Fountain Pen Ink: caveats & attributes

Incredibly Realistic Bic-Pen Drawings of Animals

"You don’t need special materials to make breathtaking, realistic art. At least, you don’t if you’re as talented as French photographer and illustrator Sarah Esteje, who often uses nothing more than a Bic pen to create stunning work."

See more here.

A modern use of pen, ink and notebook

New archaeological discovery!

Collector’s ink hobby draws pen customers

Click on the title to read the article about Robert Bradford and Bradford Ink.

Is Octopus Ink Similar to Fountain Pen Ink?

"By Nancy King

What Is Octopus Ink?
The ink of the octopus, or any cephalopod, is composed of highly concentrated melanin. This is the same dark pigment that we humans have, and which is responsible for skin color and the color of dark hair. It is a natural dye that cephalopods manufacture in an ink sac. Most, but not all octopuses have an ink sac and produce ink, but a few, such as the deep-sea octopuses, have lost this ability.

When the need arises, octopuses squirt this ink together with a jet of water and are able to guide the direction of the squirt. The result is a cloud of ink, which is used defensively as a visual screen or a distraction to predators. The ink also contains a compound, tyrosinase, which irritates predators' eyes and paralyzes their sense of smell temporarily.

The color of the ink (melanin) is red, but when it is more concentrated, it becomes darker, changing to brown and even to black. Since red appears black in low-light, many night active or deep-sea cephalopods produce only red or brown ink.

An interesting discussion of octopus ink and the ink of other cephalopods can be found in Cephalopods, a World Guide.

What is Fountain Pen Ink?
The ink that we use in fountain pens or ball-point pens today bears little resemblance to octopus ink. In it's simplest form, the ink we write with is a pigment or dye and a binder. The first ink for writing and drawing was invented simultaneously in China and Egypt, around 2500 BC. This first ink was made of lampblack (soot) mixed with aqueous binders. In the middle ages and up through the nineteenth century, ink was made from such ingredients as gum arabic, copperas (vitriol), gall apples (source of tannin), and water. Occasionally soot was used for making the ink black, or minerals and other pigments could be used for color. In this century, ink has become more sophisticated and is now usually made of synthetic dyes and compounds. Ink today may combine tannic, Gallic and dilute hydrochloric acid with an iron salt, phenol, and a blue or black dye. The composition may optionally include a drying agent, an adhesion promoter, a color developer and/or a preservative. Some inks are made thicker, such as printing ink.

Sepia Ink
There is one ink that is related to cephalopods: the historical artists' ink sepia, one of the brown inks used by artists for their pen and ink drawings. Sepia is a red-brown ink made from the ink sacs of cuttlefish, which are dried and ground to a fine powder, then mixed with shellac. (The ink takes is name from the cuttlefish species Sepia officinalis.) This ink came into use in the eighteenth century and was quite popular in the nineteenth century. It is sometimes difficult to identify a true sepia ink drawing, since other brown inks were in use as well. True sepia ink is still available from specialized artists' supply houses on the Internet. The term sepia now also applies to any red-brown color similar to the color of sepia ink."

Inky emails

By Norman Haase

Article originally appeared in the Lehigh Pocono Mensa magazine Magniloquence, issue #181, May 2005

I often reflect upon the rapidity of change that we encounter in today's world, as well as the acceleration experienced in our lives as we're faced with the torrents of information that we must quickly sort through for relevance (personal or career-related), absorb to one extent or another, often add-to, and then pass on to the next stressed-out and overloaded biocomputer in the information chain.

For those of us who regularly inhabit cyberspace, that inundation of information is most commonly and incessantly manifested by ubiquitous email, and its evil twin SPAM (I could only stand it in small measure when it came in a can, and my opinion hasn't changed much).

When I returned recently from a short, five-day vacation, logging onto the Internet brought me over 900 downloaded messages! It took the better part of a day just to separate the Triticum from the bract (this is a Mensa article). The former included customer orders, family missives and some of the jokes making the rounds. The latter was represented by multiple invitations from the son of deposed king M'runga of Nigeria to help him smuggle $50 million out of his country through my bank account -- consideration of which I had to put on the back-burner -- as I reflected upon the generously offered help in augmenting my virility, while simultaneously awaiting the next message from Pam, Bambi or Vicki, all of whom seemed inordinately interested in spending quality time with their soulmate -- ME (naively, I had always assumed that we were allowed only one each).

As a counterbalance to this type of informational overload and our increasingly frenetic lifestyles, it seems that most of us require some activity or hobby to slow us down. For some it's the release of tension brought about by intense physical activity, such as a favorite sport (table tennis in my case), a workout at the gym, or perhaps an evening spent with Pam, Bambi or Vicki.

For others, or at other times, it might be the physically passive route of TV, a movie, or sitting down with an engrossing book or a sumptuous meal. Still others find their 'downshift' through a creative pursuit such as painting, making music, throwing clay, or writing. This last activity bears on those customer order emails I mentioned, for you see -- in cyberspace -- I'm known by my superhero appellation of His Nibs and earn my daily bread (and upkeep on the palace) by selling good, old-fashioned, force-you-to-slow-down-whether-you-want-to-or-not -- fountain pens!

At first blush, offering one of the more ancient tools for writing -- as measured by a medium such as the Internet, which tends to identify anything that hasn't been upgraded in the past six months as obsolete -- would seem to be an anachronism.

My experience belies that assumption however. My customers are self-selected as technically savvy -- just by finding me on the Internet -- and in addition tend to be those most besieged by ever-changing information, be they engineers, doctors, computer scientists, judges or technical writers. All seem to share the desire to acquire a writing instrument that harkens back to a slower time, whether primarily to build a collection (there are now thousands of new models -- many created as limited editions -- as well as countless millions of vintage pens still extant), or just to experience the more organic feel of nib and ink while putting thoughts on paper, and the quieting ritual of selecting that day's pen and ink color.

In an environment of email, keyboards and voicemail, I've found many people who have taken up writing in journals and diaries -- just for the opportunity to use their pens. I don't have exact figures, but surprisingly, fountain pens have become a small growth industry in the past decade -- with prices ranging from $5 dollars to $500 thousand dollars and more (the secret: just keep adding diamonds) -- concurrently with the decline in daily opportunities to use them!

So, although I wrote this little piece longhand with a Sheaffer Legacy 2 fountain pen, a stub nib and with Private Reserve Copper Burst ink, I then dictated it into my computer using voice recognition technology in order to email it to Sallie. Ah, Brave New World. But let me now lay down my pen -- I have emails to send off to Pam, Bambi and Vicki…

His Nibs, aka Norman Haase, can be found in his virtual* store at http://www.hisnibs.com/, while his weblog, http://hisnibs.blogspot.com/ often focuses on the nature of intelligence -- human and otherwise.

*Norman's accountant will confirm the virtual nature of the business!

Think ink! illustration

For those that can read Adobe Acrobat PDF files, here's the illustration which accompanies the article.

Think ink!

An article from the Christian Science Monitor on the history of ink, with a bit on fountain pens (including the apocryphal Lewis Waterman story), geared to youngsters. Still, an interesting overview for adults as well.