Ink: Culture, Wonder, and Our Relationship with the Written Word

Introduction

Ink binds us. We are surrounded by ink, immersed in ink, a substance so common it is invisible. From cave walls to quill pens to laser printers, ink has traced the line of our culture. For millennia it was our social medium, and writing in ink used to mark our entry into the adult world. It was a rite of passage as memorable as that first drink, first drive, first kiss. But now children keyboard in kindergarten, pixels have replaced pigment, and pens will soon be as quaint as pocket watches. Even our signatures are electronic. Are we at the end of ink? This is the question I set out to explore.

We don’t really see a technology until we’re moving beyond it—the steam engine, the sailboat—but what was once utilitarian returns as a leisure activity and a luxury, like horseback riding, or taking the train, or using candles instead of electric light for dinner parties. As an English professor I’d spent my life surrounded by print, and hadn’t concerned myself much with the material book until rumours of its demise began to circulate. As for ink, it hardly figured in the equation, as long as it was readable.

A writer at Edmonton’s nonfiction literary festival remarked, The theme of all narrative nonfiction is the Quest. Playwrights write their endings first. With nonfiction you don’t know how the book will end; you’re writing to find that out. That may not be a universal truth, but it proved so for me. My quest began in a rare book library. I had some question about ink (now forgotten) that my sources on printing didn’t answer, so I asked the curator, What is the book on ink? She said there wasn’t one. I immediately decided to write a crisp little commodity biography, with the required one-word-title-plus-elaboration (INK: The Fluid That Changed the World!); I’d wrap it up in a year. Writers notoriously dream up whole books in half an hour that take them the rest of their lives to complete. My one year turned to five as the clean line of ink I’d conceived became an ever-expanding blob, drawing me further and further into the social life of ink.

The project became a pilgrimage, taking me to Budapest and Buenos Aires, the home of Lazlo Bíró, inventor of the ballpoint pen. To China’s Anhui province, where there’s a factory that still makes inksticks from Ming dynasty patterns. To the border of Tibet and the world’s oldest Buddhist print shop. To Samarkand to see the first Qur’an, soaked with the blood of the caliph who was assassinated for creating it. On the road I met characters whose stories threatened to take over the book: Bíró’s daughter, who hid students during Argentina’s Dirty War; Timor, the Muslim guide who washed his pork chops down with vodka; Mr. Chi, the earnest grad student who tried to save me from a drunken lunch at a Chinese ink factory; the two Steves, one who made me grind sheep bones in Texas, the other who taught me how to flame linseed oil in the Utah desert; Aung and Cheng, the two calligraphers who mocked and revered ink; Nathan, the Willy Wonka of ink, who railed against the government and produces inks that melt fountain pens. Closer to home, I discovered a great-great-uncle who’d been a printer in the California Gold Rush, learned how my mother-in-law resembles Ming emperors, proved myself a failure at calligraphy, inked type, crushed gallnuts, and ground inksticks. Friends began to avoid me at dinner parties. I joined the FPN (Fountain Pen Network); I was invited to present at Nerd Nite. I saw ink everywhere.

I’m convinced that even scientific projects, no matter how arcane, from thermodynamics to string theory, are rooted in the personal, even if the writer isn’t conscious that it is so. I never knew my grandfather, Edward Thomas Bishop, and aside from a graduation photo from Osgoode Hall I have no idea what he looked like, but I inherited his library. There are no letters, no diary, but he signed all his books, and while the stiff photo holds the viewer at a distance, the ink on the page always made me feel a connection. He exists for me as a signature.

In my professional life, the experience that’s had the greatest impact was an encounter with ink. As I wrote in Riding with Rilke, I was a young Virginia Woolf scholar working in the British Museum Library, reading her correspondence:

I opened up the next manila envelope and slid out a single sheet. I found myself reading a letter I had read in print dozens of times before. Anybody who works on Woolf practically knows it by heart, it’s reprinted so often. It begins:

Dearest, I want to tell you that you have given me complete happiness. No one could have done more than you have done. Please believe that. But I know that I shall never get over this: and I am wasting your life. It is this madness…

I felt a physical shock. I was holding Virginia Woolf’s suicide note. I lost any bodily sense, felt I was spinning into a vortex, a connection that collapsed the intervening decades. This note wasn’t a record of an event—this was the event itself.

