The Paradise Project is one of the biggest projects he has printed: it will take a lot of ink. For smaller projects, he’s just as likely to dole out the prescribed amount of each colour with a set of kitchen measuring spoons, working the colours together with a knife on a piece of glass on his work table.
The ink he scoops out of the cans is as thick and heavy as dulce de leche. His technique for hand-mixing looks a bit like scrambling eggs: the knife moves smoothly through the ink, then under and over, under and over, working and reworking until the pigments are thoroughly blended and the new colour is uniform.
“Mixing is a bit of a crapshoot because the hue of the paper will influence how the colour looks on the page,” Hugh says, scooping the dark, earth-coloured ink into a spanking new ink can. “I always do a trial run, especially when I’m overprinting, because the colour underneath will affect the colour of the over-print, too.”
A few days later, Hugh calls me into the shop. It is time to decide on the precise green and brown for the printing inks. “Bring that husband of yours,” he adds. “We need all the eyes we can get.”
He has printed trials of one of Erik’s images in the muted chartreuse that the two of them liked, and in the soft, spring-like hue that appealed to me. Over the images, he’s printed words in three different hues, from dark olive to a rich oxidized brown that looks like the roan-coloured soil of Brazil, where I grew up.
The three of us peer at the pages intently. The results are clear. The next day Hugh sends out a gleeful email to Team Paradise Project:
“Erik, just so you are in the loop, Wayne, Merilyn, and I agreed that the lighter image was a wallflower saying, ‘I hope that Hugh Barclay, the good-looking fellow, doesn’t ask me to dance,’ whereas the darker image was shouting, ‘I am!’ We all agreed that the ink colour you picked was best.”
The chartreuse is perfect, just a shade darker than the Salad paper. The colour is named for a liqueur that has been made at the cathedral in Chartres, France, by Carthusian monks since 1737, following instructions written down in 1605. Its natural hue is the yellow-green of summer apples. The loamy brown of the text seems to have been dug from the same orchard. The words don’t hold the image down like a grate, as I feared. Rather, it’s as if the image has come alive and is muscling up through the fibre of the paper, pushing the words into view, bringing them to life.
I’m glad I kept my mouth shut.
THE WORD MADE VISIBLE
When I found the letters that became the basis for The Convict Lover, they were a chaos of loose papers spilling out of tins across my attic floor. It was ink that helped me put the pages back together into discrete letters. Blue ink pilfered from the warden’s office. Orangey-brown ink the convict made himself from boiled-down vegetables or walnuts he found by the quarry. Black ink from charred lamp wicks, or iron filings from the workshops, or soot scraped out of the stoves. For every letter—some of them twenty-five pages long—a new batch of ink that he stole or made from whatever he could find.
I have never made ink, but my sons have. They would beg me for lemons, squeeze the juice into a jar, and write their messages on paper that they’d rub over a light bulb until the heat browned the lemon words into being. Watching the words emerge reminded me of something Vladimir Nabokov wrote, “The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamouring to become visible.”
When the boys grew older, they added a little honey to give their lemon-ink the viscosity of the real thing. When they moved from detectives to medieval knights, they tried making ink from nails soaked in vinegar, combining the nail juice with boiled-down black tea.
Remembering this makes me wonder, What is ink anyway? Chemists define ink as a colloidal system of fine pigment particles dispersed in a solvent. Colour doesn’t come into it. Neither does liquid.
Ink is much older than the paper we apply it to. Even before 2500 BCE, people were making black inks from a suspension of carbon (usually lampblack) in water, stabilized and thickened with egg white. The vehicle for modern inks can include a host of other ingredients: pH modifiers, humectants to retard premature drying, polymeric resins to impart binding and allied properties, defoamer/antifoaming agents to regulate foam efficiency, wetting agents to control surface tension, biocides to inhibit fungal and bacterial growth, and thickeners or “rheology modifiers” to control ink application.
