This is a guest post by Grace Walters, a Paper Conservator at the Library of Congress, Conservation Division.
When an object arrives on my bench for conservation treatment, one of the first steps I undertake is to determine how the object was created. Identifying its context and manufacture is important for me to distinguish the original condition from the historical uses that occurred afterwards. To do this, there are certain characteristics that I look to for information.
Often, the first characteristic I look at is the color of the ink. Historically, brown and black are the most common colors for inks. Red is also used from the Middle Ages onwards, to make specific words or letters more distinct. If your document has an ink in a more colorful hue, it’s probably more modern: think late 19th century to present day. This is because the colorants used to produce these more vibrant hues were made from synthetic aniline dyes. These dyes, developed in the mid-19th century, consisted of aniline, an extract of coal tar, mixed with other compounds to create a range of colors not available in the natural world. As you can imagine, these vibrant colors quickly became popular in mainstream use. While brown and black inks can be placed in any time period from antiquity to present day, brightly colored inks would suggest a more recent date for a document.
The next thing I look at is something we call the variability of ink deposition, or how evenly the ink is written. This variability can arise from numerous factors, like the viscosity of the ink, how heavily a writer uses the pen, the design of the pen itself, and even the texture of the paper.
For a long period of time, up until around the 19th century, quill pens made from feathers were the implement of choice for most people. The hollow tube of the feather core (also called the shaft or rachis) could hold a reservoir of ink, while the feather’s pliable material could be shaped into a point, or a nib. To use a quill pen, you must dip or reload your nib as you use up the ink from your previous dip. This process can lead to variability as the amount of ink deposited depends on how much ink is in the nib. You can see this below as the sentence written in brown ink starts dark, gets lighter, and then abruptly gets dark again after the nib is reloaded with ink.
A desire for a smoother, more consistent writing experience inevitably led to the invention of the reservoir pen, or fountain pen, towards the end of the 19th century. This type of pen holds ink in an internal chamber, eliminating the need for dipping.
Developments in pen nibs controlled the flow of ink, which led to a continuous flow, resulting in much more uniform deposition.
In addition to flow, the different shapes of metal pen nibs became available, with different designs resulting in a different style of line. While these developments could result in a much more uniform deposition of ink, this didn’t always mean they did. The viscosity of the ink and the changes in pressure exerted by a writer’s hand could also continue to lead to variability within the ink deposition, as could the different shapes of the pen nibs. In short, you could get just as much variability with a quill pen as you could a fountain pen.
Of course, a careful reader might be thinking, “but what about dip pens!” A dip pen is an intermediary between a quill and a fountain pen; think of a fountain pen with no internal ink reservoir. They were popular between the height of popularity of the quill pen and the fountain pen and are still used to the present day by calligraphers and artists.
Most dip pens have metal nibs, while quill pens are made from the shafts of feathers. Feathers, while structurally sound, are inherently softer than metal and tend to glide over the surface of paper more easily than the metal nib of a dip pen. This means that metal nib pens, including both dip pens and fountain pens, can have associated indentations in the lettering, as the metal nib compacted the paper fibers and deposited ink in the low point of the indentation, or the valley. This can be most easily seen on the back of the sheet of writing, like in the photo below.
The same careful reader might also wonder “What if you were heavy-handed with a quill pen and delicate with a metal nib pen? Couldn’t you see indentations with quill nibs and not metal nibs?” To them I would say yes, definitely! Just as with the variability in ink deposition, there are so many different factors that can influence the character and quality of a pen stroke. I think this is one of the most intriguing parts about our material past: we won’t always have the answer.
With careful observation, you can collect visual clues that help you arrive at a likely, but not definite, conclusion. Identifying these characteristics takes practice, and even with years of experience—History always has some mysteries!
Interested in trying for yourself? Have a look through some of the collections in the Manuscript Division, like the Abraham Lincoln Papers or the Margaret Mead Collection. You can also come visit in person and check out the Two Georges exhibition.
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