I turned the sheet over.

There Leonard had written in green ink the date:

11/5/41. This detail set off an unexpected aftershock. I had seldom thought of him, of how he had had to wait twenty-one days before the body was found. Three long weeks, answering questions from The Times, taking calls from friends. Then a group of teenagers, throwing rocks at a log in the river, found it was not a log at all and dragged what was once Virginia Woolf ashore.

The episode taught me about the impact of the material text, but what I hadn’t considered was that what I was responding to, as with my grandfather’s signature, was the ink.

I’d come to find ink itself compelling: the slurp slurp in the print shop as the thick goop warms on the rollers, becoming ready for the type before emerging on paper as deep black letters; the infinite grey shades of Chinese calligraphy; the way it flows from a well-tuned fountain pen. I talked to print-culture historian Michael Winship, who said, There is a mystery, a magic, to ink—how does it know when to be liquid, when to be solid?

Travel and research only really become interesting when things fall apart, the neat itineraries go by the wayside, one thing leads to another, and you’re led off the map. The ballpoint, which I thought to dispense with in a paragraph, proved fascinating. After half a century of development it still demands the most exacting technology, yet it sells for less than a cup of coffee. It is abused and ignored, and seems to have become prominent in the popular imagination only as a weapon (Joe Pesci kills a rude thug in Casino; Rachel McAdams stabs the creepy Cillian Murphy in the windpipe in Red Eye; The Joker in the Batman movies goes for both the throat and the eye; and Matt Damon disables an assassin with a Bic in The Bourne Identity). In fact, the ballpoint found its first success as an adjunct to a weapon—it was sold to Royal Air Force bomber crews because it worked at high altitudes. With Chinese inksticks I discovered that ink could be an exquisite object, the subject of poetry, a means of entry to the emperor’s court, and a thing that engendered betrayal, murder, and the theft of concubines. The ink of the Qur’an led me to recipes for ink with anemones, the rind of pomegranates, and the gall of a turtle; to the union of the erotic and the sacred in Arabic letters; and to the Sufi mysticism of a Canadian poet. It was a haphazard line from a ballpoint on my desk to the ink cakes at the Met in New York to the illuminated Qur’ans in Istanbul. Only later did I begin to see a progression, from the utilitarian to the aesthetic to the religious engagements of ink, reflected in the sections of this book: Craft, Art, and Spirit.

The basic elements of ink are simple—pigment, liquid, and a binder to make it stick—but its applications are endless. I came away convinced that the need to write is primal, and is linked to a desire for permanence that has recently become more urgent. You too, I’m sure, have faced the Blue Screen of Death on your computer, had your documents go—where? Not up in smoke, or ripped or rotted, but into the no-where of cyberspace. Not even ash or shard to testify they had once existed. But you too have had the sensuous pleasure of a handwritten note, and maybe you too, though self-conscious about your half-printed, half-cursive scrawl, have returned to the pen, chosen your ink, discovered that it is a medium that still carries a message.

Just as much a boon for democracy as the transistor radio or the quartz clock. The bastions of privilege based on money have fallen.

—LAZLO BÍRÓ, ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BALLPOINT PEN

THE BALLPOINT

The drawings for Bíró’s ballpoint pen patent aroused the suspicions of a Spanish border guard, who thought they were plans for a torpedo. 1941 U.S. patent, image courtesy of the author.

Desperately Seeking Bíró

I

On October 29, 1945, hundreds of people lined up outside Gimbels department store in New York City, so many that fifty policemen were on hand to keep them in line. They were there for the miracle pen that would revolutionize writing. The excitement was like that for the iPhone, and for the people there the technological advances were as amazing. A pen that carried its own inkwell! Unheard of. They were expensive at $12.50—the equivalent of $130 today—but they were worth it. They would write for six years! Fifteen years! They would write underwater!

