Mutiny on the Penquod

Captain Ahab had the right idea: he got results and ran a tight ship by being tough with the crew of the Pequod. Ishmael refers to his 'overbearing terrors' at one point, for instance, as he relates what happened when Stubb foolishly stepped out of line.

With this in mind, I've been throwing my weight around upon the deck of the Penquod. The troubles began when I tried to open my bottle of Abraxas Anthrazit yesterday evening. No matter how hard I twisted, the top refused to budge. I called it every name under the sun ('Call yourself a grey? You're just an anaemic black ink'), left it to think about its behaviour for an hour or two, and then returned to try again. The bottle still refused to open.

I thought about this act of blatant mutiny all day ... and then took a pliers to the lid this evening. I gave it one last chance to surrender, of course, but it was just as stubborn as it had been yesterday. I was also worried about other inks in the box joining the rebellion. The Visconti Sepia has always been a bit unruly, for instance, and I can imagine it being easily led into acts of inksolence. (It constantly swaggers around on its little stem -- it's the bottle pictured in my profile over to the right -- and was once caught leaning over the very front of the boat, shouting 'I'm the king of the world.') Drawing myself up to my full height, then, I grabbed the Abraxas, held it firmly in my hand, and tightened the pliers around its neck. I must have been in an almighty rage, though, because I suddenly heard a terrible crack. Yes, dear readers, the lid had broken. It hadn't shattered, but I could see a gaping wound running most of the way around it.

This had two results. First, I could finally fill a pen with the disobedient grey ink. Second, and more important, the other inks in the box have since been looking at me with a new respect. I have, for instance, just filled two pens for work tomorrow -- one with Noodler's Walnut; the other with Omas Blue -- and I'm sure that the bottles loosened their lids more quickly and easily than they have in the past. I would even go so far as to say that they were happy to be selected for duty.

I have clearly crushed the mutiny. The Abraxas lies wounded in the corner of the box, knowing that it must toe the line or walk the plank, and its companions obediently await my next order. The Penquod sails smoothly on in my iron grip.

Inks under my command today: Noodler's Sequoia; Abraxas Anthrazit.

Inkgestion

Is there a link between diet and choice of ink?

While you're swilling that aperitif around in your mouths, dear readers, I'll explain the origin of the question. I have just, during a brief break from marking students' essays, consumed an exceptionally spicy vegetable jalfrezi. As I have reported on previous occasions, I am rather fond of what lies towards the hotter end of the Scoville scale, and tonight's dish was pretty sizzling. After dining, and with my mouth still burning, I opened my ink box to choose a colour for the next batch of marking, and my hand instantly, automatically settled upon Noodler's Sequoia. I always think of this as a cool, calming shade -- it's a very deep, mossy green -- so I am wondering if I unconsciously selected the Sequoia as an antidote to what I had just eaten. (Is it the grappa of inks?)

I have further evidence with which to serve you, dear readers. Loosen your belts as I unveil the next course. Regular readers of Ink Quest will be familiar with a character from New York who goes by the pseudonym of Stefan. I was delighted to receive in the post this week a letter from Stefan, in which he proudly showed off the glorious brown that he has created by mixing two inks together. When I emailed him to praise his recipe, he confessed that the rich brown tones of his creation are tempting him to consume vast quantities of Belgian chocolate from a shop that is housed in the building where he works. He might, he reported, have to consider going on a Lexington Gray diet.

It's clear, then: ink and food are deeply connected. (Is this why some people chew the ends of their pens? Are they just trying to get to the ink inside, as if it were the tasty jam filling to a doughnut?) I have, that is to say, discovered the overlooked phenomenon of inkgestion. Scientists will no doubt call it a half-baked idea, but I know otherwise.

It is, therefore, a bit worrying that there are very few naturally occurring blue foods. Yes, dear readers, the blue leg of the Ink Quest is well and truly underway. I have spent countless hours chewing over the possibilities this week, and my decision about which blue to blow my money upon was made much easier by helpful comments from two fellow inkthusiasts who regularly graze upon this blog. You already know of Stefan, dear readers, but the other honorary crew member of the Penquod shall be identified only as 马太. With the assistance of these two blue-philes, I have this evening placed an order for a bottle of Private Reserve DC Supershow Blue. While I am waiting for it to arrive, I will whet my appetite with a large bowl of blueberries, blue cheese, and blue corn chips. That's right: I'm going to make a meal of it.

