holiday at the moment, but I had to call into work today to sort out a few things. One of my tasks was to sign something like ninety letters to students. I could have asked my secretary to 'pp' them in my absence, or I could have splashed out and bought one of those signature stamping devices, but I believe that the personal touch is important (doesn't 'pp' derive from the Latin for 'The person who wrote this letter really doesn't care about you'?). Besides, it's always good to have an excuse to use up a lot of ink, I feel.

For that added personal touch, I decided to use the green-black mixture that I recently created in the lab. Yes, dear students, that's right: while the government is driving you ever deeper into debt, I am sending you letters signed with an ink that I have meticulously crafted by hand. I'm sure that this eases the pain of a £15,000 overdraft.

By the time I'd signed about forty of the letters, I was feeling a little delirious. The lines that I was making on the page had started to seem random, meaningless, alien to me. You know that strange feeling you get when you say 'banana' over and over again? That's exactly how I felt. By the time I'd reached something like number seventy, I was mildly intoxicated, and I think that I may even have been hallucinating when I waved my italic nib across the final sheet. My memories of those final moments are a little hazy, I'm afraid, dear readers, so I cannot give you a reliable account. It took an espresso and a pain au raisin in the café around the corner from my office to close the doors of perception and bring me back to reality.

As I was coming home on the train several hours later, the cause of the delirium suddenly became apparent to me. In an essay called 'Signature, Event, Context' (reproduced in Limited Inc), Jacques Derrida discusses the curious contradiction of the signature. On the one hand, it's unique, beyond copying by another hand, the singular mark of authenticity. I sign to prove that I am who I am, and only I can sign my name genuinely. On the other hand, however, a signature must be infinitely reproducible in different contexts if it is to guarantee my authenticity over a period of time. No one ever signs just once in his or her life, as I have proved ninety times over this very afternoon. Unique yet perfectly reproducible. Singular yet endlessly iterable. This is the nature of the signature.

I think, then, that signing my name ninety times in a short space of time brought this contradiction to such a frenzied level that my very being was disturbed. As the ink flowed and flowed, something of me was drained away ... and then instantly replenished, over and over again. My very essence was flickering, fading in and out. I was both affirming and erasing my genuine self with every flourish of my pen. I was the real me in all but name.

Ink in use today: NB's Green-Black mixture; Diamine Prussian Blue

Last Night a Bottle of Ink Saved My Life

I feel like I've been to the end of the world and back.

The Inkette and I have just returned from a lovely afternoon in Rhossili Bay (pictured above), a small and quiet cove about sixty miles further west along the Welsh coast from Ink Towers. It's particularly quiet, I think, because Rhossili is where the road quite simply runs out. You don't pass through the village unless you're going over the cliffs...

After several hours of lazing in the sun, feasting from the picnic hamper, and strolling along the sand, we headed home through the narrow lanes. About five miles on, though, we suddenly found ourselves in a huge tailback. There had clearly been some kind of accident up ahead, as the one or two cars that came towards us stopped and passed on some secret to the drivers in front of us, who immediately turned around and drove off in the opposite direction. As no one bothered to tell us what was happening, we also decided to turn around and retrace our steps. We stopped in the next village that we came to, and I looked at the map. I realized to my horror that there was only one other way home ... and it was through a series of lanes that were unnumbered and explicitly marked on the map as steep. We decided to risk it.

The first worrying sign was quite literally that: a road sign that said 'Unsuitable for heavy vehicles'. As we sailed merrily past it, I wondered if our small Ford Fiesta could possibly be classed as heavy. Is there even such a thing as a light car? The way I see it, if you can't pick something up with one hand while holding an espresso in the other, it's heavy. I started to get really worried when the lane narrowed to little more than the width of the car. And then I saw it, the worst sign of all: grass growing in the middle of the lane. Every time I've found myself driving down such a road (no, let's call it a track), something bad has happened. I can remember once spending about an hour driving round and round a maze-like complex of such lanes with a friend -- let's call him Richard -- looking for a place in Wales called Penrhos, where another friend was due to get married not long after. We'd identified it on the map, and we'd plotted our route with precision, but the village simply didn't seem to exist. We eventually asked a farmer, but he made things worse by pointing to open fields. We eventually gave up and went home, only to discover several days later that the are multiple places called Penrhos; we should have been looking about sixty miles to the north.

Anyway, back to my tale... While this afternoon's lane had plenty of grass to offer, it was devoid of road signs. After a couple of miles, I was convinced that we were heading in the wrong direction. All I wanted was to be somewhere near a shop that sold ink, because if you're near a shop that sells ink, you must be somewhere identifiable, somewhere where streets have names and numbers. (Even though I grew up in a fairly rural part of South Wales, years of city dwelling have made me thoroughly urban. I just typed 'urbane' in error there, by the way. My unconscious is such a good judge of character.) Suddenly, we arrived at a junction that lacked a sign. One route would lead us home, and the other would lead us to the tumbleweed-filled core of the heart of the middle of nowhere. And then it suddenly came to me, like the words of Obi Wan Kenobi. Use the sun, NB. Yes, dear readers, I located the sun, which was on its way to setting in the west, and triumphantly drove in the opposite direction. Before long, we saw Swansea on the horizon, and Swansea meant that we were definitely going the right way. But I really knew that we were safe when we passed through Sketty, which is not too far from Swansea city centre, and, as we drove past a row of shops, the word 'ink' caught my eye. No, dear readers, I have not discovered an ink emporium: it was a tattoo parlour called Skin 'n' Ink. I breathed a sigh of true relief at this point, for the presence of ink meant that our skins had been saved.

Ink in use today: Diamine Royal Blue.