And this pen—it wasn’t a Bic, it wasn’t a Parker, it was the Reynolds Rocket, the brainchild of Chicago entrepreneur Milton Reynolds, who had thrown it together in four months. An extravagant promoter, he completed a round-the-world flight in a converted bomber, beating Howard Hughes’s record, handing out pens at every stop. He made an unauthorized flight in China to try to find a mountain higher than Everest (which he would name after himself), and when they tried to arrest him he threw cartons of pens at the Tommy-gun-toting guards, told the pilot to gun it, and escaped to Japan. He presented a set of two hundred pens to the president, engraved with the inscription I stole this pen from Harry S. Truman. He was in the press every week.

Today, no one remembers Reynolds because most of the pens didn’t work. They didn’t write for six years, sometimes they didn’t even write for six hours before they quit or leaked all over your shirt. Outraged customers demanded replacements, refunds, and dry cleaning. Soon the price had dropped to $3.85. Two years after their introduction they were selling for 19¢ and nobody was buying. The ballpoint was dead.

But of course they’re not dead. You’re using them. They are simply so ubiquitous that they’re invisible. Where did they come from?

The ballpoint pen was invented in 1938 in Hungary by Ladislao Lazlo Josef Bíró (pronounced BEE-roh), sports-car racer, amateur inventor, and journalist. He fled Hungary because of its anti-Jewish laws, and in 1943 patented his invention in Argentina. There he met a British banker, Henry George Martin, who bought the rights and introduced the pen to the Royal Air Force, which had been seeking an instrument that could write at high altitude for the navigators of their bomber crews. They worked, and Biro became shorthand for ballpoint throughout the Commonwealth. But of the millions who use the pens (and mispronounce the name as BYE-roh), few have heard of the man. I decided to seek him out.

II

I was travelling with my wife, Hsing, who tolerated my ink mania, liked good fountain pens (which she felt should always be carried in Furla handbags), and loved cities. We took the EasyJet night flight from Geneva to Budapest. It was an uneasy ride—the plane was packed, the announcements were incomprehensible, and the guidebook warned of taxi rip-offs and muggings. In the terminal I veered away from the pretty girl handing out flyers for Zona taxi and stood by the minibus desk with the other apprehensive foreigners, memories of Cold War spy novels churning in my brain.

The driver in his thick leather jacket was straight out of John le Carré. He chucked our luggage in the van, gestured to the door, didn’t meet our eyes. At the hotel he slung the bags onto the sidewalk like someone dumping a body and walked past us as if we didn’t exist. No cheery Welcome to Budapest!, no hovering for a tip. Was this the legacy of Stalinism? If you look at nobody, then when you’re interrogated you can truthfully say you haven’t seen anyone. The Fiesta Hotel had endless Day-Glo yellow-green hallways that made you feel you had a sick hangover by the time you got to your room. The room had a skylight but no windows; the coffee bar downstairs had no windows. The whole place felt like a prison that someone had tried to brighten up, and the desk clerk was as grim as a warden.

Or maybe not. I’d come looking for background on Lazlo Bíró, the journalist who invented the ballpoint pen. I knew the basics: annoyed by the way his fountain pen smeared proof sheets, Bíró watched the printing press laying down thick, smudge-free ink. It came to him in a flash—put that ink in a tube, insert a ball bearing at the end, and you’d have a mini rotary press that would generate just enough friction to warm the ink paste and then allow it to dry instantly. Brilliant. I figured finding Bíró would be easy, like James Joyce in Dublin—there would be Bíró statues, Bíró plaques, Bíró walking tours, Bíró T-shirts, maybe a Bíró pub, and certainly overpriced, made-in-China replica Biro pens. But no. Nothing.

In a bookstore on Váci, the main shopping street, I asked about books on Bíró. No. We have nothing like that. Bíró was also a painter, his work housed in the state museum, so I inquired at the Museum of Fine Art. No! We have no twentieth-century art here. They sent me back across Heroes’ Square, under the scowls of its warrior statues again, to the Palace of Art. There they said they’d never heard of paintings by Bíró. Try the Hungarian National Museum. I walked the half hour down to the old area of Pest. In the museum lobby there was a big circular desk with an i on it and a security guard leaning on the counter, flirting with one of the young women. The other young woman at the desk was friendly and apologized that this museum had no paintings. Only things, she said. (They had Beethoven’s piano but I didn’t care, I wanted Bíró.) She said, I will phone the National Gallery. She was transferred, transferred again, made notes, called another number, and reported that one section had said Absolutely they had nothing by Bíró and another had said Maybe they did have something by Bíró in graphics. I should come over there and talk to them.

