Ink’s history: not totally dry!

Bishop has cast ink’s history in a strongly narrative mode

Brace yourself for another book that tells you all you could possibly want to know about a humble but indispensable commodity. Ted Bishop, an English professor at the University of Alberta, brings the latest entry in this genre, but he’s a man with a sense of humour. At one point he imagined titling his book Ink: The Fluid that Changed the World! Instead, he has opted for something with more of an academic ring — The Social Life of Ink: Culture, Wonder, and Our Relationship with the Written Word.

Don’t let that multi-word subtitle deter you. It is a lively book. From start to finish, Bishop has cast ink’s history in a strongly narrative mode, relying more on interviews with the living than plowing through books in the library.

He begins Ink, for example, with an examination of that most useful postwar invention, the ballpoint pen. Sinced its Hungarian-born inventor, Ladislao Biro, has long since departed this world, he looks up his daughter Mariana in Buenos Aires, who has many a story to tell.

According to Mariana, her father smoked 100 cigarettes a day. “I grew up with smoke, and ashtrays all over,” she recalls. “He’d start one cigarette and put it down and forget where he put it and light another.” What has this to do with ballpoint pens? Nothing, except it may show that inventors, those creatures of compulsion, are not like you and me. “At age 70 he cut down from 100 cigarettes a day to 60,” Mariana says. “And lived another 15 years.”

Biro laboured night and day on his ballpoint pens. In order to work, the pen had to have a capillary-action feeder system and the proper ink. “Capillary action is the tendency for liquids to creep into narrow spaces,” Bishop explains. “Biro fed the ink from a large tube into a narrower tube, thus creating sufficient capillary action to draw the ink down continuously, keeping the ball moist.” More challenging was finding the ideal formula for ink — a formula, Bishop writes, that would allow it to flow well but dry fast enough, that would be saturated with enough dye to produce a deep hue but not clog the pen.

Biro never revealed to history the precise eureka moment when he found his ideal formula, after nine years of searching. However, by the early 1950s, his ballpoint pens became massproduced commodities. In 1965 the French ministry of education decreed the use of ballpoint pens in schools, thus triggering a debate among French intellectuals — always a gruesome spectacle. Roland Barthes served up his usual baloney by observing that ballpoint pens were made of plastic and plastic was, in his words, “a disgraced material, lost between the effusiveness of rubber and the flat hardness of metal.” Biro, on his part, maintained that the ballpoint pen was a “boon to democracy,” while Umberto Eco insisted that it was an example of realized socialism.

After tackling ballpoint pens and similar implements, Bishop visits a master ink-maker in Utah named Steve Pratt, who demonstrates his craft by setting fire to linseed oil and cooking bread and onions in the boiling mass. During Bishop’s attendance at this ritual, an odd incident takes place: The master ink-maker’s “grim-faced” wife calls him to the phone and refuses to shake hands with Bishop. Bishop, his feelings no doubt wounded, imagines that the wife has assumed the role of Pratt’s “manager,” taking care of the business details of Pratt’s artistic “vocation” (ink-making), insisting that he not waste his time with strangers. In this fantasy of Bishop’s, the spouse “hurls herself into protecting the vocation ... facilitating but finding ways to sour it a little, slipping a tincture of bile into the mix, never once feeling fully appreciated.” It’s an interesting scenario, but then Bishop admits that he is “always making up stories about people.” Readers of this work of non-fiction may take note.

Stories aside, Bishop demonstrates impressive reporting skills throughout the narrative, as well as wit and an ability to describe scenic details. But at times you can see him straining to capture the exact appearance of things through metaphor: “There was a lustrous black-bronze sheen,” he writes, describing the bottom of a pot. “But it was thick like the glop in Alien, and over it, shiny and black, was a thick, rubbery film like old pudding that is left too long in the fridge uncovered.” Actually, that’s two complicated metaphors, and half a dozen adjectives in one sentence, which is rather a lot, but at least you know what the pot looks like.

It’s when he gets into the chapter on Islamic calligraphy that his writing becomes abstruse. “All texts are shaped by experience and context,” he writes at one point, “and are always different, even for the same reader.” (I think we knew this.)

With the chapters on the revival of penmanship and the fountain pen, however, Bishop ends on a strong note. He quotes a business journalist cautioning readers not to “write off the power of a hand-written note” to express a compliment or gratitude. There is also a belief, which Bishop shares, that the physical act of writing helps to stimulate the brain. Bishop cites a professor of educational psychology claiming “because handwriting requires sequential strokes rather than touching a key to select a whole letter, it activates regions involved in thinking, language and working memory.” One of her studies demonstrates that in grades two, four and six, children write more words faster and express more ideas when writing essays by hand than when using a keyboard.

So handwriting enlists the aid of neural science, and the fountain pen in particular triumphs in the domain of polite and discriminating behaviour. Even wine tasters are scarcely more discerning than pen enthusiasts. An ink company called Private Reserve offers them 50 different colours of ink, including Cosmic Cobalt, Naples Blue and Tropical Blue.

The social life of ink clearly has a bright future.