A Spectre Calls

I have become a ghost-writer.

I noted some months ago that Pelikan Blue would appear to be the modern ink that comes closest to the charming blue used by Roland Barthes on his index cards. And I also recorded in that entry how it's only after fading over time that the colour becomes truly Barthesian; the shade that first comes out of the nib is a little too dark, too bright, and light is needed to make it lighter.

With this in mind, I have been quietly conducting an experiment: when I left the office for my summer holiday on 31 July, I placed an index card, on which I had simply written the words 'Pelikan Blue', upon my windowsill, which catches the sun at certain times of the day. I intended to leave the card there until 31 October, but, while moving a pile of papers yesterday afternoon, I accidentally knocked it to the floor. When I picked it up, my heart skipped a beat: Pelikan Blue had become, after nearly three months of exposure to sunlight, Barthes Blue.

Yes, dear readers, I believe that I have finally solved the mystery. I now put it to the world at large that the delicate colour found on R.B.'s precious index cards is Pelikan Blue that has, in the years since the death of the author (he was hit by a van while crossing rue des Écoles, Paris, in 1980), gradually faded to its present state. The ghostliness of the colour cannot be found in the bottle at the time of writing; in the beginning, the pale spectre lies beyond the pale.

Strangely, then, I have turned Pelikan Blue into a shade by refusing to keep it in the shade; what I was looking for was always a shade of a shade. I say this because, as I have recently discovered while reading Dante, 'shade' can mean 'ghost' in English. (I don't know how I'd never spotted this fact; I was spooked when it drifted like a revenant from the pages of the dictionary several days ago.)

Not long after Roland Barthes died, Jacques Derrida wrote a wonderful tribute entitled 'Les morts de Roland Barthes' ('The Deaths of Roland Barthes'). And, just over a decade later, he published a haunting book about ghosts, Spectres de Marx, which is known in English, because its translator is American, as Specters of Marx. (I have nothing against American English, but I'm not American, so will be using 'spectre' throughout today's seance.) When the volume first appeared, many commentators focussed upon its discussion of the legacy of Marxism in a world without the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union. Those elements of the book are certainly fascinating, but I've always -- probably because I would like to drift outside all political considerations -- been drawn more to Derrida's discussion of ghosts themselves.

Philosophers are supposed to be concerned with questions of ontology, but Specters of Marx quickly conjures up the name 'hauntology' to describe its project. A spectre, Derrida writes, is ‘never present as such’; if it were, it would be a being, would circulate without trouble among the alive. But it does not follow that a ghost is altogether absent; if it were, it would be unable to haunt, to disturb the present. A ghost, Derrida concludes, has a ‘paradoxical phenomenality’ that upsets the ‘sharp distinction between the real and the unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and the non-living, being and non-being’. A shade is that which comes back in a form that is ‘undecidable’.

I found myself thinking of Specters of Marx while holding my index card yesterday afternoon. My perfect shade, it seems to me, is a perfect shade, for in the ghostly words 'Pelikan Blue', Pelikan Blue (the ink in the bottle that sits just behind me as I type) is not, in Derrida's phrase, 'present as such'. If it were, my heart would not have been skipping a beat at the sight of a colour that recalls the scribblings of Roland Barthes. But Pelikan Blue is not simply absent from the words 'Pelikan Blue', for the pale shade has its roots in the darker, fresher Pelikan Blue that emerged from my nib on 31 July. The conventional distinction between absence and presence cannot possibly do justice to the present (but not present) shade.

Ink, once again, turns out to be far from straightforward. An apparently simple ontological question, 'What colour is this on my index card?', is spooked by hauntological undecidability. Shade is a shady business.