Inks in use today: Rohrer and Klingner Sepia; Omas Blue; Noodler's Sequoia.

Tangled Up in Blue

It's more complicated than I thought.

As you know, dear readers, at the heart of the Ink Quest from its beginning has been a search for the perfect brown ink. I believed for some time that Omas Sepia was The One, the Great Brown Whale, and I chased it half way around the world, but its eventual capture did not bring the voyage of the Penquod to an end. While it's a magnificent colour, it's not perfect. The quest continues.

But it continues, I now know, in two different directions. It's taken me a while to realize this, but I'm also searching for the perfect blue. As a very early Ink Quest entry revealed, I was once strongly opposed to the presence of blue ink, simply because, along with black, it dominates the market. If a stationery shop sells just two colours -- and it often will -- those will undoubtedly be black and blue. But it seems that I've changed my opinion. Looking through my ink box yesterday, I was suddenly struck by how many blues I now own -- eleven, to be precise -- and I must confess that I've been toying with the idea of ordering a bottle of Private Reserve DC Supershow Blue for the last couple of days.

Roland Barthes might be to blame for this drift. As I have stated on numerous occasions, he is one of my greatest heroes, and I've been rereading and writing about his work in recent months. Barthes, it seems, was very fond of blue ink, and his manuscripts shine with the colour. (I've posted above a reproduction of one of the index cards upon which he would make notes. There are over 12000 of them in the Barthes archive, and visitors to the stunning exhibition devoted to his work at the Pompidou Centre in 2002-3 will have seen an entire wall of the gallery covered with some of them.) I've never managed to discover which blue he preferred, though, or even if he managed to stick to just one shade. He once confessed to the audience of his seminar that he'd bought sixteen bottles of drawing ink in one afternoon, so I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he'd been similarly promiscuous with what he used in his fountain pens.

Blue v. Brown, then. Can an obsession be divided in this way? Can a quest have two totally different objectives? Until today, I've always thought of the Penquod as being exactly like the Pequod, and myself as a reinkarnation of Captain Ahab. There has, I've believed, been just one aim. But now, out of the blue, the course of the Penquod is no longer monomaniacal. Should I draw up blueprints for another ship and commandeer a new blue-bound crew? Do I need to start another blog, Ink Quest: Blue Book, to record the pursuit of the Great Blue Whale? My reference library, inkidentally, tells me that there is actually such a thing as a blue whale, and that it's the largest living mammal. We're in for a fight. I'm also a bit concerned to discover that English contains the verb 'to blue', which means 'to squander'. The Great Blue Whale is clearly going to be my ruin. I will blue my riches until I am blue in the face, and all for a blue dahlia.

Inks in use today: Omas Blue; Herbin Gris Nuage.

PS (added at 1.45pm): As I managed to miscalculate my blue holdings this morning, and as it's been quite some time since I posted a complete inkventory, here's what's currently in the hold of the Penquod:

Abraxas Anthrazit
Aurora Blue (cartridges)
Caran d'Ache Grand Canyon
Conway Stewart Blue
Conway Stewart Brown
Diamine Dark Brown
Diamine Golden Brown
Diamine Grey
Diamine Indigo
Diamine Prussian Blue
Diamine Royal Blue
Diamine Sepia
Diamine Umber
Herbin Gris Nuage
Herbin Lie de Thé (bottle and cartridges)
Herbin Terre de Feu
Herbin Vert Olive
Levenger Cocoa
Mont Blanc Bordeaux
Mont Blanc Sepia
Montegrappa Red
Noodler's Black
Noodler's Britannia's Blue Waves
Noodler's Lexington Gray
Noodler's Nightshade
Noodler's Sequoia
Noodler's Walnut
Omas Blue
Omas Sepia
Papyrus Sepia
Parker Quink Blue (cartridges)
Pilot Black (cartridges)
Private Reserve Avacado (sic)
Private Reserve Chocolat
Private Reserve Tanzanite
Rohrer and Klingner Alt Bordeaux
Rohrer and Klingner Sepia
Sailor Blue (cartridges)
Sailor Brown
Sheaffer Skrip Brown
Styl' Honoré Cocktail Chocolat
Visconti Brown
Waterman Florida Blue
Waterman Havana

Beyond the Incubus

'You don't?!'

