Old Writing Materials

This page is basically about making paper, ink and quills. One of the points of these activities is to become familiar with the skills involved in the technology of writing before the invention of metal nibs but after the introduction of paper to Europe. It's probably best to divide this into three sections: writing surfaces, writing implements and consumables.

Writing surfaces

These need to be flat and marks made on them should be easily visible and durable. They include stone, wax, bamboo, clay, wood, bark, palm leaves and metal as well as the more familiar media of papyrus, parchment, vellum and paper. Once again, my vegetarianism prevents me from using parchment or vellum, which are in any case expensive, hard to work with and difficult to obtain. Consequently, they were used in situations where literacy was not widespread. However, they resist damp and cold conditions better than paper or papyrus.

Papyrus

This is a less high-tech solution than paper. It was used in warm climates where it was unlikely to go mouldy. The oldest surviving papyrus is around 4000 years old. This is how it's made:

1. Sedges, reed-like plants growing on water edges, are cut near their bases.
2. The outer, green skins are peeled off, exposing the pith within.
3. They are cut lengthwise into strips of similar thickness and length.
4. These are soaked in water for several days, then a rolling pin is used to flatten them and squeeze out the water.
5. The strips are laid out parallel and slightly overlapping in two layers at right angles to each other.
6. The sheet is pressed between boards for several days until it's dry.
7. A stone is used to smooth the surface to make it suitable for writing.

Papyrus was used until the twelfth century, though it was replaced by parchment and vellum in Christendom and by the less labour-intensive paper in the Islamic world. It is still used in southern Africa as a building material and for making such items as nets and baskets, and as fuel. Crucially, it is also used to make sanitary towels, which makes a huge difference to standards of living in countries such as Uganda.

I'm going to make a section here on parchment and vellum, which I hope someone else will edit. If you are that person, once you've put something here, please delete this paragraph.

Parchment and Vellum

Paper

This was first used by the Mayans in Central America before the Christian Era. Around the beginning of the Christian Era, it was used by the Chinese, though not for writing at first. The court eunuch Cai Lun is said to have been inspired by wasps chewing wood to make their nests. In a battle in 751, the Arabs captured Chinese papermakers and learned the technique from them.  Later on, it reached Europe as a result of the Crusades.  From Tudor times onward, it was made in converted water mills.

Making Paper

Paper can be made out of any fibrous material that will stick together.  It needn't be made from wood pulp or even cellulose.  Using the right techniques, it can be made entirely from wool, silk, shredded plastic, wires, asbestos or glass fibres, among other things, and of course other substances can be included for decoration, such as petals, onion skin or leaves.  Clearly, some raw materials may be more desirable than others.  Cellulose paper can be recycled up to six times, after which the fibres are too short to hold together properly.

In order to make paper by the method below, you will need:

• Cellulose fibres.  The most practical sources are cotton rags, old paper, grass clippings or nettle fibre.  The whitest and most durable paper is made from hemp - I have three hundred year old books made of it that look new.  Wood pulp is actually a poor choice as it's hard to extract the fibre without damaging it, for example by the use of sulphuric acid or  mechanical techniques such as hammering.
• Lots of water.  Twenty times as much by weight as the pulp.
• A food processor.  This is not essential but it makes things a lot easier.
• A net curtain, stocking-style nylon or wire mesh.  Substitute this in the instructions if you decide to use it instead of netting.
• Drawing pins.
• A wooden picture frame.
• Towels (not paper ones!) or other absorbent material.

This is what you do:

