Vintage

Old is the new new.

I say this because honorary Penquod crew member Gerry has sent me a whole bottle of vintage Parker Permanent Royal Blue Quink from Michigan. The box alone is a work of art, as you can see from the first picture displayed above. Look at that exquisite typeface, the shade of blue, and the quirkily italicized Quink. Look at the reference to the mystical 'solv-x'. Look at how gracefully the cardboard has aged. This box has been around the block a few times, lived and loved a little, and is now settling gently down into the September of its years. I'm sure, to quote Leonard Cohen, that it aches in the places where it used to play. (I'm don't know exactly how old the bottle is, inkidentally, but the box is identical to the one seen in this 1944 advertisement, so perhaps I have a war baby on my hands.)

And then there's the bottle. It's safe to say that they don't make them like this today. In my opinion, many modern ink manufacturers rarely give much thought to the design of their bottles. (There are some honourable exceptions, of course, such as Visconti, Montegrappa, Mont Blanc, and Omas.) But this immaculate creature looks as if it spent its formative years in exclusive finishing schools and on Savile Row. It's dapper, poised, and no doubt carries a silver pocket watch. It likes a dry martini in the middle of the afternoon.

But the real glory is, of course, the ink itself. (Dedicated readers of Ink Quest may remember the frenzy into which I was sent on 1 March when I first saw, in a letter from Gerry, the splendour of Parker Permanent Royal Blue. And such readers may also remember my farcical attempts to recreate the colour by mixing modern shades together.) I have been deliriously writing with the sacred colour since yesterday evening, and I'm still amazed by how elusive it is. It's an alluring mixture of light blue, grey, green, and possibly faded black, but it's the perfect balance of those colours that makes this ink so special, so difficult to pin down. As I said back in March, no camera can possibly capture the nuances, but I have done my best with the close-up of a semi-colon posted above.

I've never tried a vintage wine -- and 'vintage', of course, is tied at its root to the world of wine -- but I'm beginning to understand what aficionados mean when they describe the aged power and harmony that simply can't be found in young varieties. I may never use modern ink again. Even my beloved Private Reserve DC Supershow Blue feels shallow and undeveloped alongside Parker Permanent Royal Blue.

I think, too, that the vintage colour is having a transformative effect upon me. The words that are flowing from my pen this morning have an ancient feel to them. Contemporary language feels at odds with my nib. I can feel myself shying away from terms that entered British English in the second half of the twentieth century, such as 'hopefully' and 'thankfully' as sentence adverbs. 'Role' must now be 'rôle', and no infinitive may be split. I've even started to write 's' as 'f'. And I think that my speech is also changing: short and crass Welsh vowels are being stretched out into sounds that would have been heard on the BBC in 1944. 'Last', which I would normally say with a short and clipped 'a', now sounds like 'Laaaaahhhst'. 'Pure', which I would normally, in true Welsh fashion, make into a bi-syllabic rhyme with 'fewer', now comes out 'Pyorr'. I nearly called a colleague 'old sport' a few minutes ago. I'm a new man. A new old man.

Ink in use today: Parker Permanent Royal Blue.

PS (4.15pm): I have made a small alteration to my sentence about 'hopefully' and 'thankfully', as Carlos, who made an appearance on Ink Quest recently, has pointed out to me in 'characteristically pedantic' fashion (his words) that the Oxford English Dictionary does actually record uses of the terms in English as far back as 1636 and 1000, respectively. It's their use in British English as sentence adverbs, he pointed out, that's new. Well, Carlos, you're right ... and not quite. I certainly cut corners in my account, probably because I was thinking of Ernest Gower's furious denunciation, in The Complete Plain Words, of twentieth-century borrowings from American English (that language which has, as he puts it, 'been assaulting these islands with ever-increasing weight and persistence for many years'), and I stand corrected. But, old sport, I can out-pedant you on one count: the full OED has 1639, not 1636, for 'hopefully' ('In a hopeful manner; with a feeling of hope; with ground for hope, promisingly'). I thankfully receive your corrections, in other words, and I hopefully win back a little credibility with my pedantic reply.

'Officer down!'

Thumbs up ... but thumb's down.

Allow me to give you a thumbnail sketch of the events of yesterday evening. I've often said that ink is a risky business, but I didn't realize that it could be quite so dangerous.

Just before retiring for the night, I decided to try out my latest acquisition, Diamine Blue-Black. I prepared my Visconti Van Gogh for filling, removed the plastic wrapping from the neck of the bottle, and opened the lid.