The Hungarian National Gallery—not to be confused, as I had done, with the Hungarian National Museum—was across the river and up on the hill. The river was the Danube, the hill was Castle Hill in Buda (Buda and Pest are like Minneapolis and St. Paul or Strathcona and Edmonton: once separated and bridgeless, with only ferries going between them, each superior to the other), and the gallery was in a wing of what once had been the Royal Palace.

The curator came down to speak to me. Bíró? Yes, of course we know of Bíró, but I think you will find nothing here. Not in Hungary. Maybe abroad—in Argentina, yes—not in Hungary. He left, he did not die here.

But Bíró invented the ballpoint pen—and he was a well-known journalist, a medical student, a race car driver…

Yes yes, it is sad. It is the same with Moholy-Nagy. He is not known here. In Germany he is famous because of the Bauhaus. But he left, he did not die here.

I know, but Bíró didn’t leave until he was thirty-nine, a full lifetime. He had already patented a washing machine, an electromagnetic mail system, and an automatic transmission that he sold to General Motors .

He left, she said. He left. He did not die here.

I told her that in Canada we cheerfully claim anyone who’s ever lived there, or stayed longer than twenty minutes. If you change planes you qualify, I said brightly, all set to tell her about Mavis Gallant and Malcolm Lowry, but stopped. She understood the English but not the concept. In Hungary, you go, you’re gone.

I started thinking of service staff as the Scowling Magyars. From curators to clerks to waiters and tram conductors, they all scowled. Scowled like the statues of the warriors with the fierce moustaches in Heroes’ Square. Hsing read the guidebook. It says the suicide rate is high here—it was the noble way out for bankrupt aristocrats and so didn’t carry a stigma. You would still be buried in consecrated ground. Hanging is preferred.

Hence the hangdog expression of all servers. They’re just going to finish their shift and go home and hang themselves. They’re already depressed because the rope will probably slip or the light fixture will come out and they’ll have to try two or three times. I later read about a doctor who committed suicide by tying a rope to a chair and strangling himself on the floor. That’s determination.

Hungarian seemed as grim. I figured out that kavéház was coffee house and étterem (eat-a-room) was a restaurant, but although the word for thank you sounded vaguely like kissin’ him it brought no response when I used it. In Italian the accent routinely falls on the second syllable, giving the language a lilt; in Hungarian the stress falls on the first syllable (utca = OOT-ka), which makes the language emphatic, like chopping wood. Hsing was much better, maybe because she was used to the tones of Mandarin and had done years of ear training for violin. She mastered the thank you—köszönöm—and quickly figured out that utca is a street, út a smaller road, and körút is a ring road. Also that könyvtár is a library, and so we made our way along various utcas and down úts to the Applied Arts Museum in search of Bíró.

In the museum I pushed through an oak door marked Library. The hinges squealed and the aged battleaxe at the coat check, obviously the mother of one of the stern warriors in Heroes’ Square, scowled. I wondered what fierce crone would challenge me on the other side. But the librarians smiled, found a couple of books on fountain pens, and when they could do nothing more, gave me directions to the Technical University library. There the pattern of frosty reception and helpful engagement repeated itself. I asked if Bíró was well known in Hungary. Oh yes, said the first librarian in a tone that implied Who cares?, but the director found me a little pamphlet in English and told me I could copy it. I found the one old photocopier that cranked and whirred and spat out a page every thirty seconds, ministered to by a leathery-faced dwarf. Though she looked grim she proved only shy, and told me her English was much better before. I wondered if I should ask Before what?, but the director came back and told me there was material on Bíró at the National Széchényi Library, across the river in Buda, up on the hill in the palace.

