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Acid Free


PenMan828

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Should fp paper be acid free?

I never concern myself with whether my paper is acid free or not. Is there a particular reason you are asking? Do you need the things you're writing to last a long time?

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I think the question your asking is what does it mean for paper to be acid free and does it affect fountain pens. Acid free simply means that the paper will last a long time. Cheap newsprint, that is most newspapers today, will not last more than a few years before becoming brittle and discoloured. Whereas certain acid free papers with writing on them are know to be at least 1,700 years old and someone may know about others that are older. Does it affect your fountain pen? I have not seen any evidence suggesting it does. Some people on this board are real sticklers if you read the ink arguments, so I think it would surface from time to time. Hope this was helpful.

 

Rick

Need money for pens, must make good notebooks. :)

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I never really both with acid free. If you think af any old manuscript, it was not written on acid free paper, and while many of them have in fact dissapeared, the biggest factor in the longevity of a document is the way that it is stored and treated. with good care, we still have some incredibly old documents available to us.

 

Also, I don't tend to think that anyone is going to want to read my journals in fifty or more years time, as I don't really see myself becoming famous.In regars to how it affects your pen/ink/writing, i would say that the difference, if any, would be negligible.

Edited by thomasdav

More of a lurker than a poster.

Daily Writers:

- Charcoal Lamy Safari (EF) - Filled with Aurora Blue

- Waterman Phileas (EF) - Filled with Noodler's HOD

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Should fp paper be acid free?

It's not a requirement if you simply want to write and don't care about longevity (although some blue inks will fade pretty quickly on acid-containing paper).

 

If you think af any old manuscript, it was not written on acid free paper... with good care, we still have some incredibly old documents available to us.

Actually, those old manuscripts exist because they were, in fact, written on acid-free paper (and then taken care of). Acidic, wood-pulp paper is a relatively recent development.

 

AIn regars to how it affects your pen/ink/writing, i would say that the difference, if any, would be negligible.

I agree there.

 

-- Brian

fpn_1375035941__postcard_swap.png * * * "Don't neglect to write me several times from different places when you may."
-- John Purdue (1863)

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Actually, those old manuscripts exist because they were, in fact, written on acid-free paper (and then taken care of). Acidic, wood-pulp paper is a relatively recent development.

 

I think that the author of Forty Centuries of Ink spends some time bemoaning the introduction of wood-pulp paper.

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If you think af any old manuscript, it was not written on acid free paper... with good care, we still have some incredibly old documents available to us.

Actually, those old manuscripts exist because they were, in fact, written on acid-free paper (and then taken care of). Acidic, wood-pulp paper is a relatively recent development.

 

 

Sorry, my bad.

More of a lurker than a poster.

Daily Writers:

- Charcoal Lamy Safari (EF) - Filled with Aurora Blue

- Waterman Phileas (EF) - Filled with Noodler's HOD

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A few years back, due to a long term personal project I intended to start, old university notes were inspected. It was a surprising disparity on the ink permanence. Thanks to the dates written on the pages, and the circumstance that at that time only three inks from specific brands were employed( as a typical student of limited funds, 1 bottle of black, BB and Blue were bought when the academic season started and replaced 3 or 4 times per year as they became empty) the variables were limited. I know as well what paper brands were used and all the notes have been stored inside sealed cardboard boxes in a very high humidity environment, meters away from other high salinity one ( the Atlantic Ocean), and a mild temperature variation. Recently, spiral Mead Notebooks from even previous years came back to my hands: those had been written with the very same pens and inks, but on different paper and stored in an environment that swings from very dry to mild humidity ( a town nearby Lake Winnebago) with very contrasted temperature range. The notes showed such varied results that it lead me to ask some curators and restorers. They all answered the same; paper and environmental storage conditions are the key, not the ink. For as much as we discuss here about inks, they all dismissed it as the least important factor, emphasizing a) paper neutrality B) paper composition and processing system and c)environmental conditions ( storage, temp., humidity, salinity, lighting conditions and UV exposure...) as the true key factors of long lasting documents. Edited to ask why my b+parenthesis gets transformed into a cool emoticon wearing black glasses........

Edited by Ondina
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  • 2 weeks later...

emoticons are built out of certain special sequences of characters; it all started, decades ago, with "colon-dash-right parenthesis", after all. web-based bulletin boards that substitute certain known sets of these sequences with fancy graphical images are newcomers to the emoticon scene, which started as pure ASCII art and remained that way for lo very many years. these posts we write are stored in the back-end database as plain text, and the FPN web front-end just automatically sticks in the pre-made .gifs wherever it sees the "correct" sequence of characters...

 

...and "lowercase b-right parenthesis" is one of those sequences, it seems. well, the web software can't know you were using that for an enumerated list this time around, so...

 

you should be able to turn off the emoticon image substitution entirely, for yourself, somewhere in your account profile settings. then, as an extra bonus, you should get back the ASCII-art aspect of emoticons, which is an interesting thing in itself.

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This is very interesting for me to hear, especially since I am planning out the logistics of hand-writting a family Bible. I retail Clairefontaine (affiliation!!!!), so obviously that would be my first consideration for paper choice. I was looking more into the archival quality of the paper, not just the size of the notebooks and smoothness of the paper. Clairefontaine is acid-free and pH neutral, which are some of the key ingredients for making paper last (in combination with proper storage!).

 

As far as the original question of the acidity of paper affecting your pen....the answer is not nearly as much as the ink you put in it! You should definitely check the ink you're using for the safety and longevity of the pen, there are definitely some ink that are 'pen killers' over a long period of time. As far as the paper...the only thing it could really affect would be the nib. As far as a steel nib...I don't know. I doubt it would affect anything, esp. since most steel nibs are tipped with iridium. The iridium is what would actually be touching the paper. A gold nib would be far less susceptible to acid, but the more impure the gold the more likelihood of being damaged in the long run. All in all, I don't know how much of a difference it makes in terms of the pen. I'm VERY biased, but I would say if a manufacturer is making acid-free and pH neutral paper, it's going to be of better quality and provide a better writing experience than cheaper wood-pulp paper.

Brian Goulet</br><a href='http://www.gouletpens.com' class='bbc_url' title='External link' rel='nofollow external'>www.GouletPens.com</a></br><a href='http://twitter.com/GouletPens' class='bbc_url' title='External link' rel='nofollow external'>GouletPens on Twitter</a></br><a href='http://blog.gouletpens.com' class='bbc_url' title='External link' rel='nofollow external'>Goulet Pens blog</a>

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Paper for big box office supply stores are made in batches and sometimes by different companies. (Remember the bagasse issue at Staples.) There are inexpensive pens for testing the acidity of paper. Sometimes case of Office Depot copy paper is less acidic than the more expensive papers labeled as acid free, for example. If it is the longevity of the paper that concerns you, such a pen might be helpful. (No affiliation, just a customer, etc.)

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I have a well made journal which has an embossed skull and crossbones on the cover. The paper is excellent with fountain pens. There is a statement in the book that says under good storage conditions "preservation for several hundred years without significant deterioration". How's that?!

Edited by Studio97
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