I awoke five minutes later on the floor on the other side of the room, my hands covered in ink. I dimly remember a whoosh and a flash of blue-black fluid, but the details are hazy. It would seem that some kind of pressure had built up inside the bottle during transit, leading to a small explosion. The inky state of my hands following this inkident can be seen in the first image posted above.

Before the Inkette could discover the mess, I sneaked into the bathroom to wash away the inkriminating evidence. I think that I must have used too much soap, though, for my right hand somehow slipped free, causing my thumb to be impaled upon a sharp piece of metal at the end of the chain that holds the plug. I was now covered in ink and blood. I tried shouting 'Officer down! Officer down!' to the Inkette, but she could not hear my whimpering.

I eventually managed to drag my battered body to the bedroom, where I reported the inkident. 'Look, there's ink! There's blood!', I mumbled deliriously. 'And there'll be plenty more of your blood splashed around the room if you don't get cleaned up and come to bed', replied the Inkette. I bandaged my gaping wound -- but not before I'd taken the second photograph shown above -- and slipped into a feverish sleep from which I did not expect to awake.

I somehow made it through the night, dear readers, and I have this morning, with throbbing thumb, finally tried out the Diamine Blue-Black. It's extremely pleasant and has a certain vintage feel to it. I have just thumbed through my ink book and added it to the list of blues, where it sits quite happily. (It's not as special as Diamine Indigo, however.) I would say that it gets the Siskel and Ebert thumbs up, but it would be more accurate, given the fact that I'm all fingers and thumbs, to award it the thumb up.

Ink in use today: Diamine Blue-Black.

Ink and the City

Should ink come with a consume-by date?

I dreamt last night that new European Union regulations now called for all bottled inks to be labelled with a date by which they should be used. A special team of inkspectors (yes, I even manage to create stupid puns when I'm asleep) would be making regular visit to all ink outlets in order to check that no unsafe bottles were still on display.

It didn't take me long to work out that this dream was inspired by a story in the local news last week about how two Welsh branches of the Asda supermarket chain had been fined for selling food that was no longer fit for consumption. What did take a bit of figuring out, however, was why my unconscious should have come up with such a scenario. Freud tells us that dreams articulate secret wishes, but why on earth, I asked as I subjected myself to a session of analysis this morning, should I want ink to be subjected to such a law?

The answer finally came to me when I found myself strolling jauntily out of the city's only proper pen shop with a bottle of Diamine Blue-Black in my hand: if all inks had consume-by dates, I'd need to buy more of them. Because they would no longer be allowed to languish in my ink box for an indefinite period, I'd be compelled to pour them down the drain and buy replacements at regular intervals.

My unconscious wants to shop unhindered, in other words. In this respect, its production of last night's dream might also have been inspired by something that a colleague -- let's give her the pseudonym Daphne, shall we, dear readers? -- said to me last week when I confessed the full extent of my ink obsession: 'You are to stationery what Carrie Bradshaw is to shoes.' I took this as a huge compliment, and I was immediately reminded of an episode from season 4 of Sex and the City where Carrie, unable to get a loan from the bank to buy her apartment, adds up how much she has spent on shoes in recent years. She is rather shocked to learn that the figure is $40,000.

I haven't splashed out quite that much on ink and pens, but I'm getting there. And I'm Carrie-d along by the thought that in 'consume-by' it is possible to hear 'Consume! Buy!'

Inks in use today: Noodler's Walnut; Herbin Poussière de Lune; Omas Sepia. (I wasn't planning to buy the Diamine Blue-Black this morning, so I didn't bring an empty pen to work with me.)

Why Don DeLillo Writes Such Good Books

"What's wrong with ballpoints?" he said.
"They're bad."
"What's bad about pencils?"
"All right, pencils. Wood and lead. Pencils are serious. Wood and graphite. Materials from the earth. We respect this about a pencil."

Don DeLillo, Falling Man (London: Picador, 2007), p. 200.

Ink in use today: Omas Sepia.

The Book of Ink

Every great religion needs a Book.

With this in mind, I have started work on the Book of Ink, the text that shall act as the holy work for all those inkthusiasts who have selflessly devoted their lives to spreading the word about the glory of ink and the eternal damnation that awaits errant users of ballpoints.

Unlike most, if not all, sacred texts belonging to conventional religions, the Book of Ink offers neither origin story nor commandments. (Well, 'Thou shalt not Bic' is written between the lines, I suppose.) In what I believe to be a major step forwards, the Book of Ink will merely consist of samples of every ink in my collection, every bottle stored in the hold of the Penquod. Each time that I fill a pen, I now check if the chosen colour has been entered in the holy pages. If it hasn't, I fast for a day, make the sign of the nib in the air, crush a ballpoint beneath my heel, and add it to the Book.