I paid my six thousand forints, stood by the pillar, got my picture taken, got my card with a bar code. I was now not a tourist, I was a Reader—A 76280—and I learned how to drop the card in the slot and tip it forward so that the barcode scanner could read me, turn the little light green, and click the turnstile open. Lesser mortals stood on the other side and looked up at the broad marble staircase with the red carpet that led to the reading rooms.

The woman at the reference desk spoke English and helped me fill in the request slips. Yes, they had bound journals of the arts magazine Bíró worked for, Hongrie-Magyarország-Hungary, and microfilm of another magazine, Elöre, plus an English translation of a book about the ballpoint, The Never Ending Line: The Ball-Point Legend by György Moldova. This turned out to be the gem. Research is like mining: you sift through a lot of gravel hoping for that one nugget; or like detective work, where you sort through endless documents knowing that there’ll be one that will crack the case.

Things were looking up. As we walked back through the university district, Hsing saw a door with a small sign for a rental agency. Let’s buzz it, she said. Maybe we can get out of that horrible hotel. I was diffident—what if they replied in Hungarian?—but Hsing is forthright and will not tolerate bad lodgings. Tibor, the young manager, spoke excellent English, and in minutes booked us into an apartment with soaring ceilings and parquet floors. In the nineteenth century it would have belonged to a wealthy bourgeois. I was glad to make the shift from Stalinist modern. I paced off the apartment: twenty-nine strides from the bedroom at the back to the tall window overlooking the turreted Science Library with its warm lemon-yellow walls. I checked the guidebook. Founded in 1561 by the Jesuits. Two million books. I want to live here, I said.

III

Back in the library the next day, I learned that Lazlo was the wild child of the family. His older brother, Georg, went to university and like his father became a dentist; Lazlo studied medicine for a few semesters but was only really interested in hypnosis, and dropped out of medical school. Bíró claimed to have been, among many other things, a biological researcher and a racing driver, but apparently the research consisted of dissecting a couple of frogs and the auto racing was a one-time event.

Bíró bought a red Bugatti sports car from an actor named Svetislav Petrovic after a night of drinking. To put this in perspective, it would be like hanging out with, and at the end of the evening buying a racing car from, Steve McQueen, Hollywood’s most famous auto aficionado (who was of partial Hungarian descent). Petrovic started out in Hungarian silent films and would go on to make more than a hundred over the course of his career, including an appearance in a 1958 Louis Malle thriller with Jeanne Moreau. At the time he sold Bíró the car, Petrovic had already appeared in more than thirty films. The only thing more glamorous than the chisel-jawed actor would have been the Bugatti itself, more exclusive and costly than a Ferrari today. No Bugattis of that era had twelve-cylinder engines—but the outrageous Bugatti Royale had a massive twelve-litre motor (think two and a half Hummers). I had no idea how a journalist could have financed it; perhaps alcohol was a factor. Bíró does say that he soon sold the car because he couldn’t afford it.

It was under the influence of champagne that Bíró offered to enter the car in a race on Sváb hill in Buda two weeks later, though he had never driven. He took lessons from an old chauffeur friend, but would often forget to put in the clutch when he shifted, grinding the gears. The chauffeur would punish him by stomping on his foot. Bíró claims he won the race, but that wasn’t what made the event significant. It was his difficulty in working the clutch that gave him the idea of the automatic gearbox.

He worked for a year with an engineer to create an automatic transmission. They installed it in a 350cc motorcycle, and, with the two-hundred-pound engineer in the sidecar, drove all the way from Budapest to Berlin where they met with representatives from General Motors. GM was impressed and signed a contract with Bíró for half a percent of the sale of units produced and an advance of $200 a month for five years, half for Bíró, half for the engineer. This was considerable cash in 1932, and so they eagerly signed the contract, without consulting a lawyer. Only later did they see that GM had made no mention of when they would begin production, and how many gearboxes would be made. In fact GM had been working on their own automatic transmission for years, and had signed the contract with Bíró only to keep his invention off the market. The same combination of brilliance, exuberance, and naive trust would mark Bíró’s dealings with the ballpoint pen.