I thought that I'd finished this post, dear readers, but then I was suddenly visited by the ghost of an entry from 2006, 'Powdering, Ghosting, Ink Fly', in which I reported that I had discovered many wonderful new technical terms in a 1961 book entitled Printing Ink Manual. I didn't explain the meaning of 'ghosting' at the time, but perhaps it would be appropriate to do so today. Here, then, is how pages 719-20 of the book put it:

The most prevalent type of ghosting is that of interference in the drying rate of one side of a print by the inks printed on the reverse; this is believed in the main to be due to the interaction of the volatile decomposition products of one drying ink film and the reverse side of the next sheet in the stack. [...] The defect may also appear as a loss of gloss in some areas which have been affected by inks on the reverse side, and also as a 'bloom'. Quick drying inks, especially gloss inks, seem most prone to give this trouble, but ghosting has been observed with normal linseed stand oil inks and problems have been investigated on many different types of paper from surface sized offset litho cartridges to coated boards.

I am now wondering, of course, what would happen if I wrote 'Pelikan Blue' on both sides of an index card and left the object in the sunlight for several months. Would a double ghosting occur? Would ghosting haunt the ghosting? (Can a spectre spook itself?)

I, a ghost-writer, clearly need to begin another experiment. Watch Ink Quest -- my haunt -- for news. Expect a spectre.

Ink in use today: Noodler's Nakahama Whaleman's Sepia. (I quite like this colour, which reminds me a little of Herbin Terre de Feu, but I am finding it extremely dry. My Sailor Sapporo simply gave up the ghost when filled with the ink, in fact, so I am now trying it in the eternally reliable Pelikan M200.)

PS (9.00am): Like a spectre, I'm back again. It occured to me after posting earlier today that readers inkterested in hearing and seeing Jacques Derrida speak about ghosts can consult the following clip (of an impossibly stylish J.D.) from Ghost Dance:



Derrida may have been Algerian, and the director of the film may be British, but the clip strikes me as magnificently, deliciously, deliriously French. I genuinely believe that, while I am sitting in my office reading papers about how the university is going to 'manage' a flu pandemic, the universities of Paris are filled with people having conversations just like the one in the clip. Pastis envy, I suppose.

PPS (4.30pm): While I rarely use Moleskine notebooks, I couldn't help but recognize something of myself in a delightful little piece of satire published just over a week ago in The Onion. Thanks to eagle-eyed, fountain-pen-wielding 'Owain' for the link.

Penacea

Give us this day our daily ink.

Life at the office is still chaotic, dear readers, so I have not been able to enjoy communion with you as often as I'd like in recent months. But I have found a moment or two this evening to bake my latest thoughts into some kind of loafing loaf.

In a rare period of calm on the train several days ago, I finally managed to read a short essay which I'd been ambitiously carrying in my briefcase for at least a week. The piece, by Colin Bloy, has a wonderful title -- 'The Use of Bread in Early Ink Making' -- and is, it may surprise you to learn, all about the use of bread in early ink making.

In 1645, notes Bloy, Abraham Bosse described his special varnish for copperplate black ink: bread crusts and onions were key ingredients, apparently with a view to making the oil less greasy. This, Bloy states, is the first recorded use of bread in the production of ink. Bosse's practice soon spread: Fertel and Mueller mentioned -- in 1723 and 1740, respectively -- the importance of a piece of bread to the ink-making process. (Mueller believed that it made the varnish thicker.)

This, however, is just the beginning of Bloy's fascinating tale, for he goes on to describe how, when the printing ink industry really found its feet in the nineteenth century, 'the romance of ink-making [...] disappeared', for the production of ink had been a festive occasion in earlier times. He then quotes a truly odd passage from Goebl's Unsere Farbe of 1896:

Those were the days of ink-making when it was made on a still, sunny day before the city gate, far from the damp air of the printing house, when the fire crackled under the pot, which stood on the trivet in a hole in the ground, and threw fantastic lights on the old city wall, a pleasant interlude in the monotonous profession of the printer -- and the festive mood was heightened by the oil-scented warm rolls which had been fried in the varnish, with which that ever-thirsty race of men who wield the balls, downed a heart-warming shot of schnapps -- which they did, naturally, only to ameliorate the effects of the fatty oil on the stomach -- and then the stirring in of the black provided the prose on a day of festive poetry.

Yes, dear readers, over 250 years after Abraham Bosse first referred to using bread in the making of ink, German citizens were gorging themselves on bread rolls which had been fried in the varnish inkvolved in the production of ink. 'These rolls', Bloy also notes, 'were considered to be a great delicacy when eaten with salt', and were seen as beneficial for victims of tuberculosis ('as long as they could overcome their revulsion of the pungent odour of the oil to which they, as laymen, were not accustomed').