I have just rounded up all the inks in my office. Apart from my husband’s eight antique pottery ink jars, all of them empty, I have twelve bottles and four inkwells, all containing inks of various colours and in various stages of dehydration: the usual Sheaffer, Skrip, and Waterman inks for my fountain pens, a fabulous Stone blue-black ink from England that for some reason has never dried up, the Victor Hugo ink I bought in Paris that is now the consistency of old window putty, three wax-sealed bottles of ink I bought from an ink-maker in Siena, Italy—black, blue, and sepia—and the small square bottle of turquoise ink that Margaret Atwood gave to each of the other nominees when she was named Author of the Year by the Canadian Authors Association. My antique travelling letter-box from Pittenweem, Scotland, where my five-greats grandmother lived before she emigrated to Canada, has a small glass inkwell set into one end of the case, the desiccated dregs still visible.
When I was in school, being allowed to write with ink meant you’d left your puny childhood behind. In grade one, my desk had a hole in the upper-right corner, but it wasn’t until grade six that the hole was fitted with a glass inkwell. By the time I got there, however, no one was writing with straight pens dipped in ink. The Bic pen hit North America the year I turned ten. The next year, ballpoint pens replaced inkwells in my grade six classroom.
It wasn’t until I wrote The Convict Lover that I learned to love the straight pen. I chose it as the tool for my first draft for the same reason that Hugh chose Salad paper: because it fit what I was doing. With the straight pen in my hand, my sentences grew longer, my thoughts allowed to roam as long as there was ink in the nib. In the same way, writing on a typewriter chops my sentences into fragments. Onscreen, however, physical limits fall away: there is no pen to scratch the paper, no nib to run dry, no pencil point to flatten. I can write sentences and paragraphs as long I want. That’s always been true, of course, but for me, the writing instrument and the ink that flows from it act on my mind to make the words come out differently.
The ink that flows from our pens—writing ink—accounts for only a small percentage of the ink that is produced today. Over ninety percent of manufactured inks are for printing, made not with liquid and soluble dyes but with oil or rubber and insoluble pigments.
Originally, even printing ink was made with water. The Koreans and the Chinese brushed their wooden characters with Chinese ink and pressed the blocks onto mulberry pages. The ink was thin and black and pooled on the type, where it was sucked up by the tissue-like paper.
In Europe, medieval scribes also used water-based ink that they kept in inkhorns fitted into holes in the sloping tops of their wooden desks. The ink itself was a solution of tannic acids from gallnuts mixed with ferrous sulfate and thickened with ground-up gum arabic. This replaced the earlier carbon-based ink. Iron gall ink soaked into the parchment, unlike carbon ink which could easily be rubbed off. Iron gall ink was shinier, too, giving words on parchment their inimitable gloss.
But whether made from iron gall or carbon, these water-based inks simply wouldn’t stick to metal type well enough to avoid splotches and blurs on the stiff rag paper of fifteenth-century Europe.
Gutenberg needed an ink that would retain its viscosity both on the slick metal surface of the type and against the extreme pressure of the press; an ink that would dry quickly enough that pages could be stacked, but not so quickly that the ink became tacky on the press; an ink whose viscosity and colour would remain consistent throughout the printing of an entire book.
; At the time, painters were just beginning to work with the new medium of oil paints, which gave a depth of colour and light to the paintings that would become a trademark of the Renaissance. Oil paint dries by oxidation, the oil reacting chemically with oxygen so that it gradually changes from a liquid to a gel and finally becomes hard.
It is impossible to know which painter first mixed his or her pigments with linseed oil—the new medium arose more or less simultaneously in northern Europe and Italy—but certainly the Flemish artist Jan van Eyck was an early adopter. So, too, was Leonardo da Vinci, who mixed oils and tempera—pigments combined with a water-soluble binder, usually egg yolk—for The Last Supper. By 1500, tempera had all but disappeared as a painting medium, lingering on in frescoes. The new painting medium was so widely adopted that paintings on canvas were soon referred to simply as oils.
