Gutenberg’s real invention

I’ve slowly been stocking the fridge with homemade inks. A forestry friend tells me that the berries I picked off a hedge are privet berries – they make a stunning purple. Another friend brings me dogwood fruit from her boyfriend’s yard: we eat a few – they have almost a gritty texture – and then I boil the spiked, ornamental, deep-pink fruit into an improbable pale yellow. My nephew, three, trails after me in rubber boots to monitor boiling black walnut husks. “Oh,” he says. “Can you paint a whale?”

Ink-making has always required a community. Power grinders weren’t invented until the 1820s (long after Gutenberg!) and before that, materials for ink – like burnt bones – had to be ground by hand. In The Social History of Ink, University of Alberta professor Ted Bishop dives into the world of Cennini, around 1400 AD: “He talks about getting recipes for red ink from the friars, glue and pine rosin from the druggist, charcoal from the bakers, cuttle to rub down the panel from the goldsmiths, miniver tails from the furriers.” A recent study in Analytical Chemistry tested 54 tattoo inks and found that 45 had ingredients that didn’t match their links; inks are still proprietorial secrets.

Gutenberg’s real invention wasn’t the movable type press, which Koreans were already using, but ink, Bishop writes. Gutenberg, inspired by innovations in painting at the time, devised an oil-based ink that still glistens on the page. And that’s what ink makers are after: permanence.

Ballpoint pens for bombers

Oak gall – the plant growths that cocoon wasp eggs – are my easiest access to a lasting ink. History is written, literally, in ink that blends oak galls with iron, according to Bishop: Leonardo da Vinci, Bach, Shakespeare, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and all American government paperwork until after World War II used it. In 1945, as the first ballpoint pens were being tested in American bomber planes (the army needing a writing instrument for high elevations), the U.S. was importing oak gall from Syria.

Those bomber planes raise the question: what does it mean, to mark the page with a place? Does the story of every invention twine, at some point, with cruelty?

Bishop tells another story: Indigo, grown in India, created an industry boom in the West. It was used for ink but also for dying blue jeans and military jackets, blue being a notoriously difficult pigment to source. In 1878 the Germans produced synthetic indigo. Despite the market crash, British farmers in West Bengal doubled-down on indigo, forbidding the peasants from planting anything else. The resulting starvation sparked India’s 19th century Blue Rebellion, when the farmers revolted and a young Mahatma Gandhi was brought in as a mediator, “providing the template for the movement that would ultimately achieve Indian independence,” writes Bishop.

Ontario Woad

Symeon van Donkelaar, a Canadian iconographer, has planted woad in his garden. Woad is a source of blue dye that the Germans used to use; this strikes me as a sort of reconciliation for the history of indigo.

I bought the last copy Amazon had of Field to Palette: Dialogues on Soil and Art in the Anthropocene to read van Donkelaar’s essay. Van Donkelaar describes his first search for pigment: he read about a cave along the Mattawa River feared by French Canadians, “a rare place where a sacred red ocher pigment had been collected by the Algonquin First Nations. . . I found both the idea of a frightening sacredness and holy earth intriguing.” The next week, he and his family canoed to find the cave, only to discover that it was halfway up a sheer cliff face. Van Donkelaar was hooked.

When he was named the Artist in Residence for Cambridge, Ontario, he used local earth in a 100-mile radius of Cambridge City Hall to make all the paints used in an orthodox icon. Farmers and scientists got involved; the earth sciences department at the University of Waterloo gave him some Mastodon tusk from Ontario’s last ice age: “the first ivory black from the region in perhaps 10,000 years.”

To ink ourselves

What fascinates me about ink is the human itch to mark our places with ourselves and ourselves with our places – the first inks humans made, after all, were used for rock paintings and tattoos. “As more and more of my students were coming to class with electronic devices, more and more were displaying tattoos,” notices Bishop. Maybe, in this high-speed digital age, the search for permanence still leads to ink.

The landscape of British Columbia is still unfamiliar to me, but I’m learning it through my hands. Now that the colour I normally look for is stripped away in winter, it’s a unique joy to discover pigments buried in nuts and berries, soil and charcoal. Even if my inks aren’t built to last, it’s a beginning. Maybe in its own mysterious way, this is part of a work of reconciliation.