This, dear readers, was the subject line of an email that I received this morning from a regular browser of Ink Quest. (He's appeared in a previous entry under the pseudonym 'Stefan', so I'll carry on using that moninker here today.) Stefan was rather surprised by the casual announcement in my previous post that I do not keep any bottles of ink in my place of work. He stores most of his at home, he reported, but he can't resist having one or two bottles of blue and black with him in the office.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that Stefan has put his finger on something rather contradictory about the rambling voyages of the Penquod. If I spent large amounts of time in my office, shouldn't I have at least a small shrine to the holy liquid next to my filing cabinets? (This might cause a clash of faiths, though, as I've been informed that one of the cleaners uses my office as a prayer room every morning.) If I love ink so much, how can I bear to be separated from it for much of the week?

As usual, Proust can help. When, towards the end of 1906, he moved to his famous address on Boulevard Haussmann, he insisted, as André Maurois reports (and as I related in a much earlier post), 'that his bed and the little table which he called his "pinnace", loaded with books, papers, fountain pens, and the materials needed for his fumigations, close beside it, should be placed in exactly the same position as they had occupied in' his two previous residences. Roland Barthes, one of my true heroes, took the obsession even further: he recreated his Parisian study in minute detail in his summer home in Urt, even down to the level of the writing instruments themselves, so that he could travel between the two places and carry on working as if nothing had changed. Now that's what I call devotion. It's not surprising that he once told an interviewer that he had 'an almost obsessive relation to writing instruments'.

It's clear, then, what I need to do. Duplicates of all my existing inks must be acquired as a matter of extreme urgency, and I will, to respond to a question raised in the entry of 27 December 2006, definitely need to buy two of everything from now on. These doubles can then be transferred to my place of work and placed into a blue storage box identical to the one that sits upon my desk at home. That way, I will constantly be inktimate with my precious colours.

But why stop there? What happens if I run out of ink while I'm travelling from home to work (or vice versa)? Perhaps I will also need to acquire weatherproof crates, which can be filled with further duplicates and placed at strategic points along the route. I could have one at the railway station in the small town where I live, another at the station in the centre of Cardiff where I have to change trains, a further one in the coffee shop to which I regularly escape for an espresso and something fattening, and so on. Will I need to apply to the local authorities for planning permission and official clearance, though? Is there a law against peppering a city with ink stashes? I'm prepared to fight all the way to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg if I have to. It's commonly accepted that urban spaces need to feature basic facilities like benches, public toilets, and drinking fountains (although Mike Davis' City of Quartz tells a fascinating story about how the 'war on public space' in contemporary Los Angeles has led to the deliberate removal of such things). And it's still possible to see, on certain older British roads, watering posts that were placed there for the refreshment of horses.

I'm calling, then, for basic facilities for users of ink: fountain pen fountains, ink wells dug deep into pavements, weatherproof and lockable ink storage boxes on street corners. Perhaps there could even be a fleet of vehicles, all equipped with a range of inks, that would travel around cities on clearly identified routes. Any ink user stranded with a dry nib could then simply stand at one of the stops, raise his or her arm, and climb aboard to refill. Yes, dear readers, I'm talking about the 'Ink-u-bus'.

Ink in use today: Herbin Gris Nuage.

Ink Guzzler

Kermit was right: it's not easy being green.

When I lived in California in the early 1990s, I used to take a deliberate short cut through a particular car park (or 'parking lot', as I'd learned to call it) because a beautiful vintage car would often be sitting there. I'm not normally remotely interested in cars, and I still don't know the name of the model that caught my eye, but this one was different, a true work of art. It was one of those classic models from the 1950s -- about half a mile long, all pointed tailfins and dazzling chrome. One day, though, as I was admiring the vehicle, a man passing by called out: 'It's hideous, isn't it? A real gas guzzler'.

