The Missing Ink

by Philip Hensher

  ‘My favourite letter? The one I like making with a pen? I quite enjoy making a D, a capital D. It’s got a nice outline to it. I don’t like A very much. Don’t like E too much.’

  Interviewer: ‘Do you make those Greek E’s? You know, people call them Greek E’s, but they’re not – you know what I mean.’

  ‘No. Never. Horrible. I used to like y and z, because you can go zh-zh-zh-zh-zh, with the capitals.’

  R.J.H., retired bank official, 78

  16 ~ Ink

  In Zachary Leader’s superb biography of Kingsley Amis, there is a memorable photograph of the novelist, who has fallen asleep on a beach somewhere. It must be sometime in the early 1960s, during his most libidinous phase. There is a message written in lipstick on his back, by his then wife, Hilly, later Lady Kilmarnock – their marriage was approaching its end. It reads ‘1 FAT ENGLISHMAN I F—ANYTHING’.

  It is worth remembering that writing can be done by any number of substances, on any number of receiving mediums – in this case lipstick on skin. Some of these stories fall into the category of urban myth. We have all heard the story of the gentleman on a holiday with his mates whose skin was similarly written on with factor-25 sunblock by a supposedly helpful friend so that, after a long afternoon, his back blazoned BUMMER to the whole beach in spotty white letters. There is a common skin condition of hypersensitivity called dermatographism, in which the pressure of a fingertip on another’s skin is enough to raise lines and letters, which might encourage such stories. There is also the story which comes up from time to time about a very helpful and kindly German prisoner of war in Ipswich who announced that he was a gardener in private life. Would the town council like him to plant some bulbs? Oh yes, please, that would be very nice, as all the town gardeners had been called up. The POW worked very hard, to the delight of all the town. You see, they’re not all bad, those Germans, and when the war’s over we’ll all be friends again. They missed him a little bit when he was transferred to another camp in a month or two. Then spring came and a vast array of crocuses came up, when it became apparent that the German gardener had planted them in the shape of a giant swastika.

  We also hear, on good authority, about ‘An interesting court case [that] occurred in Germany. A farmer was living on bad terms with his neighbour. To offend him he deliberately sowed seeds on his neighbour’s field in the form of libellous words. The seeds grew to plants which were in the exact pattern of the offender’s handwriting. The court accepted this as evidence and legal proof of the offender’s identity, and he was convicted.’1 There are plenty of other ways in which writing can be performed in unorthodox ways. In a story by J.D. Salinger, members of that frightful Glass family send nonsensical messages to each other by writing on the medicine-cabinet mirror with soap, such as ‘Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man. Love, Irving Sappho, formerly under contract to Elysium Studios Ltd. Please be happy happy happy with your beautiful Muriel. This is an order. I outrank everyone on this block.’*

  We all remember the ways from childhood in which writing can be performed in unexpected ways. To a very shy and wary child, one of the few pleasures of Bonfire Night* was the opportunity to light those harmless fireworks known in England as ‘sparklers’ and spending the next two minutes trying to write your name in the air, its trace retained only by the retina. Still more transiently, there are the famous words on Keats’s tomb in Rome, that he was one ‘whose name was writ in water’. A little later in the year than Bonfire Night, when snow fell in Yorkshire† rude boys would go out to the field and make a serious attempt to piss their names in the snow – the bladder never held enough to get to the end of Simon Postlethwaite’s name, but it didn’t stop him from seriously trying. On the same theme, once, two German painters were talking about the German chancellor Hindenburg, whom one of them had been commissioned to depict in an official portrait. The portraitist was bemoaning the difficulty of capturing the Chancellor’s facial features, upon which the other said ‘Ich kann den Alten in den Schnee pissen.’ And sign his name afterwards, presumably.**

  There are numerous attempts to write in unorthodox media on unorthodox substances in the kitchen – that festival of hopeless handwriting in icing chronicled in an unmissable website, cakewrecks.com, for instance. (My favourite is the baker who wrote on a cake, in loving Palmerian lettering, ‘Happy Retirement. Good Bye Tension. Hello Prison.’ The customer had requested ‘Pension’.) Loving mothers have for decades proved their superiority by making pancakes in the shape of their children’s initials. And so on. All of these methods may record something of their maker’s characteristic and individual handwritings.*

  Nevertheless, for the most part, when we want to write something to be read later, we don’t write in these relatively unorthodox ways. We write with ink, on paper, and have done for hundreds of years.

