Stark's ink is one of a number of types of homemade
ink
Ink is a gel, sol, or solution that contains at least one colorant, such as a dye or pigment, and is used to color a surface to produce an image, text, or design. Ink is used for drawing or writing with a pen, brush, reed pen, or quill. Thicker ...
s whose recipes were widely available in the 19th century. People often made their own ink before
commercially available ink was inexpensively and easily obtainable.
Dr. James Stark was a chemist during the 19th century who experimented with ink recipes for 23 years. He tested 229 recipes for their durability on various kinds of paper to find the most stable iron gall ink recipe. He submitted his findings in 1855 to the Society of Arts in Edinburgh, Scotland. This recipe was the one he personally used.
Recipe
This iron gall ink recipe is taken from the ''
Household Cyclopedia of General Information'', published in 1881. It is not in common use now, though the preparation of inks with similar methods was common at one time.
:Recipe for 1 gallon of ink:
:*Twelve oz. nut-
galls
:*8 oz. each,
sulfate
The sulfate or sulphate ion is a polyatomic anion with the empirical formula . Salts, acid derivatives, and peroxides of sulfate are widely used in industry. Sulfates occur widely in everyday life. Sulfates are salts of sulfuric acid and many ...
of
indigo
Indigo is a deep color close to the color wheel blue (a primary color in the RGB color space), as well as to some variants of ultramarine, based on the ancient dye of the same name. The word "indigo" comes from the Latin word ''indicum'', m ...
and
copperas
Iron(II) sulfate (British English: iron(II) sulphate) or ferrous sulfate denotes a range of salts with the formula Fe SO4ยท''x''H2O. These compounds exist most commonly as the heptahydrate (''x'' = 7) but several values for x are know ...
:*A few
cloves
:*4 or 6 oz. of
gum Arabic
Gum arabic, also known as gum sudani, acacia gum, Arabic gum, gum acacia, acacia, Senegal gum, Indian gum, and by other names, is a natural gum originally consisting of the hardened sap of two species of the ''Acacia'' tree, '' Senegalia se ...
The addition of the sulfate of indigo renders the ink less stable on the page and prone to premature browning over time, but less liable to
mould in the inkwell. It is blue when first written with, but soon becomes an intense black.
The ink can be made without the sulfate of indigo, which will make it considerably less expensive yet more archival. Without it, the ink will appear pale initially then quickly blacken as it dries.
The ink is very permanent and waterproof.
See also
*
Iron gall ink
Iron gall ink (also known as common ink, standard ink, oak gall ink or iron gall nut ink) is a purple-black or brown-black ink made from iron salts and tannic acids from vegetable sources. It was the standard ink formulation used in Europe for ...
References
External links
SourceForty Centuries of Ink by David N. Carvalho (Project Gutenberg)*
ttp://www.irongallink.org/ The Iron Gall Ink Website (previously called the Ink Corrosion Website)Open-Ink Wiki -- Stark's Iron Gall Ink Recipe by Fiberdrunk
{{Pens
Inks