He was right, of course, and I'd never actually want to drive such a thing. I do my best for the environment, you see, dear readers: I recycle as much as I can (even though Britain is probably the laziest country in Europe when it comes to these matters), I own a small and very economical car, I always use public transport to get to work, and I buy recycled plastic and paper products whenever possible.

But I have a terrible confession: I happily own an ink guzzler. I hadn't realized this until today, when I sat down to mark a pile of essays with my recently acquired Aurora Talentum (or 'Black Beauty', as it's affectionately known). I'd worked my way through just a few papers and made some notes ... when Black Beauty ran dry. I thought at first that there was some kind of problem with the nib, as Blue Beauty, my Stipula I Castoni, runs for miles between pit stops. But a quick inspection inside the barrel revealed that the Aurora was completely empty. I don't keep any bottles of ink in work, so I couldn't refill the tank, but I did have Blue Beauty waiting in the wings to see me through to the end of the day. I've carried on marking at home this evening, though, and Black Beauty has guzzled its way through two more converters of Noodler's Sequoia. (Are Aurora converters smaller than their Stipula counterparts? Note to self: conduct complicated scientific experiment as a matter of urgency.)

But here's the really terrible part: I love the fact that the Aurora is so uneconomical, for it means that I can raid my ink box for refills more often than I would with many of my other pens. The beauty of Black Beauty, in other words, is that it allows me to play with the bottles and choose new colours several times a day. And if I'm using more ink than usual, I'll need to buy more ink than usual, of course. Fountain pen enthusiasts often seek out writing instruments with huge reservoirs, but I'm going to start a global campaign to have the capacity of converters reduced. Think Small will be its name. No, I have a better idea: Ink Small. Or maybe simply ShrInk

Finally, the sting in the tailfin. I wrote and began to type up these words last night, as the official dating of the entry will show. But before I could post my missive, the Blogger server crashed. It is actually now Tuesday morning. Has my irresponsible and wasteful behaviour, my greedy expenditure of ink, led to power cuts? Are the lights going out all across Europe at the very moment when I am lighting out for the Territory in my shiny ink guzzler?

Inks in irresponsible use today: Noodler's Sequoia; Omas Blue; Styl' Honoré Cocktail Chocolat.

Inkcrossing

You have to give something back to the people, I feel.

I know that this may sound a little odd coming from such a miserable misanthrope, but I can explain. Today's random act of giving was inspired by the phenomenon of 'bookcrossing', which was newly defined in the 2004 edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary in the following manner: 'the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise'. There's even a website called bookcrossing.com that allows you to register your book with a unique code and then, if the new (temporary) owners follow the rules, to track its movements around the world.

I hereby give notice that I have invented the practice of 'inkcrossing'. The idea came to me just after we had left the supermarket this afternoon. I had prepared the shopping list for the occasion in my favourite way: on an index card and with an italic nib. (Is it any wonder that the Inkette has started calling this blog Ink Pest?) As I can't stop using the Styl' Honoré ink that I recently acquired in Paris, this week's essential items were meticulously listed in glorious chocolate tones. The supermarket trolley was fitted with a rather helpful miniature clipboard above the handle, so I attached the list and admired the ink as we trawled up and down the aisles.

When the shopping had been loaded into the boot of the car, I wheeled the trolley back to the storage point. I was about to remove my list from the clipboard when I decided that it would be an interesting social experiment to leave the card for the next user of the trolley to discover. Not so that he or she could study what will be eaten in Ink Towers this week, but, more importantly, so that he or she could see how much more rewarding life can be with the acquisition of a fountain pen and some exotic ink. I have been running through fantasy scenarios all afternoon: the trolley is chosen by a lifelong advocate of ballpoint pens. No, better still, the CEO of the Bic corporation just happens to arrive at the same supermarket moments after I have deposited my inky surprise. S/he notices the elegantly inscribed index card, falls in love with the ink, realizes that Bic production must be halted immediately, places an urgent call to the production line ('This is X. The codeword is "De-Lazlo". I repeat, the codeword is "De-Lazlo"'), and thereby ends the global reign of the ballpoint.

Inkcrossing, then, is an underground revolutionary activity. You will know me by my calling card (and my weekly purchase of Reggiano parmesan). I am everywhere, watching, waiting, scribbling. My name is inksurrection.