Gutenberg must have been aware of these developments. Printers and painters belonged to the same guild. They would have known what each other was up to. Painters worked on illuminated manuscripts and they worked with engravers, too, the same men who were making the moulds for Gutenberg’s type.
It wouldn’t have taken Gutenberg long to realize that the water-based inks used by scribes had no staying power on his new press. A look at the painters in his guild-hall would have given Gutenberg his solution: ink made with oil.
This switch from water- to oil-based ink seems a slight and obvious change, but it may well be Gutenberg’s most important contribution to printing. The typeface can be exquisitely carved, the paper like velvet, the words themselves the breath of angels, but they all count for nothing if the ink won’t stick.
The pigments used for printing were the same as those used for painting. Black from carbonized bone, burned without oxygen to a crisp ebony, then ground in a mortar and pestle. Or from lampblack, made by burning linseed oil in a lamp then placing a clean dish over the flame, carefully brushing off the soot that collects. Cennino Cennini describes the process in Il Libro dell’Arte (The Craftsman’s Handbook). Written fifty years before Gutenberg invented his press, the book is still in print today and available digitally at Project Gutenberg. To get the deepest black imaginable, a printer had to commit to some serious bone-grinding. Cennini doesn’t pull any punches: “grind this black for the space of half an hour, or an hour, or as long as you like; but know that if you were to work it up for a year, it would be so much blacker and better a colour.”
Black from bones, blue from the semiprecious Asian gem lapis lazuli, red from cinnabar (once believed to be the blood of dragons), the colours ground to a fine powder and mixed in perfect proportion with oil: these produced the first printer’s inks. My arm gets tired grinding a few flax seeds in a mortar and pestle; I can hardly imagine the muscles on the young men who apprenticed to the work. Or the young women, for Cennini advises that the grinding of lapis lazuli, the perfect blue used to paint the Virgin Mary, “is an occupation for pretty girls rather than for men; for they are always at home, and reliable, and they have more dainty hands. Just beware of old women.”
(Given the laborious grinding required for printing inks, it seems amazing to me that power grinders weren’t developed until the early 1800s, especially given that specialized ink-makers were in business almost as soon as presses were running.)
As impressive as a year of grinding sounds, the real key to good printing ink was the oil. Pure linseed oil was the gold standard in Gutenberg’s day and still is. The oil was heated and subjected to prolonged boiling at a high temperature to produce a varnish with the viscosity to carry the pigment and withstand the press, as well as the ramped-up appetite for oxygen that would convert the ink from a gummy substance to one that was solid at room temperature.
For those who have seen a Gutenberg Bible, the difference is clear: the blacks so rich and glossy they might have been printed yesterday. His ink was good. According to Martyn Lyons in Books: A Living History, Gutenberg’s recipe was lampblack mixed with varnish and egg white. He got his spectacular results with fastidious grinding, no doubt, but historians postulate a secret ingredient, too. A Roman army physician in the first century recommended adding to the ink the “urine of an uncorrupt boy,” and indeed Cennini specifies not to grind red “lac” with urine, implying that urinating into the ink was common practice, and in this case, to be avoided.
The inky problems Gutenberg faced and overcame were legion. The lampblack had to be roasted to degrease it. If he wanted coloured inks—and he must have in order to produce a book up to the standard of the scribes—he had to grind the minerals until the particles were consistently fine as dust. The oil had to be exactly the right viscosity and the finished ink identical in colour and texture from batch to batch within each project. And that was just the beginning. How much pressure was needed to get the ink on the paper without smearing it or leaving blank spots? How much ink had to be applied to the press to produce a good image without filling in the bowls of the e’s and c’s and smudging the page?