  Ink can be made of any number of substances. You remember how, as a child, you discovered that you could write with lemon juice on a blank sheet of paper, and it remained blank until, cunningly, you placed it on a radiator, when it darkened into a readable brown. ‘I WILL MEET YOU IN SECRET IN THE WOODS TELL NO ONE AND DESTROY THIS MESSAGE.’ Ah-ha! That’ll foil those swine who are always spying on 8-year-olds to find out how they spend their time!

  Ink, in the normal sense, comes from the Latin word ‘encaustum’, meaning ‘to burn in’. In the Middle Ages, ink was prepared either from iron salt and oak galls, or from some sort of suspension of carbon. The most usual form of this was lampblack – the substance you get if you place a piece of glass over a burning candle. This was usually combined with gum and water. Both these inks had disadvantages. The iron salt and oak gall ink tended to brown with age. The carbon-based method produced a blacker ink, but it needed constant stirring by the writer. Moreover, when it dried, it became brittle and could in time drop off the paper altogether.

  For centuries, it was quite normal for people to make ink for themselves. Recipes for ink can be found in most early writing masters’ books. In Edward Cocker’s 1658 copybook, The Pen’s Triumph:

  Take three Ounces of Galls which are small and heavy and crisp, put them in a vessel of three pints of Wine, or of Rain-water, which is much better, letting it stand to infusing in the Sun for one or two dayes. Then take two Ounces of Coppris, or of Roman Vitrial, well colour’d and beaten small, stirring it well with a stick, which being put in, set it again in the Sun for one or two dayes more. Stir all together, adding two Ounces of Gum Arabique of the clearest and most shining, being well beaten. And to make your Ink shine and lustrous, add certain pieces of the Barque of Pomgranat, or a small quantity of double-refin’d Sugar, boyling it a little over a gentle fire. Lastly, pour it out, and keep it in a vessel of Glasse, or of Lead well covered.

  If that seems like a great deal of effort, you could, by the seventeenth century, buy ready-made ink. The profession of ink seller appears to have been a marginal one, however. Those fascinating volumes which describe the calls which street vendors used to bawl out their wares only occasionally find space for the ink sellers. A 1648 volume of Cries of London does show one:

  Number 11 sells ink and pens. He carries an ink-bottle hung by a stick behind him, and has a bunch of pens in his hand:–

  Buy pens, pens, pens, pens of the best

  Excellent pens and seconds the least;

  Come buy good ink as black as jet

  A varnish like gloss on writing ’twill set.2

  Or from a children’s book of 1815:

  Come buy my fine writing-ink!

  Through many a street and many a town

  The Ink-man shapes his way;

  The trusty Ass keeps plodding on,

  His master to obey.3

  In some of these depictions of ink sellers, the seller himself carries a barrel of ink; clearly this one was unusually successful, as he could employ an ass to carry it. The trade, however came and went, and the itinerant ink seller was evidently not a
permanent sight in every town. Not every set of Cries of London includes the ink seller – J.T. Smith’s famous one (1839) leaves it out.*

  By the end of the nineteenth century, it had completely disappeared. Hindley (in 1881) classifies it among the ‘itinerant occupations which the progress of society has entirely superseded . . . He who carries a barrel on his back, with a measure and funnel at his side, bawling “Fine writing-ink,” is wanted neither by clerks nor authors.’4

  The mass manufacture of ink in factories began in the early nineteenth century. As its development and constitution was tied up with new developments in the pen, we should now go back to discover what these were.

