Ink, red and otherwise.
Posted by ravensmarch on May 11, 2009
Red ink is the devil’s onions, if I may lift a phrase coined by my brother. I do not refer to the figurative version of it, either.
I have a desk set at The Regular Job, one pen loaded with Quink blue-black, the other with Skrip Red. The former works exactly as it should, despite lapses of four and five months between flushing, starting immediately even after a long weekend. The latter will balk at writing if left in its trumpet for more than an hour. In the morning, I let it soak point down in its bottle of ink, just to wake it up. This past weekend I decided it was time to switch to another contrast colour, and took the pen home to strip it down and clean it properly.
The point, feed and collector all had a layer of not red, but brown-black film on them, as if I’d been using some slightly shellac-ish ink. It resisted even ammoniated water in an ultrasonic cleaner, and had be be removed by mechanical effort. That’s a fancy way of saying “scraping.” Not good. All is now clean, and the pen carries a load of Pelikan Brilliant Green, which looks like it will perform properly.
On to Ink Quest. It’s one of my regular reads, and in a recent installment, the Inkanthropist in charge was referring to a recently published book of one of his literary heros, Roland Barthes. He was scandalized to learn that said Barthes used a ball-point for some of this particular work, and then there’s this:
“And the ballpoint scribbling in the parts of Carnet 1 that I have seen does not continue throughout: the editor reports that the books also contain passages written in felt pen.”
Since this stylophile is sufficiently (and, I’ll grant, understandably) misanthropic to not have any means of commenting at him in blog nor at the Fountain Pen Network, I offer this public condolence in hopes that it may filter back to him– a combination of bad paper and observer’s ignorance may well lead to the misidentification of fountain pen trails as the marks of a felt pen. It may be that the editor doesn’t know what he or she is looking at.
Today’s Pen: Parker Moderne.
Today’s Ink: Private Reserve Burgundy Mist.
This entry was posted on May 11, 2009 at 12:50 pm and is filed under General Blather. Tagged: ink, fountain pen, Regular Job, Parker, Quink, Pelikan, Roland Barthes, Skrip, Private Reserve. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