This belief that ink has medicinal qualities has been remarkably inkfectious. Writing in 1793 in Paris, Bloy records, Momoro declared that ink could be used to treat cuts, bruises, burns, and even -- make sure you're seated ... gently -- haemorrhoids. Meanwhile, a 1926 volume entitled Printing Ink! A History reported that the custom of daubing ink upon tumours, swellings, and wounds had been a common one within living memory.

I'm still trying to digest these remarkable slices of inkformation. (Perhaps I need a shot of schnapps.) And I'm also trying to come to terms with how far we've fallen. Our ancestors knew, it seems, that ink was good for us, that it could, when placed upon troubled bodies, heal and calm. We, however, live in a half-baked world where, as I've noted on countless occasions, ink is generally seen as a poison, an evil force, a demon to keep at a distance.

Regular readers of Ink Quest will know that I am not fond of any form of religion and that I know next to nothing about the major belief systems of the world. I believe, however, that I'm right to say that bread features quite centrally in the rites of at least one well-known religion. My sole visit to a Catholic Mass some six or seven years ago, to see the child of some former friends receiving his first communion, left me extremely puzzled when, after the jingling of some kind of bells, people started leaving their seats and coming back chewing snacks of some kind. When I discovered that bread was being dished out from some kind of makeshift bakery at the front, I told the Inkette that I was going up to the buffet for a nibble. She informed that I wasn't allowed because I hadn't been something-or-othered (confirmed? ordained? beatified?); I still don't see how the priest (is that the right term?) would have known that I wasn't the Right Kind of Person. Is there a password that has to be uttered before the baguettes are revealed? ('Crouton'?) And are you allowed to choose if you want bread without wine, or is a 'meal deal' system strictly enforced at all times? And what, while I'm wondering aloud, is the deal with strangers turning around, trying to shake my hand, and saying 'Peace be with you'? Are they not aware that peace will never be with me? Do I look like the kind of person in whom peace is interested? And are 'Have you got any of that tasty-looking bread left?' or 'Could you go back up and grab a crust for me; I'll pay you?' acceptable responses to 'Peace be with you'? It occurs to me now, in fact, that the build-up in Ink Towers to my first experience of Mass went a little something like this:



But I digress; my bafflement before religion has led me astray, my children. Let me come back from the wilderness and tell you about my latest Great Plan. Let me cast my bread upon the waters that surround the Penquod.

We all, as inkthusiasts, agree that the Gospel of Ink needs to be spread; there are heathens out there (note to self: stop calling them 'idiots' if in the pulpit) who know nothing but ballpoints and who fear the dark one who signs his name as 'Mephinkstopheles'.

My solution, my dream, inkvolves the resurrection of ink as both foodstuff and medicine. I'm far too misanthropic actually to break bread with anyone, but the engine-room of the Penquod will henceforth also serve as a bakery, from which inky rolls will be blessed and sent out into the lost world. The little-used social function room, moreover, will be transformed into a hospital where every disease will be treated with ink.

'Doctor! He's gone into cardiac arrest!'
'Pass me the Noodler's, nurse, and fill me a converter with 5ml of Herbin'.
'We're losing him, doctor!'
'There's one thing we haven't tried. Nurse, get the Parker Penman Sapphire from the secure storage area'.
'Is that the ink which is essentially the same colour as Private Reserve DC Supershow Blue, or possibly Diamine Majestic Blue, doctor?'
'There isn't time for that discussion now, nurse; we'd be here all night. Remember the Hippocratink oath and get back to work'.

This heretical blog has often hailed ink in ecstatic tones, turned inscription into some kind of new religion. And now, in my inky bread and my 'penacea', I have finally found the flesh of my faith. Let's roll.

Ink healing ailments today: Noodler's Bad Blue Heron. (More pleasurable to use, I think, than the Upper Ganges Blue. It's drier, certainly, and I know that some have found this problematic, but it transpired that the UGB was simply too wet in my Sailor Sapporo.)