Posted above, faithful readers, is a picture of part of the blue section. Yes, that's right: the Book of Ink is divided into chapters -- Blues, Browns, and Other. I spent forty days and forty nights in the wilderness pondering the precise divisions, and I accept that the eventual choice is a touch arbitrary and limited. I decided, though, to keep things simple, and there was no point in my having a separate section devoted to black inks, for instance, as I own perhaps just two of these. I have no doubt that 'Other' will come to be an ark-like mixture of shades -- so far it features Herbin Poussière de Lune, Rohrer and Klingner Alt Bordeaux, and Noodler's Sequoia -- but this is all part of the eclectinkism of the Book.

The launching of this epic project has not been without moments of anxiety and spiritual doubt, however. As you can see from the second picture displayed above, the gospel according to Inkling is contained within a red Clairefontaine notebook. I made the mistake of buying two such items at the same time, and the other one is blue. It took another forty days and nights of wandering and wondering before I was able to settle upon the red. But the troubles didn't stop there, for I then had to decide how many pages to set aside for each section. Too few would lead to the Word being cut short; too many would result in distracting blank spaces. Was the production of, say, the Bible similarly anxiety-ridden, I wonder?

- St. Mark, I can give you space for sixteen chapters, but you'll have to work around what Matthew and Luke are doing. Yes, I know that Luke has more pages to play with than you do. Luke of the draw, amigo.
- Whoa, whoa, II Corinthians. No one's said anything to me about a sequel.
- Genesis, have you had our lawyers talk copyright clearance with Peter Gabriel's people?
- Revelation, the boss wants a rewrite with a downbeat ending -- your first draft is eating up our special-effects budget.

In the end I set aside four pages each for the browns and blues, and the rest of the Book for the other colours. If this turns out to be a mistake, the holy Book will just have to be wholly rethought.

Ink in use today: Omas Sepia.

PS: Since I last posted, Ink Quest has welcomed its 10000th visitor. The Word is clearly spreading.

Ink rid and Ingrid

Here's looking at ink, kid.

While I've watched and wondered at Casablanca countless times, I'd never actually seen it on the big screen until a couple of days ago. Chapter Arts Centre has been showing a new print this week, and Friday mornings feature a special 'Carry on Screaming!' showing for people with babies. You turn up with your infant, and he or she is allowed to make as much noise as he or she wants throughout the film. I was rather surprised when we walked in to see audience members without babies -- did they not know that their viewing pleasure was about to be ruined? -- and the moment became positively neurosis-filled when I realized that we were the only infant-carrying people the room. Do 'Carry on Screaming!' events, I wondered, have to be attended by a certain numbers of howling babies before they're quorate? Were we going to be asked to leave? I was worrying unnecessarily, though, for several other parents soon arrived with their unruly offspring.

Baby Ink ended up sleeping through the whole thing, so he didn't get to see the glorious moment at which ink plays a crucial starring role in Casablanca. Rick has arranged to meet Ilsa, to whom he's just proposed, at the railway station so that they can escape occupied Paris for Marseilles, but she fails to turn up. Instead, she sends a letter, in which she simply says that she can never see him again. As Rick reads the tragic words, the torrential rain begins to smudge the ink and dissolve Ilsa's elegant handwriting. He is, you might say, being ink rid.

It's a beautiful, memorable inkident, and the running of the ink is absolutely crucial to the scene. Rick's heart is breaking, and the words of his beloved -- his only trace of her now -- are slipping away as he reads them. (Inkidentally, lovers of the film might be interested to know that the Sherlock Holmes Bookstore and Café sells reproductions of the letter, complete with smudged ink, for just $17.50. Click here and scroll down to the bottom of the page if you're interested.)

Many contemporary inkthusiasts are obsessed by the idea of permanence. Honorary Penquod crew member Stefan, for instance, has devoted years of his life to the quest for the perfect permanent ink, and I've known him to lapse into complete hysteria if he leaves the house with only a pen that contains washable ink. I, meanwhile, am not quite so obsessive, but I do have a selection of Noodler's permanent inks that I use for writing envelopes, cheques, and other documents where impermanence could pose a problem.