  17 ~ Witness

  Interviewer: ‘You’re full of shame?’

  A: ‘Let’s not get into that. I went to see the film Shame last night. Quite a difficult watch. This is handwriting, not psychoanalysis?’

  Interviewer: ‘You made a face there. It’s the same one as when I mention your flat.’

  A: ‘Yes. Let’s not go there. I think shame is a thing with me. I think that’s your writer’s observational shtick.’

  Interviewer: ‘I’m not really so interested in shame, which I think is a more-or-less universal condition more-or-less successfully concealed, but why does it focus on your handwriting?’

  A: ‘Maybe it’s a self-conscious thing, that you’re asking me to reveal something about me?’

  Interviewer: ‘No, I’m asking you to think about why it’s handwriting that people are so often openly ashamed about – this is very common – whereas if you asked someone how they feel about their clothes, people are not so likely to express shame.’

  A: ‘Women are.’

  B: ‘Because you can be more in control of your clothes?’

  Interviewer: ‘People often shrink from discussion of their handwriting.’

  A: ‘It does feel like a personal thing. It’s your signature – it’s part of your self. Through your handwriting, that is a mark of you, isn’t it? What does my handwriting say about me? It says – I’m feeling self-conscious about this now. This is so difficult.’

  Interviewer: ‘Let’s try a different tack. Have you ever fallen in love with someone because of their handwriting?’

  A: ‘I’ve definitely been drawn more to people when I’ve seen that they had handwriting that I admired. I think there’s something about your handwriting which – if you can do it, it’s like being an adult. My mother’s handwriting is actually perfect.’

  Interviewer: ‘Perfect? That’s a strange thing to say about handwriting. There are so many different ways to write well.’

  A: ‘Well, to me. I’m in her shadow. Her writing is very straight, it’s very clear, it’s very neat, but it’s also obviously her own hand.’

  Interviewer: ‘Is there any sort of handwriting that if you saw it after you’d been to bed with them, say, they sent a postcard, you would say “No Effing Way”?’

  B: ‘No, but once – pitter-patter, head-over-heels . . . Everything that I was falling for in that person was just, oh God, look at that, it was there. Stylish, not completely overbearing but a little bit relaxed, not over-thought.’

  Interviewer: ‘Could you ever go to bed with someone if you discovered that they drew a little heart over their i’s?’

  B: ‘I think he means you. It’s unlikely that I would.’

  A: female political lobbyist, 46

  B: female agent, 36

  18 ~ Pens

  When you are elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, as most English writers sooner or later are, you are offered the choice of signing the Book during your induction ceremony with one of two writing implements, both inherited by the Society. You either sign with Byron’s pen, or with Dickens’s quill. The majority, interestingly, go for Dickens’s quill, as I did, even though it must have been one of many thousands to pass through Dickens’s hands – quills don’t last all that long. The counter-intuitive nature of the sequence pen-before-quill suggests, however, that the historical picture that most of us have, that the eighteenth century wrote with goose feathers trimmed and dipped in ink, to be succeeded with much more durable and effective metal pens in a steady sort of way, is quite wrong. Pens co-existed with quills for a very long time.*

  The problem with quills, and for many pens, was an obvious one. A quill has a very limited means of holding ink, as well as being a short-lived sort of tool. Oddly, the problem of increasing the ink reservoir of a pen attracted a solution long before anyone thought of making the nib more durable by making it out of metal. Pepys, unexpectedly, had what seems to have been an early reservoir pen. On 5 August 1663, after a busy day which left him in a sweat after ‘towsing’ a tart called Jemimah and reading Descartes, he records, ‘This evening came a letter about business from Mr Coventry, and with it a silver pen he promised me to carry inke in, which is very necessary.’