Inventing ran in the family: Lazlo’s father invented something called the rubber porter that allowed the front door of the apartment to be opened from any room, and experimented with a new kind of pen. Instead of being filled with ink the pen was filled with water, which flowed through a thin tube and dissolved an ink-cartridge core. The pen didn’t work because it couldn’t supply an even flow of ink—exactly the problem that bedevilled Bíró for years with his own pen. I was beginning to see that Bíró had a journalist’s nose for the powerful anecdote: expanding on an idea your dad had been fiddling with since you were a kid is much less striking than a bolt of insight in a print shop. In fact Bíró’s first patented invention was a water fountain-pen in 1928 (he was born in 1899), though we know nothing about it.

Moldova referred to Hongrie-Magyarország-Hungary as a fine-art magazine, so I ordered up the library’s few back issues. I undid the binder twine, expecting an avant-garde art periodical. The title was trilingual, the first page laid out in columns of French, Hungarian, and English, but it was not at all avant-garde. The lead story, Public Hygiene and Welfare Institutions of Budapest, proudly announced that lifeboats on the Danube had saved 189 lives out of 194 boating accidents the previous year (an accident every second day; the citizens of Budapest must have been good swimmers). An article followed on The Development of Hungarian Furrier Industry. Uninspiring stuff, and although Bíró was listed as managing editor, his byline appeared on none of the articles. Editing Hongrie-Magyarország-Hungary must have been simple work for him, a few hours sifting through bland articles over coffee while his creative mind worked on his inventions. In the second issue I found the statement of purpose: To give a picture of our country to the Western States. This was just a promotional trade magazine, and by 1934 it was bent on assuring the English and French that Hungary would be a good ally against Germany. In response to doubts voiced by a French politician, the editors of Hongrie-Magyarország-Hungary exclaimed: If they only read our history! Where were the Czechs, Serbs and Rumanians when we fought these wars? They fought against us, on the side of the Germans!

I wondered about Moldova. In researching his book he’d used Bíró’s memoir, Una Revolucion Silenciosa. Not only was Bíró’s biography written in Spanish, dictated to Argentine journalist Hector Zimmerman, but Bíró cheerfully advises his readers that they should never forget that what they hold in their hands is a hopelessly biased work. What I recount is the truth, but it is probable that the facts and persons presented are not in reality quite as I describe them. Moldova also relied on Andor Goy’s unpublished memoir, truculently titled The Real Story, written, Moldova admitted, when Goy was losing his intellectual powers. In it Goy, Bíró’s early partner in the ballpoint, rages against Bíró’s memoir: I could not find one honest sentence in it to accompany the flurry of self-praise. It is arguably not worthy of being put through a printing press. He also accuses Bíró of making elementary mistakes in grammar and spelling—usually the last refuge of critics who don’t like the content.

Moldova himself decided to dramatize the story, asking the reader to consider his book both a historical manuscript and a novel. So, a creative nonfiction composed of creative nonfictions. Further, what Moldova delivers is the clash of two Hungarians, not the story of the ballpoint pen: Marcel Bich, who perfected the Bic pen, is never mentioned, nor is the globe-girdling flim-flam promoter Milton Reynolds, who created the market. And Moldova’s book, indispensable as it is, was a vanity commission: published by ICO, the Hungarian pen company, to mark their fiftieth anniversary. Bíró was taking shape through a veil of semi-fictions. Maybe that’s all there ever are.

The window was open to the Buda hills, traffic hum floating up from below, punctuated at regular intervals by the screech of a tram. The library was closing. Bíró’s anecdotes were his true made-up stories, his true creative embellishments of memory. Who was I to quibble about whether a Bugatti was twelve litres or twelve cylinders? It was huge, it was fast. Wasn’t that enough?

IV

At the base of the hill below the library, beside a busy traffic circle, there stands a vulva-like ellipsoid in white concrete with KM inscribed on the base. Who is KM? Hsing found it in the guidebook: KiloMetre. The statue, not meant to be erotic at all, is the zero kilometre mark: all distances from Hungary are measured from here. This was the epicentre. But only for road makers. After my day at the library Hsing dragged me back to Liszt Ferenc tér (Franz Liszt Square), to the Liszt Academy to buy tickets for some pianist that night. This Liszt Academy looked like serious business: