I give up. I've seen so many modern inks described as having a "vintage" look and when I look at them they just look like ... ink. Fresh ink. Or someone says a certain ink currently in production appears to "age" instantly when it hits the paper -- and to me it just looks like fresh ink.

In my work in the University archives in college, many of the documents we dealt with were very old. Some of them were many centuries old. You could say they had a "vintage" look, or you could just say the paper/vellum was obviously old and the ink had faded/eaten into the paper/flaked off in places. This isn't what I see when I look at Noodler's Zhivago or R&K Alt Goldgrun or any of a number of blue-black inks. The only inks that I'd categorize as having a "vintage" look are the Parker Quinks, and then only because I know their formula has not been changed in decades. It's nothing visible.

So what makes a modern, in-production ink fall into the "vintage" category? Maybe understanding that will help me appreciate certain inks more.

to me it implies a couple of things.

1. a greyish or grey-green tint that makes it look like it's been exposed to light and the color has sort of "broken down". I've had a thing for inks like that lately. Diamine Umber, Diamine Prussian Blue.

2. shading. An ink that can show both depth and softness even in a high-flow nib. Again, the above two fit that. As do some of the light brown inks out there.

So, mostly I would not call any very dark ink "vintage-y" - Penman Emerald, PR DC Blue, and other very saturated inks would not make it into that category for me.

A black or grey ink could never fit that category for me.

edit: Zhivago definitely wouldn't be in my vintage category either

In this case, the term "vintage" is something entirely subjective. And I agree with KCat.

Bill;

The bottle. You can tell vintage skrip a long way off especially if it comes in one of the larger bottles.

Roger W.

Nor would it be on my "vintage look" list, if I had one. Frankly, most of the time in most pens it just looks black to me. Yet I have seen Zhivago described and praised here for its "vintage" look.

Thanks for the complete explication. I doubt that any two people would agree as to whether a given ink sample had a "vintage" appearance even with your criteria.

Aaah the smell of vintage Waterman ...

Chris

I tend to agree with K-Cat. For me, a modern ink with a vintage look is one that is not brightly coloured and has a slightly faded greyish look about it. I'm guessing that some of the grey inks might come close to my idea (though others may be too "pure"): a photo of PR Grey Flannel that someone posted on here a while back came incredibly close to my prototypical "vintage" look - I must get a bottle sometime... When watered down in the right proportion, Noodlers Squetegue can also have that vintage appearance.

I wouldn't put most modern blues and blue-blacks into my vintage category - they are mostly too intense. The German blue-blacks (Pelikan, Lamy) look more vintage, judging from scans - I haven't tried them.

"Vintage" ink could mean either the way an ink from another era looked initially or years later, faded and muted. Vintage ink for me can also be period colors. A Victorian palette, rich but muted, is what I think of first. Victorian Trading Company has lots of items in those colors.

I've made a swatch based on one of their e-cards. It does not have all the colors as I look back at it. There is a brighter green and a tiny bit of red I missed but you get the idea. If you matched these colors to modern but not super-saturated inks, for my money, you'd get a vintage look.

Less saturated, watercolory inks, because they are most readily recognized
as coming from a fp. Inks that are heavily saturated look like they could come
from any modern nibless pen. That's one of the reasons why I prefer the former.

Exactly what I was thinking.

I suspect that means the observer thinks they look like inks used in the dim and distant (pre ballpoint) past.

Blue-black inks are designed, I believe, to look like iron-gall ink with Prussian blue pigment added for initial visibility -- they would have intially laid down as dark blue with a black tint and gotten blacker as the ferro-gallate salts precipitated. This was standard ink for quite some time.

Blacks would have been India (squid) ink or some carbon black approximation (not normally used in fountain pens!).

Other older inks would have been formulated from the coal tar dyes available toward the end of the Victorian era, and would have been, most likely, "muddy" in comparison to modern dyes. Blue-black analine (coal tar) based inks would have been mixed to resemble "good" iron gallate ink in color. Any such inks would have likely faded quite a bit by now, and there were several common inks in use that are biologically based (vermillion, for example), being extracts of wood or bark, or chochineal dye. Natural dyes fade pretty quickly, too, and are not as bright as aninline dyes to start with.

"vintage look" inks would then, I suppose, tend toward the lighter, more muted, muddier colors, not the "jewel bright" colors we expect to see from modern dyes and compounding, and toward blue/black colors with moderate density resembling iron-gallate inks.

Strictly a matter of perception.

Peter

Peter - exactly what I wish I could have said, except you know what you're talking about.

I had not heard that what we call India ink was squid ink - I thought it was always carbon black, and that squid ink was another thing entirely. New information that I will never need, to go with all the other useless stuff I remember.

Since I was the person who stated that R&K Alt-Goldgrün ages as soon as you lay it down on paper, I'll try and justify this comment.

It has little to do with the colour. The ink could be blue or green or brown, but it shows distinct variation - highlights and dark shadows all in the space of a few mm - it's not a continuous, flat colour. It looks weathered for want of a better word.

You mention: "This isn't what I see when I look at Noodler's Zhivago or R&K Alt Goldgrün or any of a number of blue-black inks." Alt-Goldgrün is an olive green ink. Perhaps you are thinking of R&K Verdigris in this context, as Verdigris is a solid blue-black colour with deep undertones of green.

At any rate, I've been made to feel that my comment was somehow silly or wrong. Good-o.

An ink looks vintage when it closely resembles writing from a 16th century manuscript. Especially by a noted astronomer. . .

John

Phthalo, I apologize for whatever it was in the way I said it that made you feel your comment was somehow silly or wrong. I just didn't see R&K Alt Goldgrün the same way as others do (and still don't). I had no intention of taking a shot at you or at what you said.

For what it's worth, I am using R&K Alt Goldgrün in a green 1945 Parker Vacumatic with a very wet fine-medium nib. I chose the ink to match the color of the pen. The ink makes an almost monochromatic line from this pen, with hardly any variation or shading at all. I like the color of the ink, but it's just an olive green ink, darker than Herbin Vert Olive (which is too pale for me). Perhaps if I were writing with a stub nib or one that is a bit drier I might have a different impression.

On the "Noodler's Zhivago or R&K Alt Goldgrün or any of a number of blue-black inks" -- I should have put some commas in there, I guess. Neither Zhivago nor R&K Alt Goldgrün fall into the blue-black category. Noodler's Zhivago, R&K Alt Goldgrün, and a number of blue-black inks have been described here as having a "vintage" look. I don't have R&K Verdigris and have never seen it, so I don't know where it falls in this range.

So from the responses to date, I now understand that "vintage" means someone sees an ink as having a "weathered" look, perhaps due to a grayish or greenish tinge here and there, or as being a less saturated color and showing a lot of variation and shading. All of which are nice features and (in my opinion) add a lot of character to a written line. But until I asked, I had no clue what others were seeing when they described an ink as having a vintage appearance.

Thank you again for your reply, and again, I regret whatever it was in my original comment that came across as criticism.

Thought-provoking thread. We each have our mental image of what a "vintage" ink looks like. For me, it means a color in the green-black or blue-black family that exhibits some degree of shading. Basically, the inks that my father used in the '40s and early '50s. The question is, is the concept, such as it is, so subjective and variable that it fails to convey any definite information? For myself, I will certainly think twice now before using "vintage" and "ink" in the same sentence. And I think it may be time to go back and reread Strunk and White.