Gutenberg: First Modern Inkmaker?

In past years, I have occasionally used my first column of the year to write about some aspect of the history of ink, thus giving readers a better perspective as to how the ink industry evolved. This month's column is about ink development efforts made by that pioneer of printing, Johann Gutenberg.

Mark Barbour, curator of the International Printing Museum, Carson, Calif., notes that Gutenberg, credited with inventing movable type in Germany in the 1450s, was also the probable inventor of the first workable printing ink.

Barbour points out that of the four principal components comprising what we call "printing" (i.e. press, type, paper, and printing ink), only paper was in existence in the 15th century. Invented in China around 100 A.D., paper was brought to Europe in the 1300s by returning Crusaders, who had learned how to make it while in prison as laborers in Arabian paper mills.

In addition to movable metal type, still needed were a functional printing press and usable printing ink. Says Barbour, it was Gutenberg's genius that enabled him to create those latter two requirements. Ink, Barbour states, is "the unsung hero of printing" from that era, when historians gave it only the most cursory attention amid discussions of Gutenberg's contributions.

But as every printer knows, without ink, the most modern press, the finest paper, and the most artful image-bearing surfaces (type or plates) are all just useless artifacts.

Existing inks in Gutenberg's era would not adhere to his metal types because they were water-based, which made them unsuitable for printing use. What Gutenberg conceived was an adaptation of artists' oil-based paints developed earlier in the 15th century.

As proof of how well he succeeded, one need only look at his famous bibles, whose black ink looks as good today as it did 550 years ago. His inks were not glossy, but rather strong, firm, and dense. The pigment probably was soot derived from pitch, with a vehicle made from boiled linseed oil.

Contemporaries of Gutenberg—Johann Fust and Peter Schoffer—are credited with the first important use, in 1457, of colored inks. They employed natural pigments to produce magnificent red/blue and blue/red initial letters in printing liturgical books.

Despite their success, the use of colored inks did not catch on. Fust, Schoffer, and most of their contemporaries reverted to printing principally in black, using hand illumination to add color, say, to initial letters. Some individual printers continued experimenting with a wider range of colors that included not only blue and red, but also yellow, olive green, brown, and gold.

As printing spread across Europe in ensuing centuries, printers were forced to formulate inks for their own use, usually concocting enough barrels at one time to last a year.

Barbour notes that the earliest list of ink ingredients comes from a printer's ledger in 1471. In addition to linseed oil, the list included turpentine, pitch, varnish, vermilion (a red byproduct of mercury), and lake (a reddish pigment derived from vegetable or animal dyes). Later printers would include such "exotic" additives as soap (to enhance adhesion), balsam, waxes, molasses, and lees (the residue found inside wine barrels).

The day that was chosen to make ink became one of celebration for the printer, his employees, family members, friends, neighbors, and customers alike. The most critical and also the most dangerous part of the process was boiling the linseed oil to thicken it into varnish. Moxon, in his Mechanick Exercises of 1683, writes that the process was "both laborious to the body, noysom (evil smelling), and ungrateful to the sense, and by several odd accidents dangerous of firing the place it was made in."

Fire's peril came both from the fact that the oil was boiled to the point where its vapors would sometimes ignite spontaneously, as well as from the constant danger of spills.

Surprisingly, press design, papermaking, and the above method for making printing inks remained fairly much the same for 400 years after Gutenberg's time. In the middle of the 19th century, steam power, advances in science, and the mass production methods of the Industrial Revolution brought printing and its complementing industries into the modern age.