Ink in use today: Styl' Honoré Cocktail Chocolat.

Inklement Conditions

It's stormy out there.

The wind has been blowing so strongly today, in fact, that the telephone wires have broken free from the pole opposite my house. As I write these words, the British Telecom engineers are carrying out urgent repairs using a van with a ladder that is swaying worryingly in the gale. I, meanwhile, am sheltering inside with my inks and the cats, who keep pestering me to make the weather improve.

Bleak as it is out there, though, it's nothing compared to what Scott of the Antarctic had to endure on his last expedition to the South Pole in 1912. As you may have seen or heard in the news yesterday, dear readers, the last letters that Scott wrote to his family are about to go on display in Cambridge's Scott Polar Research Institute Museum. They were penned in March 1912, not long after Scott and his men had tragically discovered that a Norwegian team had beaten them to the South Pole. As the temperature outside the tent fell to 70 degrees below zero, Scott, knowing that he and his crew were about to die, wrote a poignant note that began, as you can see above, with the line 'To my widow'. 'We have decided not to kill ourselves', he concludes, 'but to fight it to the last for that depot but in the fighting there is a painless end so don't worry.' That 'painless end' came soon after.

I clearly have a lot in common with Captain Scott. Like him, I am a rugged, muscular, masculine specimen. (I can hear those readers who actually know me guffawing in front of their screens.) And I, like him, have embarked upon an almighty quest. I can't help thinking that he had it easier, though. At least he had a map marked 'South Pole'; I, on the other hand, am constantly drifting in the Penquod in search of the perfect ink, not knowing if such a thing even exists. Since seeing the picture of his moving letter yesterday, I, naturally, have been wondering about the ink that he used to write it. How did it not freeze in the unthinkable temperature of -70 degrees? Any explorer leaving for the South Pole in 2007 could take along a bottle of Noodler's Polar Black, which is freeze-resistant, but this miraculous product was not, of course, available in Scott's day. There were primitive predecessors, though, and David N. Carvalho's Forty Centuries of Ink, which was actually published a few years before Scott set off on his fateful journey, helpfully reproduces the following old recipe for freeze-proof ink:

Instead of water use brandy, with the same ingredients which enter into the composition of any ink, and it will never freeze.

Did Scott read Carvalho's book? Was the ink used to write to his 'widow' laced with brandy? If it was, wouldn't that make the letter even more heartbreaking, for the dying man would have penned his farewell note with an ink containing a fluid that could, if extracted and consumed, have provided a little warmth and comfort to the men in the tent. But, at the same time, if the ink hadn't been modified to remain fluid in the terrible temperatures of the South Pole, Scott would not have been able to write anything at all, to say farewell to his wife. This, dear readers, is the chilling irony of inklemency.

Ink in use today: Styl' Honoré Cocktail Chocolat.

The Encredible Voyage

Bonjour, chers lecteurs! I apologize for the lack of updates in the last week -- the good ship Penquod has been sailing merrily around the cafés and boulevards of Paris. I won't bore you with the tale of how dramas at Bristol Airport caused our return flight to be redirected to Heathrow, which then led to a chauffeur-driven Mercedes being laid on to transfer the Inkette and me from London back to the West Country at speeds of up to 100mph in the dead of night -- Ink Quest is not the place for 'human interest' stories. I will, rather, get straight to what really matters: ink.

The Inkette had, through gritted teeth, agreed that I could have a little time to dip into some of the pen shops of Paris, so I'd obsessively prepared a detailed, annotated list and pored over maps with a little help from Glenn Marcus' excellent website. The inkcounters began earlier than expected, however. As I was wandering around one of the galleries in the Centre Georges Pompidou, my eye was caught by a television screen that was a showing a short film of a man dipping a pen into a large bottle of Quink and starting to write on a piece of paper. There was a problem, though: it was raining heavily, so his words were constantly erased or reduced to a series of faint streaks. Before too long the bottle of ink was overflowing with rain water. The man was defeated. This magnificent work of art, I now know, is Marcel Broodthaers' La Pluie (Projet pour un texte), which dates from 1969. I urge all lovers of ink to make a pilgrimage to Paris to see it at the earliest opportunity. And if Nathan Tardif ever decides to advertise his wonderful Noodler's 'Bulletproof' inks on television, a short clip from Broodthaers' film would provide a perfect illustration of the problems of traditional ink.

The following day, the search for exciting inks well and truly began. First port of call was a shop called Stylos Marbeuf, just off the Champs-Elysées, where a mouth-watering display of pens awaited me. I could have spent thousands of pounds here, but I limited myself to a bottle of Omas Blue. This safely stashed in the hold of the Penquod, I sailed a little further along the Champs-Elysées to Rue Quentin Bauchart, where I docked at Point Plume and admired the cases of pens that I've always dreamed of seeing (and owning, of course). Again, it was a real struggle to keep my credit card in my wallet, particularly when faced with some glorious Omas specimens. While the ink cabinet at Point Plume was well stocked, nothing really cried out to be purchased, so I left empty-handed and took the Métro over to Styl' Honoré on Rue Marche St. Honoré, where I found the true highlight of the Parisian trip.

I'd read on Glenn Marcus' website that the owner of Styl' Honoré makes and sells his own inks. On entering the shop, I noticed a tantalizing display of bottles labelled Encre Cocktail on a shelf behind the counter. In my best A-level French, I asked the assistant if the ink in question was suitable for fountain pens. 'Yes', she said, 'they're made especially for fountain pens, and they're our own brand' (I'm translating, of course). She then handed me a piece of card with swatches of the colours, and my heart skipped a beat when I saw a splendid brown called 'Chocolat'. This was to be mine, I immediately decided, so I asked for a bottle, which was lovingly wrapped and placed into an elegant bag. And all for eleven euros!

It wasn't until we were on the way back to the hotel that I realized that a problem lay ahead of the Penquod on its return journey from France to Wales. While airlines now allow passengers to travel with small amounts of liquid in their hand luggage, these have to be carried in transparent and resealable plastic bags, which are likely to be inspected by security guards at the airport. Both of my new acquisitions fell within the 100ml limit, but I couldn't help feeling that carrying two bottles of ink (and no other liquids) through the checkpoint at Charles de Gaulle would only call attention to myself in a foolish manner. All of the publicity material issued by the airlines mentions substances such as shampoo and perfume, but there's no mention of ink. 'Pourquoi avez-vous deux flacons d'encre, monsieur?', I could imagine the heavily-armed guards asking, and I just couldn't see 'Parce que j'adore l'encre' striking them as a convincing answer. I believe, too, that passengers can be asked to, say, take a sip of a drink to prove its authenticity, but what would they ask me to do with my ink? Do their machine guns have quills strapped to their barrels?

I worried about this all of yesterday morning, even when we were strolling around the magnificent Père Lachaise cemetery, where I left a little stone on Proust's grave. (I know that you would probably have preferred a madeleine, Marcel, but I couldn't find one.) In the end, I reluctantly packed the two bottles in the suitcase for checking into the hold of the plane. (They were, of course, neurotically wrapped in several plastic bags and then cushioned between clothing.) And then I worried throughout the flight about the bottles breaking in transit. Couldn't airlines offer a special red 'Inkredibly Fragile' sticker for the cases of passengers travelling with ink, I wondered?

But they survived, and I can report that the Cocktail Chocolat is a beautiful shade. (True obsessives will surely want to know that it's a bit like a cross between Diamine Sepia and Sheaffer Brown.) The Omas Blue is also wonderful, but it's the Styl' Honoré exclusive that's really caught my attention. And not just because it's a very pleasant colour. The fact that it's made especially for one shop in one city has awakened in me the desire for a bespoke ink. This, I think, might be the way finally to bring the Ink Quest to an end. I've searched so long for the perfect brown, and I've bought more bottles than I can remember, but I've never found the one. Perhaps I've been doing things the wrong way around. Perhaps I should, rather than drifting around the world in the Penquod in search of the colour of my dreams, arrange to have the colour of my dreams created and shipped to my door. Oui, oui -- I shall become an armchair Ahab.

Inks in use today: Omas Blue; Styl' Honoré Cocktail Chocolat.