A Subtle Green

Greeeen!

Something about a green ink that immediately grabs my eye. Perhaps because it has in its different shades the power to spin or support a variety of moods and suggestions. The lighter mixes of green are difficult to use because too often they lack body or weight enough to make the written word easy to read, but there are a number of darker, richer shades that don’t make one squint in order to see what’s written. Most of the better known ink brands have at least one or two robust shades of green, and many of them are very close to being one-of-a-kind. I always felt that Montblanc did something very special with their Racing Green, now sadly discontinued. Private Reserve has a handsome green called Sherwood Forest, though I always found it a messy ink. German master, De Atramentis first thrilled me with the Edgar Allan Poe emerald green, and later the Frederick Chopin pine green. Conway Stewart makes a delicious blend called CS Green. Newest to the fold is the marvelous series from Iroshizuku, which includes the beautiful Shin-ryoku.

But this time I want to focus on a French ink, one in the J. Herbin family of colors — Vert Empire.

In an earlier post, writing about another J. Herbin ink, the very unusual Cacao du Brésil, I compared it to the Charles Dickens ink made by De Atramentis. Now, a couple of days later I find myself going again to the same comparison in talking about the Herbin color, Vert Empire. No, I do not mean to imply that the two are close or similar, but rather that both these inks have a like quality of understatement. There is nothing bold or eye-opening about Vert Empire or the Charles Dickens, but each has its own subdued strength.

Clicking to enlarge the sample above will probably make the words legible, but to make things easier I will reproduce my comments here.

VERT EMPIRE — Sample of the J. Herbin ink, Vert Empire using a Sailor 1911 fountain pen, medium nib. The paper here is not something I can be too specific about, as it’s a page from an old blank journal, something I bought at the Museum of Modern Art on a visit to New York several years ago. From the look of this page, the pen, ink and paper behave well together. Ink flow is good; no feathering; shading is good also, and there’s no bleed through. (smeared words) Let’s look at drying time and smearing with this sentence. Yeah, it’s a wet, slow to dry ink, more so than its Herbin brother ink, Cacao du Brésil.

I give this ink a high rating and suspect I might even grow to like it more in time.

Mouse Fur?

The J. Herbin ink library of colors includes a rich assortment of beautiful, striking and unique, or at least idiosyncratic colors. The Vert Olive is a distinctive ink, and the perfectly named Rouge Opéra is for one who has a taste for reds, particularly individual. And though it it close to Private Reserve’s Arabian Rose, the J. Herbin Larmes de Cassis has its own quality apart from the former. But the feeling is they have done something truly individual with the ink they call Cacao du Brésil. A quick look might prompt one to say, “Yeah, a gray-brown ink. Not very pretty.”

In my opinion that snap description would be about 50% accurate. It honestly is not an ink that anyone would choose to brighten up or prettify the page. But then, we must realize it was never meant to serve that purpose, and that the mixologists at J. Herbin had a different idea in mind when they devised this odd shade of gray-brown. I have always felt that fountain pen inks should be chosen to illuminate the writer’s mood, or the tone of what is being put on the page. Certainly graphic designers routinely select their fonts and colors to enhance the ad or layout on their drawing board. Are we who love fountain pens, ink and paper any different in that respect?

I saw right off that Cacao du Brésil would fill a useful spot in my palette of inks. In writing out the detailed review page shown above, I mentioned that the ink reminds me of the De Atramentis ink, Charles Dickens—slightly somber, but in that description we also sense a hard-to-name quality of quiet simplicity. The Japanese call it shibui, or sober refinement and elegance. To my eye, the Herbin gray-brown has that quiet elegance.

Gray-brown. Mmm…is that accurate? How did they achieve this shade? At the risk of sounding as though I’m making a joke (and I’m not), if I had to imagine how Herbin arrived at this color, I would say they tried to come up with something that might look like a mix of unwashed potato peels, mouse fur and two, three at the most blueberries. Of course, that’s a preposterous recipe, but it does look a little like that to these eyes. My hope is that no one will read it as an inky indictment. When all has been said, when finally the inked words march or dance they way across the page, I’m happy with what I see.

The above review gives a few of the details, but I must warn that as of now, I have only tried the Cacao du Brésil in one pen, a Lamy Safari, and on three or four varieties of paper. The overall impression with the Lamy was good, but I'm not sure that another (perhaps better) fountain pen won’t bring out some other qualities in the ink. I have a feeling that the shading might be improved in a Pelikan, with a gold nib. In time, I might have some other ideas about this wonderfully peculiar J. Herbin Cacao du Brésil.

The Brothers Gray

The weather in Tokyo today prompted some thought about which inks in my library might convey a sense of the wet, gray and wintry conditions coloring the city streets from early morning. I left home in a gentle misty rain that both obscured and revealed the cityscape in an interesting way. There was no fog, yet there was a sense of fog in how the rain and early morning light masked and filtered the view of streets and buildings, and how the cloudiness brought out shapes and lines that seem like different shapes on fair weather days. In an opposite mood, the four fountain pens in my bag were filled with a quartet of colors that mocked this somber aspect with their gaudy redness and juicy greens. Only the Pelikan Souverän 600 was inked with a shade that came close to matching the rain slick streets. And so I began to mentally flip through my color chart of inks trying to imagine what among those colors would be the right accent for a day like this one. There are blacks aplenty, but they all seemed too black, too dark, and too quick to add unwanted weight. I needed something with moderate darkness and comfortable shadow. It didn’t take long to hit upon a trio of grays that I sensed are just right for characterizing a cold and rainy day in the big city.

And who but Pilot with their Iroshizuku series, along with the marvelous De Atramentis could capture the mood any better? The samples shown here are, from the top down, Kiri-same and Fuyu-syogun in the Iroshizuku family, and Charles Dickens from Dr Jansen at De Atramentis. The swatches in the photograph were done with a small calligraphy brush, and the sentence samples with an old and battered Stypen long out of production. As for the ink, I have found it difficult to match another ink with the consistently fine quality of Pilot and Iroshizuku. However, the De Atramentis ink is never easily topped, and in my experience has proven to be consistently a world class ink. Just so happens, of the twenty-one different De Atramentis inks in my collection, the Charles Dickens ink is by far my overall favorite.

I offer a toast to these gray brothers and their potential to heighten atmosphere.