Inkfluenza

The swines!

I have complained in many previous posts about how the makers of modern writing instruments (ballpoints, rollerballs, and so on) want to make the world a sterile place. By hiding ink away, by refusing to let the sacred fluid itself ever come near our hands, the companies responsible for these monstrosities push us ever closer towards a wholly prophylactic existence, in which we all become like the Bubble Boy ('Moops!'), deprived of physical contact.

My previous complaints have discussed this will-to-sterility (Nietzsche is so passé; the will-to-power has become the will-to-scour) in largely figurative terms; the Bic corporation does not, for instance, actually market its endemic biro as a germ-free object. But the time of the figurative has passed, dear readers, for we have entered the next phase of Project Prophylactic; the war of sterility against older forms of writing instruments -- fountain pens, for instance -- has taken a terrifyingly literal turn.

I became aware of this yesterday afternoon while reading the consistently inkformative Office Supply Geek, where a post from 9 October described the Ticonderoga antimicrobial pencil. This truly bizarre object is sterility raised to the level of DEFCON 1, for each pencil is coated with Microban, which, according to the official Microban website, is designed to 'provide continuous antimicrobial product protection'.

I have not yet seen a Ticonderoga Microban pencil in the (scrubbed, shrink-wrapped) flesh, but I suspect that the product will sell rather well in the coming months, for the threat of swine flu is, in the UK at least, being discussed in tones that increase in anxiety with each new day.

As official union troublemaker, for instance, I have seen detailed risk assessments and an 'escalation plan' drawn up by the university in order to 'manage' a pandemic. There's an absurd, perverse poetry in these documents; the late J.G. Ballard would surely have loved them. And there are also specific measures that will be put into place if the swine pushes its dripping snout into the ivory tower. Containers of specially purchased sterilizing handwash, for instance, will be placed alongside handbasins, and staff have already been informed, in a series of laminated documents affixed to walls, about the correct way to dispose of used tissues. (I must write to the Vice-Chancellor to thank him for enlightening me. Such knowledge is not to be sniffed at.) There is, I feel, something magnificently British about the belief that a serious global illness can be defeated by a little bit of soap.

I dread to think what will happen if the institution finds out about the Ticonderoga Microban pencil. I have reported in previous posts how serif typefaces have essentially become outlawed in the workplace, and I have also worried here that the risk-obsessed management will impose a ban upon fountain pens and real ink. The terrible partnership of swine flu and the Microban pencil has sent me into utter panic. This can only be the moment They have been waiting for, planning for. We've lived for years beneath the bloated banality of micromanagement (F.W. Taylor, how mild you now seem); microbemanagement is surely just around the corner.

Let them try to make us write with nothing but Microban pencils; let them ban ink and fountain pens as unhygienic carriers of swine flu. I will pigheadedly spread inkfluenza with my unclean writing instruments. They may shout 'Oi, ink!' and reach for their sanitizing handwash when I enter the building, but I will snort 'O, ink! Oink! Oink!' back at them. Before swine, pearls. Sterility has had its bacon.

Ink in use today: Noodler's Upper Ganges Blue; Noodler's Polar Brown. (I noted in my previous post that these two colours have recently arrived at Ink Towers in a package from honorary Penquod crew member Anna. A few words on each. The Polar Brown is certainly an improvement on Eternal Luxury Brown, but it's proving to be rather dry in my Aurora Talentum. I quite like the colour, but Noodler's Walnut remains Nathan Tardif's finest brown, in my opinion. Upper Ganges Blue has been rather pleasant so far: it flows much better than the Polar Brown, and it doesn't suffer from the 'chalkiness' of some of the other Noodler's eternal colours. And I think I prefer its shade to Eternal Luxury Blue.)

Eee! Ink!

'Eee! Ink!', I cried.