Without varnish, the pigment wouldn’t stick to the type and without its drying properties, the advantage of a mass-producing printing press would have been lost. But the varnish-making stage of the ink-making process was lengthy and risky, given that oil, when heated, can spontaneously combust. It was such a dangerous undertaking that twice a year the printer and his apprentices would travel outside the town walls to make ink, turning the foray into a party with free-flowing schnapps and bread rolls fried crisp in the boiling oil. Linseed oil is edible—in fact, it is prescribed as a nutritional supplement—but rolls deep-fried in printer’s oil? I make a mental note never to tell Hugh this bit of ink history or he’ll be boiling up vats of the stuff, one more way to get printer’s ink into his blood.
I tap four letters on my computer keyboard.
WORD
Three seconds. It is easy to take this simple gesture for granted, to forget that for half a millennium, hundreds of men and women cracked their skulls trying to solve the problem of making words visible, transferable, indelible.
I squint at the screen. My WORD is visible and transferable, but how indelible is it really?
BEACH BALLS & GHOSTS
I can easily imagine grinding sheep’s bones, inking rollers, and watching varnish burst into flame. But I’m stumped by the electronic micro-wizardry that makes the words I type on my keyboard appear on a computer screen.
If you are reading this book on a dedicated ereader such as a Kindle or a Kobo, the letters are likely made visible with E Ink. E Ink stands for electrophoretic ink, which isn’t just ink; it is both paper and ink rolled into one.
E Ink was developed at the MIT Media Lab. Xerox has a version, too. In both cases, the ereader “ink” is made up of millions of little capsules, each one filled with tiny pigmented balls that float in an oily substance. I try to imagine them as the manufacturers suggest: think of the capsules as clear beach balls filled with thousands of white Ping-Pong balls suspended in a blue liquid. Okay, I can do that. If I look down on the beach ball, onto the white Ping-Pong balls that have all floated to the surface of the liquid inside, the beach ball looks white. If I hold the ball above my head so that all I see is the liquid, the ball looks blue.
SEHARCLENS/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
In an ereader display, these teeny-weeny “beach balls” or capsules are suspended between two sheets of super-thin plastic that are divided into cells like 3D graph paper—about 100,000 balls fit into every square inch of ereader display. Each cell is wired to microelectronics in the plastic sheet that control whether the capsules have a negative or a positive charge. This charge determines whether the Ping-Pong balls inside the capsules are submerged or floating, creating patterns of light and dark that appear as letters, words, and sentences.
That’s how the ink in an ereader works. However, if you are reading on a tablet, a smartphone, a computer, or even a flat-screen television, the words are made visible through LCD (li
quid crystal display) technology. Liquid crystals sounds like an oxymoron, but the crystal in question normally exists in a state somewhere between a liquid and a solid: I imagine something like a slushie. Even a small increment of heat will make the liquid crystal truly liquid, which is why a computer screen goes wonky when left out in the sun.
LCD technology has been around for a long time by contemporary standards: about forty years. Basically, on an LCD screen, words and images are made up of millions of tiny blocks called pixels (picture elements), each of which is effectively a separate red, blue, or green light that can be switched on or off very rapidly to make a moving colour picture. (On original iPod screens, the pixels were black and were either switched on or off, creating a black and white screen.) The liquid crystals control the passage of light through the screen. When voltage is applied, the transformed crystals block the light and that pixel appears dark. It’s actually much more complicated than that, but like the beach balls, this gives a rudimentary sense of how the technology works.
In geek chat rooms across the Internet, there is a running debate about which is superior, E Ink or LCD display. The E Ink used in ereaders, for the moment at least, only comes in black. It’s slow to refresh, which means that each turn of the “page” on an ereader can leave a ghost image of the previous page on the screen for a few seconds. On the plus side, E Ink actually looks like ink. Weirdly, it appears to have depth and texture. Almost like the real thing.
LCD technology comes in all the colours of the rainbow. In the last ten seconds I’ve changed the words I’m writing on my laptop from turquoise to orange to lime-green. If black is too harsh, I change it to charcoal, or dove grey, or boot-leather brown. This technology effectively shifted decisions about colour and intensity from the designer’s hand to the reader’s.
Gutenberg's Fingerprint Page 13