But can you imagine how much less poignant Casablanca would be if Ilsa's note had been written in an ink immune to the downpour? Would people still be enjoying a beautiful friendship with the film sixty-five years on if Ilsa had owned a bottle of Noodler's Bulletproof Black or used Registrars' ink to pen her farewell? I suspect not. This is one occasion when we need ink that runs, that bleeds, that dissolves when touched by rain or tears. These fundamental things apply as time goes by.

Inks in use today: Diamine Indigo; Noodler's Sequoia; Private Reserve DC Supershow Blue.

Ethinkal Issues

Is ink cruel?

I've been rereading Peter Singer's Animal Liberation this week, and my eye was caught by a certain passage in the disturbing chapter on animal experimentation. Laboratory rabbits, Singer writes, regularly find themselves having 'a test substance (such as bleach, shampoo, or ink)' squirted into their eyes. Because they are restrained and have their eyes held in place, the creatures have no escape from the liquids. The tests can last for several weeks.

It is well known that early inks contained ingredients drawn from the animal world. Carvalho's Forty Centuries of Ink notes that sepia collected from the cuttlefish is the oldest ink of all, and the book goes on to list various other vintage ink recipes that called for parts of animals -- skin, blood, and so on. And the history of books, a colleague who shall be veiled by the pseudonym Carlos has reminded me, is similarly bound up with the death of animals, as Riddle 24 of the tenth-century Exeter Book makes memorably clear. (Inkthusiasts may also wish to puzzle over the delightful Riddles 84 and 89, inkidentally.) As Carvalho reports in the final pages of his book, 'the skins of 300 sheep were used in every copy of the first printed Bible'.

Such violent examples, of course, are drawn from the distant past; Animal Liberation, meanwhile, is a recent text (the revised edition from which I have quoted was published in 1990). Is ink still linked to the suffering of animals? Are all modern inks tested upon animals before being launched? Do inky-fingered lovers of fountain pens have blood on their hands? Is there a terrible tension between my love of ink and my refusal to eat meat for over two decades? Is the work that I do as a volunteer for a local cat-rescue charity scribbled out by the countless bottles of ink that lie upon my desk? Do we need a new code of ethinks?

I was giving thought to these troubling questions yesterday morning when the postman delivered Baby Ink's birth certificate, which was signed in the bottom right-hand corner in the Registrars' ink to which I devoted Wednesday's Ink Quest entry. (So that you can now see the delicate blue-black balance that the makers of this ink have achieved, I've posted a close-up photograph above. And if you'd like your own 110ml bottle of the mythical liquid, you can, as honorary Penquod crew member Stefan has advised me, purchase one for just £6 by clicking here.)

As I studied the certificate, I once again found myself smudging life into death. (I know, I know -- I really ought to stop reading Philip Roth, but I've probably made matters worse by dipping into Samuel Beckett's Complete Dramatic Works while waiting for Baby Ink's bottles to warm in recent days. Waiting for Godot finally makes sense if you read it at 4am while waiting for a kettle to boil.) Is Registrars' ink tested upon helpless animals? Is its permanence a permanent reminder of suffering? Does the certificate of birth simultaneously record, in the authenticating lines of ink, the death of countless, nameless creatures? Is this vivinksection?

Ink in use today: Herbin Poussière de Lune; Diamine Sepia.

A Different Register

Allow me to register my excitement.

This morning involved a trip to the local Register Office formally to record the birth of Baby Ink. I'm sure that this is a significant event in the life of any parent, but I've spent the last few days in a state of near hysteria at the thought of being able to use genuine British Registrars' ink for the very first time. I've seen it used on one previous occasion -- a civil wedding ceremony at a stately home where the Registrar turned up with a rather large plastic bottle of the precious liquid -- but I've never actually been called upon to sign my name with it. (The Inkette and I were married in the USA, and I don't remember special ink being used there. I think we were handed a ballpoint, actually.)

As soon as we entered the office, I spotted a Parker Penman bottle on the desk. While the Registrar talked us through the official details, I kept eyeing up the glass object, wondering if it contained the mystical fluid or if the state official was merely a collector of discontinued inks. Eventually, when the forms had been checked and double-checked, he filled a fountain pen from the Penman bottle and asked me to sign the papers. This, I thought, is what it's all about: an employee of the state is handing me a fountain pen asking me to write with it. I cannot remember another occasion on which I have been handed a fountain pen in a public place, in fact. A million cheap ballpoints have been thrust into my disapproving hand, but never a real pen. Let me never forget this glorious inky moment, I thought to myself.

A small belch from Baby Ink reminded me why I was in the Register Office, and so I quickly signed my name, marvelling at the blue-black ink that emerged from the nib. The Registrar took the form from me and, with an elegant sweep of his hand, blotted the writing. The time had come to ask.