It was Tuesday evening, and I had just returned home from a long, deranged day at work (where the chaos continues and continues to keep me from blogging, as does Baby Ink's decision merrily to work his way through just about every illness known to humanity). Waiting for me when I crossed the moat around Ink Towers was a package from Seattle-based honorary Penquod crew member Anna. Inside, to my delight, I found an array of vials filled with delightful Noodler's ink. Seven vials, to be precise. I was filled with such joy that I whirled around the room in what will henceforth be known as the Dance of the Seven Vials. (Shallow? Me?) You can see the glorious little objects in all their glory in the photograph above, dear readers, but you may not, because I couldn't show all of the labels, be able to figure out the full, magnificent names of the inks within. Here, then, is the roll call:

TOP ROW (left > right): La Reine Mauve; Polar Brown; Mata Hari's Cordial (new style).
BOTTOM ROW (left > right): Borealis Black; Manjiro Nakahama Whaleman's Sepia; Bad Blue Heron; Upper Ganges Blue.

As I type these words, two of my favourite pens -- the Aurora Talentum and the Sailor Sapporo -- are drying and awaiting the ceremonial opening of the first of the seven magical vials. I haven't quite decided where I'll begin, but I'm drawn to Upper Ganges Blue and Polar Brown, partly because the former looks a little like the charming blue used by my beloved Roland Barthes on his index cards.

'Eee! Ink!', I shrieked, then, as I joyfully danced the Dance of the Seven Vials. But I had been shouting 'Eee! Ink!' in fury several days earlier.

Well, 'E ink!', to be precise. Allow me to explain. I was, in a rare moment of calm, reading the Sunday paper, in which I noticed an ecstatic review of some of the latest wireless electronic reading devices (the Amazon Kindle, and so on). While I like to fill my life with trinkets, I rarely take an interest in hi-tech gadgets. Yes, I have a mobile phone, but, as I may have reported in an earlier post, I made the assistant in the shop find me one without a camera, MP3 player, internet access, colour screen, and just about anything unrelated to the act of making a telephone call. I own an iPod, too, but it's one of the older models that's about as large as the twelve-inch record that the iPod apparently replaces. ('How old is that?', honorary Penquod crew member and colleague Daphne recently asked; she seems to acquire a new iPod as often as she acquires a new pair of shoes, which is weekly, as far as I can tell.) I don't, ink fact, count these technologically advanced objects among my precious trinkets; they're functional tools, rather, and they, as objects, give me no particular pleasure. For that, I have my archaic pens, my ink bottles, my silk pocket squares, my notebooks, and so on.

But I somehow found myself reading the review of the Kindle and Kindle-like devices in the newspaper, even though I have no desire to own one. And it wasn't long before I was on my well-worn soapbox, raging, raving, ranting.

What set me off, dear readers, was the discovery that what readers see on the screen of an electronic reading device is technically known as 'e ink'. (For a more detailed explanation, click here.) 'E ink!', I shrieked upon discovering this monstrous phrase. 'E ink! Where the hell is the ink?'

It all makes terrible, perfect sense, doesn't it, dear readers? It's another piece in the global conspiracy against us, against lovers and users of fountain pens, against inkthusiasts. I've known for years that manufacturers of ballpoint pens have been doing their best to keep ink away from us, to make it something that we never see or touch. And now the makers of the Kindle and their collaborators are taking the untouchability and immateriality of ink one step further.

Traditionally, ink has been something that spits and splashes, that gets on hands and cuffs. In short, it has been something that we touch and that, in turn, touches us. (Think of the narrator of Tolstoy's Boyhood covering the edge of his school desk with ink when he's bored; think of the monks in Eco's The Name of the Rose who lick their inky fingers ... and pay the price.) As I've noted in countless previous posts, one of the things I love most about ink is its physicality, its material quirks and winks.

And this is precisely what the makers of 'e ink' want to destroy. When I read a book, I want to smell the ink and the pages; I want to feel the object in my hands as it responds to my reading. (The spine gradually cracks and its colour changes, for instance; the photograph above shows precisely how the black spines of Paul Auster's novels became flecked with white in my hands.) In short, I want to be as seduced by the materiality of a book as I am by its plot or play of words. But that could never happen with 'e ink', with a 'book' (the term is no longer appropriate, really) read on a Kindle or some other modern monstrosity. 'E ink' has no body, no presence, no physicality. And that is why I will never touch it.