  By 1710, such pens were known as ‘fountain pens’; the term doesn’t seem to make obvious sense to us, but the eighteenth century would have seen something which held a body of liquid to be made to flow at will. In any case, in the OED it’s recorded from 1710, and by 1723 we have a detailed description of its working in English, in Edmund Stone’s translation of a M. Bion’s The Construction and Principal Uses of Mathematical Instruments. Stone, or Bion’s, account of how the pen works, or fails to work, makes you realize that the dark corner of the human soul that works for IKEA and tortures us with flatpack instructions is not at all a new phenomenon.

  A pen about five inches long, consisting of a Pen, which ought to be well slit, and cut, and screwed into the inside of a little Pipe, which is soldered to another Pipe of the same Bigness, as the Lid; in which Lid is soldered a Male Screw for screwing on the Cover; as likewise for stopped a little Hole at the Place 1, and so hindering the Ink from running through it. At the other End of the Piece F, there is a little Pipe, on the Outside of which the Top-Cover H may be screwed on. In this Top-Cover there goes a Porte-Craion, that is to screw into the last-mentioned little Pipe, and so stop the End of the Pipe at which the Ink is poured in, by means of a Funnel. When the aforementioned Pen is to be used, the Cover G must be taken off, and the Pen a little shaken, in order to make the Ink run freely. Note, If the Porte-Craion does not stop the Mouth of the Piece F, the Air, by its pressure, will cause the Ink all to run out at once.*

  The other problem that writing implements faced were the poor durability of goose quills as nibs. The answer ought to have been plain – to make them out of metal. But in fact it is not quite as simple as it seems to make a metal nib. What quills had strongly in their favour is flexibility. You can’t write with just any narrow piece of metal: as the historian Joyce Irene Whalley points out, ‘If you try to write a good hand with, for example, a knitting needle, or even a piece of metal more nearly adapted to pen form, you will have a good idea of the problem facing the would-be pen improvers.’1

  The technical demand that the nib be flexible was also supplemented by an aesthetic demand – the predominant style of writing, from Bickham’s ideal copperplate in the eighteenth century onwards, required an alternation between thick and thin strokes that required a flexible nib, such as a quill. There was also the point that the inks of the day corroded metal, which would require the replacement of a relatively expensive item.

  These questions were worked on, and the manufacture of steel pen nibs for general sale started about 1829. Most steel pen-makers set up in Birmingham. The firm of Joseph Gillott is credited with being the first to improve the flexibility ‘by making three slits in a nib instead of one – one in the centre of the point and one on each side of the “shoulder”.’2 These manufacturing processes were complex and highly intricate. Nineteenth-century authors describe ‘fifteen or sixteen distinct processes [that] have to be completed’ in the making of a nib.3 By 1840 Joseph Gillott was Steel Pen Maker to the Queen, and boasting in an advertisement that he

  has been for Twenty Years engaged in the Manufacture of Steel P
ens and during that time has devoted his unceasing attention to the improving and perfecting this useful and necessary article; the result of his persevering efforts, and numerous experiments upon the properties of the metal used, has been the construction of a Pen upon a principle entirely new, combining all the advantages of the elasticity and fineness of the Quill, with the durability of the Metallic Pen, and thus obviating the objections which have existed against the use of Steel Pens.

  These pens were not, for the most part, fountain pens in our sense, but just nibs. Your metal nib, held by some sort of ‘pen-holder’, had to be repeatedly dipped into the bottle of ink as you wrote. It was tiresome, inconvenient, and it went entirely against the rule of writing-masters that a smooth and cursive hand be maintained with a steady flow. Reading copybooks like George Bickham, with their uninterruptedly smooth flow of line, it is difficult to believe that their authors seriously expected many people to be able to achieve the same effect without a steady flow of ink. Apart from anything else, the transfer of the pen from ink-pot to foot of page must have been a constantly perilous step, and many pages must have been ruined by a falling drop of ink.