'Is that Registrars' ink?', I enquired. 'Yes', he said, and then added that the fluid is not used a great deal in Register Offices these days. Just several weeks ago, he explained, Registrars stopped writing everything out by hand, and switched instead to computerized forms. Only certain key items -- signatures, for instance -- are still written in ink. I then asked where the ink is acquired, and the kindly gentleman informed me that it is bought from 'regular stationery suppliers'. 'It comes in these plastic bottles', he said, reaching into the drawer of his desk and holding up a black container for me to inspect.

When I explained that my questions were motivated by a love of ink, the Inkette brazenly asked if it would be possible to take a photograph of the bottle for displaying on Ink Quest. 'You can keep this one, if you want', said the Registrar. 'There's only a little bit of ink left in the bottom'.

And so Ink Quest proudly registers in the photograph above a genuine bottle of Registrars' ink. I'm eager to try it out, but I feel that I should keep it for posterity. I have, after all, used this very batch of ink to leave my mark for eternity in the archives. I have written below the name of Baby Ink, who cannot yet write, lines that will no doubt outlive me. (It's a shame that 'infant' etymologically announces one without a voice, not one without writing, but I've read enough early Derrida to know why this is the case.) This must be why births and deaths are officially noted in the same room, by the same person. In recording the one, I have an inkling of the other. In order to notify the state of a birth, I must leave a mark whose permanence underscores my own mortality. Life in a different register.

Ink in use today: Registrars' Blue-Black ink; Diamine Sepia.

PS (10 May): It occurred to me today that yesterday's story might have seemed to good to be true. Sceptics may have wondered if I'd used a stock photograph of the bottle of ink and made up the entire inkident, for instance. To prove the authenticity of the tale, I've added a new picture at the top of this post, in which you can clearly see the bottle resting on a copy of today's Guardian newspaper. Ink Quest: all the news that's fit to print.

Baby, Blue

All hail the magical powers of Waterman Blue-Black ink.

As I was walking from work to Inktown Central railway station on Monday afternoon, I was seized by a sudden urge to buy a bottle of the colour in question, so I called into the one decent pen shop in the city, Pen and Paper. While Waterman Blue-Black is a classic, familar shade, I've never actually got around to purchasing any, but on Monday it seemed the perfect colour with which to fill the Sailor Sapporo fountain pen (Music nib) with which the Inkette would be presenting me as a birthday present on Tuesday morning. (Although I'd been told that I had to wait until I got home from work to open most of my presents, we'd hammered out a deal which allowed me to have the pen in the morning so that I could take it to work.)

The moment I stepped through the front door of my house, however, the Inkette appeared at the top of the stairs and informed me that her waters had just broken. The contractions seemed to have started with a vengeance, too. I set down the bottle of ink, picked up the hospital bags, and off we went to the delivery room.

To cut a long and somewhat gory story short, Baby Ink was 'ventoused' into the world a little after 9am the following day. In other words, he chose to arrive just when I should have been blowing out my birthday candles and filling my new pen with Waterman Blue-Black. A coup had occurred upon the deck of the Penquod. I can't quite remember precisely where Freud locates the beginning of father-son power struggles, but I don't think that it's as early as the moment of birth itself in his account. Only I could out-Freud Freud. (And only I, when told to pack a book in case the labour was lengthy, could choose Philip Roth. What was I thinking?)

The blur of the last couple of days has largely kept me from my new pen and ink. I did, however, come up with a masterplan this afternoon when Baby Ink was sleeping. 'Why', I asked the Inkette, 'don't I sit down and make a list of the gifts that we've received. That way, we can send personalized "Thank You" notes in a week or two?' Amazingly, my ruse worked, so I settled down at the table with my shiny new Sapporo.

As soon as the first line of Waterman Blue-Black emerged from the nib, however, I experienced a Proustian flashback to the early hours of Tuesday morning, when the Inkette was wheeled into theatre for the ventouse procedure. I realized that the ink was to blame, for its teal-like tint is identical to the colour of the surgical scrubs into which I'd had to change before entering the theatre. As the words flowed, all I could think of was the feeling of helplessness that had overtaken me as I sat beneath the bright surgical lights, watching a team of professionals go about their dramatic work in an eerily calm manner. (That, inkidentally, was also the moment at which I finally realized why my mother, shortly after I became a Doctor of Philosophy, said that 'It's not like being a real doctor, though, is it?') I have an inkling that Waterman Blue-Black will never be the same again.

Ink in use today: Waterman Blue-Black.