There is, of course, a certain irony here: you are reading this upon a screen. Ink Quest can offer no ink for your fingers to fondle. But that's immaterial in the end, I think, because every post begins its life upon a page of one of my notebooks, with pen and (real) ink. And I am saving those pages to fuel an almighty bonfire of the profanities. Yes, dear readers, I urge you to gather together the 'e ink' devices of the world -- the Kindles and the like -- and pile them up at the gates of Ink Towers. I will soak my back pages in paraffink (a potent mixture of ink and paraffin), and I will stuff them between the plastic monstrosities. And then 'e ink' will know the true meaning of the word 'kindle'.

Ink very likely to be in use today: Noodler's Ganges Blue; Noodler's Polar Brown.

Spoiler

******SPOILER ALERT******

My recent complaints about the ink on offer inside "Wales' largest department store" have generated furious complaints of their own: the author of Ravens March, a blog of which I am very fond, has taken me to task for being ungrateful about what's on my doorstep. The only department store near him, he notes, sells no ink whatever, so my whining about the handful of brands available in John Lewis was like a red rag to a bull.

I accept completely, dear readers, that I regularly behave like a spoilt child. Ink Quest is, ink fact, little more than four years of ungrateful complaints about the excessive numbers of consumer objects that I have amassed -- and quickly discarded -- in my search for the perfect ink. My life is so unfortunate -- the ninety-eight bottles of ink that I've purchased at great expense have brought me no happiness. And the leather case filled with twenty-three fountain pens is just salt in the wound. Feel my pain.

But here's the problem: if I had nothing to complain about, if everything were perfect, why on earth would I bother living? It's precisely because I'm such a spoilt brat that I have a reason to get out of bed in the morning. 'What can I complain about today?' is always one of my first thoughts on awaking. (Beckett's famous line is thus reworked: I can't go on ... Oh, there's something new to complain about. Good -- I'll go on.) Ink short, complaining is what I do. Complaint is my complaint.

By extension, if I were to find the perfect ink, the perfect pen, or the perfect notebook, I would have nothing to write about, no reason to keep drifting at the increasingly deserted helm of the Penquod. All of these words, these bitter complaints, exist because I cannot possibly be satisfied by my latest object of desire. I thought for a while that this simply made me a fickle aesthete, but then I read the following in one of Susan Sontag's essays: 'The aesthete's posture alternates between never being satisfied and always finding a way of being satisfied, being pleased with virtually everything.' I, of course, am pleased with nothing. (I once found myself in conversation at work with a member of The Management. He asked what it would take to stop me complaining, to please me professionally. I said that I simply didn't understand the question, and we moved on to another topic. It was inevitable that I would find my way into trade union activities, then, I suppose: our regular meetings are minuted marathons of complaint. When we formally declared ourselves 'in dispute' with the university over redundancies earlier in the year, I had to stop myself saying at a meeting, 'What, the dispute is only beginning now? What the hell do you call what I've been doing for the last decade?')

This, of course, generates problems. I cannot help noticing, for inkstance, that colleagues who come into my office filled with optimism always leave looking suicidal when they have heard my latest complaint. I am convinced, moreover, that my endless complaining has persuaded at least two people to leave academia permanently. ('Come back! If you resign, you won't be able to complain about how much you'd like to leave!', I have cried, but it's always been too late.)

In short, then, I am a spoiler. Spoilt for choice, I cannot help spoiling others' happy days with my spoilt behaviour. (I'm reminded of a lovely story that Maurice Blanchot tells somewhere; I can't remember where, and I may have spoilt the finer details. The Messiah has finally returned and is wandering around near the gates of the city, enjoying his hour of arrival. A man strides up to him and says, 'So, when are you going to come back?')

A 'spoiler', of course, is also a device attached to the back of a car in order to drag it down. And that is precisely what I, as a spoiler, will do to all of you, dear readers. Sooner or later, I will drag you down to my level of misery, indignation, despair, and fury. The spoils from the Penquod's sullen voyages will inkrease, yes, but so will the inkevitable spoiling of your moods.

I'm spoiling for your cooperation, then: stop reading Ink Quest. Delete it from your list of 'bookmarks' and never return to these pages. I will keep complaining, keep acting like a spoilt child, but this need not concern or upset you. *****END OF SPOILER ALERT*****

Ink causing reason for complaint today: Noodler's Walnut. (Why so dry, Walnut? You're a lovely colour, so why not show yourself more readily.)

Deadlines (part II)

What use is ink without a pen?

I was so tired -- dead tired -- when I wrote last night's entry, dear readers, that I completely forgot to say anything substantial about the fountain pens on sale in 'Wales' largest department store'. Ink is always my priority, of course, but I should perhaps have offered at least a few words about the shop's writing instruments.

As with the inks, I'm afraid, the selection is rather predictable: Cross, Waterman, Mont Blanc, Lamy, Sheaffer, and so on. The big brands. The ones you see everywhere. 'Same as it ever was ... Same as it ever was.' Once again, I can't help feeling that John Lewis has missed an opportunity. The store prides itself on being somewhat exclusive, somewhat above other shops, but its selection of fountain pens does absolutely nothing to mark it out as distinctive.

The shiny familiarity of the new pens in their glass cabinets, ink fact, depressed me a little. They all looked so new, so recently crafted. Why, I asked myself, couldn't a forward-thinking department store start selling vintage fountain pens, models that have matured over time and in the hands of previous owners?

And this is where things start to get curious: John Lewis sells, in the men's clothing section, vintage cufflinks. Yes, dear readers, buried deep within the four floors of pristine luxury objects is a small glass case in which previously owned cufflinks sit and face the shelves of shiny new cufflinks. (Do the vintage ones talk amongst themselves about what they can see? 'Look at those kids out there, all polished and ready for their first cuffs? So eager, so naive. What do they know about anything? A simple glance this way would be nice. Hey, kid! Yes, you. With all the shine. Are you a boy or a girl? I can't tell these days. I fought in a war so that you could sit out there and enjoy your freedom. Don't you scowl at me, kiddo -- I'll come over there and give you a cuff around the ear.')

Why is it that vintage cufflinks are acceptable in a luxury department store, but not vintage pens. Is it something to do with the fact that the latter would have spent a great deal of time in others' hands, and not suspended at a sterile distance in cuffs? Would a used fountain pen be seen by the general shopping public as an object too intimate to be passed on and used again, like a pair of shoes or an undergarment?

There is clearly market research to be done here, dear readers. We need to know why a major retailer has degrees of vintageness -- vintages of vintage, perhaps. I'll set aside my deadlines and get straight to work. I'm rolling up my sleeves...

Ink in use today: Rohrer and Klingner Sepia.

Deadlines

Dead lines in the wake of deadlines.

I announced in my last post, dear readers, that I was about to disappear for around a week into the annual whirlwind that is enrolment week at the university. The 'days of the station wagons' are always chaotic, but things were more crushing than ever this year, mainly because several major deadlines -- for a publisher, for the union, for an MA examining board -- also decided to impose themselves upon me, as did a nasty cough that looked as if it was turning into bronchitis. I still have a major deadline looming at the end of October, and I have no idea how I'm going to meet it, but there seem this evening, for the first time in far too long, to be a few spare minutes in which I can sit and update Ink Quest. The deadlines have left me extremely weary, so I can promise nothing but tired, dead lines tonight; my usual exuberant optimism, happiness, warmth, and love for the human race are nowhere to be found.

Actually, I should probably write nothing at all, for Sitemeter tells me that the blog has been more popular than ever while I've not been posting. People, it seems, just can't get enough of my absence; they've been falling over themselves to see me not here. (Cue the old Max Boyce line: 'I went outside to collect my bicycle, and there it was -- gone'.) Perhaps there's a special kind of RSS feed which updates inkthusiasts only when I've written nothing on any given day. ('Quick, he's been totally silent today -- let's read the blog'.) The less I write, the more you read; the less I'm here, the more I'm evidently adored. I can't possibly think why.

Anyway, the chaos of the last couple of weeks has left little time for inky pursuits. I've thought about ink, of course, and I've spoken about pens and stationery on the telephone to old friend and honorary Penquod crew member Eileen, who's recovering from major surgery on her spine (get well soon!), but my ongoing search for the perfect ink has been rather interrupted.

Ink fact, I have just one major inkident to report. While I've been off the air, Wales' largest department store, John Lewis, has opened its doors for the first time. To be more precise, the crowds were welcomed in on what was, for me, one of the busiest days of last week. Although I was barely awake by the time I left work, I still managed to break my train journey and call in on the way home, for I, dear readers, was on a mission.

As far as I'm concerned, any department store can be judged according to a few very simple criteria:

- Does it stock a decent range of fountain pens?
- Do its shelves also hold bottled ink? (Cartridges win no points in this test, I'm afraid.)
- Does the men's clothing section offer more than three colours of silk pocket squares? Are they, more importantly, on display? (Take ten points off if the shop keeps them 'behind the counter'. Take forty points off if the salesman says, 'It's normally only the older gentlemen who ask for these'.)
- Can a wandering dandy easily fill a basket with at least two of the following essential grooming items: shaving soap; shaving cream (nothing in a tube or can counts); a delicate aftershave balm that does not contain alcohol; Acqua di Parma Colonia; Floris No. 89; mainland-European-style gentleman's carryall (ordinary woman's handbag not allowed as substitute)?

Readers of Ink Quest lucky enough to live in major metropolitan areas will perhaps see this list as nothing special; anyone who lives in London, for instance, could probably find all of these items, and many more, within minutes in Selfridges or Harrod's. But out here in the wilderness, where prancing dandies are strung up on streetlamps on a daily basis, the luxuries of life -- nay, the bare essentials -- are harder to come by.

I was, then, filled with hope when I walked through the doors of John Lewis last week. No longer, I felt, would I need to order my trinkets online, or track them down in shops hidden down dark alleyways and behind unmarked doors. ('Can I help you?' 'I hear you have Floris.' 'Who sent you?' 'El Lavender'. 'What's the password?' 'Niven'.)

The disappointment did not take long to descend. The shop is extremely pleasant, and it's certainly a promising step in the direction marked 'foppery'. Pocket squares in several colours were on full display, as were some fairly interesting shaving products. And there was an entire table devoted to the delightful yellow Acqua di Parma boxes. Floris No. 89 was nowhere to be found, however. And then I arrived in the pen section.

Major retailers would probably go out of business in a matter of weeks if I were allowed to stock their pen departments. What we inkthusiasts love, what we prize, tends not to match what sells in huge numbers. Outside our little world, there can't be many people who would pay over £10 for a bottle of Noodler's ink when they could pick up Parker Quink for something like £3.50. We're a 'niche market', I suppose you could say, and we have many websites that attend to our expensive, erratic, insatiable whims.

However, I still find it rather disappointing that Wales' largest department store plays it quite so safe when it comes to ink. Yes, there are bottles on the shelves, but the overall selection is rather uninspiring: Cross Black; Parker Quink Blue; Waterman Florida Blue and Blue-Black; Sheaffer Blue and Black; Mont Blanc Blue and Black.

Please don't misunderstand me: some of these colours are perfectly pleasant -- I'm very fond of the Waterman inks -- but couldn't the company have pushed the boat out a little? (Does it really want its unofficial slogan to become, 'John Lewis: where the boring blue is'?) Wouldn't a few J. Herbin shades have added a charming Gallic twist? Or, thinking more ambitiously, couldn't the shop, which has opened to such fanfare, have made the radical decision to be the first brick-and-mortar outlet in the UK to sell Noodler's ink? Why the need to play it so safe?

I have been back to John Lewis on a couple of occasions since, just in case a selection of more exciting inks has been added. ('The regular crowds have died down a bit now; bring out those funny inks that always attract the lunatics. And get the camera -- we can put the footage on YouTube for people to laugh at'.) I think, ink fact, that one of the men who works at the pen counter has recognized me as an obsessive lingerer. But he will just have to put up with my daily visits and my disappointed sighing when I see the shelves. I'm waiting for ink that will light up my page, make more than dead lines.

Ink in use today: Sailor Brown; Sailor Grey.