1. If you're not using paper or cloth, take the other source of cellulose and soak it in water for several months.  This rots everything away that isn't cellulose.  Then rinse it thoroughly until it's clean.  Other, faster options are destructive to the fibres and produce inferior quality paper that will probably not even last a century.  Another option is to use the roughage-high faeces of grass-eating mammals such as horses and cows and rinsing them thoroughly.  This makes pretty good paper which has however been in contact with hydrochloric acid for several hours, and you may wish to sterilise it in some way, though on the other hand you aren't going to be eating it.  If you are using paper, boil it with detergent to get rid of any ink.  This may produce a hazardous sludge which is difficult to dispose of safely.  If I did this, I would boil it almost dry and store it in a metal or glass container.  If anyone else has any suggestions as to how hazardous it is and how to dispose of it safely, I'd be very happy for them to edit this paragraph accordingly.  Weigh the paper, then shred it into confetti and soak them for a day or so in a bucket of water.  You should also weigh any other fibres you use.  Whatever fibres you use, it can help to liquidise them in a food processor for a few seconds, though if you use dung you'd probably either want to skip that bit or dedicate a food processor to non-food purposes (they also make good centrifuges for example).
2. Remove the contents of the picture frame, cut a rectangle of net curtain slightly bigger than it out and fasten it to the wood with a series of drawing pins, quite a few on each side as well as one at each corner.
3. Squeeze out any excess water from the fibres.  Put roughly twenty times the weight of the fibres into a container.  You can't make more paper in one go than a twentieth of the weight of the maximum water capacity of the container.  For example, our kitchen sink has a capacity of around 25 litres, so it can only be used to make around 1.2 kg of paper.  Useful bits of maths in there.  Get the towels ready.
4. Add the pulp, stirring continuously until it's suspended evenly through the water.  If you want to size it (see below), the potato water or other colloid should be added at this point too, in proportion.
5. Take the frame contraption and slide it obliquely into the water, pin side down.  Let it sink or push it down to the bottom of the container, then lift it vertically out of the water.  If you do let it sink, be careful not to trap too much pulp under it.  As it drains, shake it alternately from side to side and back to front at right angles.  This meshes the fibres.  Paper made on reels in mills usually has a grain to it because it is made in a unidirectional process, and consequently can be torn more easily in a particular direction.  In the unlikely event that the paper is delicate enough, any pattern on the net curtain will end up being visible if the sheet is held up to the light.  This is how watermarks are made, which nowadays are mainly found in banknotes rather than normal pieces of paper.
6. After the water is  substantially drained, take the frame, turn it upside down quickly and thump it down onto the towel.  If you're lucky, it'll all come off in one go.
7. Repeat steps 5 and 6 until there's not enough pulp left to make sensible bits of paper.
8. Leave the paper to dry thoroughly, then carefully peel each sheet off the towel.

Then drain the water.  If you're doing it in a plumbed-in sink or bath, you may block the drain, but you can avoid this by not doing that or using a filter for the plughole.  A zinc bath or old squarish porcelain basin are probably your best bets.  Otherwise you might end up learning more about plumbing than you planned.

I have found that the quality of paper made by this method increases to a peak, then declines.  If you make it from grass, it'll probably look like a cowpat, which is not terribly surprising.  It's more like cardboard than writing paper, can't really be folded without breaking and unless it's sized, will behave like blotting paper.  Depending on what you use it for, this has various advantages and disadvantages.

Sizing

This is an unfortunately confusing term which does not refer to the dimensions of the paper.  Paper is generally processed to achieve a particular absorbency, using a substance known as size.  This is  a gelatinous substance used to reduce the tendency of various materials to absorb liquids by capillary action, other examples being textiles.  Various substance can be used, including rosin, glue, gelatine, gypsum (blackboard chalk) and starch.  The easiest substance to use is probably potato starch, from heavily boiled potatoes.  The more size there is in paper, the less absorbent it is, because the substances used repel water.  The "hardest" sizing is in tracing paper, which was invented by accident in the mid-twentieth century.  Unsized paper, known as waterleaf, is blotting paper.  The type of size used influences how long the paper will last.  Size is not very relevant to ballpoint ink, but fountain pen ink behaves very differently.

Writing Implements

There are various writing implements.  A stylus can be used to write on wax tablets.  This is simply a hand-held pointed stick made of metal or hard wood, appropriate for rough notes.  Clay was written on using a stick with a wedge-shaped cross section, producing the distinctive cuneiform writing used by many ancient languages, including Hittite, which is related to English and most other European and Indian languages, and Sumerian, along with Egyptian the most ancient surviving written language.  Other than those, the most important tools were brushes, reed pens and quills.

Brushes were used in Central America before the Europeans arrived and in the Far East, where it is still used for calligraphy and has influenced the appearance of East Asian writing.  However, most non-European writing on soft surfaces was done using pens made from reeds or other plant stems such as bamboo.  Greek was also written with a reed pen.  Quills made from feathers were used in Europe and in the European cultures of the Americas until the mass production of metal nibs.  On the American frontier, they were used until the second half of the nineteenth century.  The production of steel nibs altered the nature of ink due to the risk of corrosion and the importance of a steady flow.

Making a Quill

Contrary to popular belief, the barbs are stripped from feathers before they are used to write with.  The best quills are made from from the largest wing feathers of geese, or in North America, from the same feathers on turkeys.  Large wing and tail feathers of many different moderately large birds can often be found lying around and can also be used, so a cruelty-free quill is quite feasible.  However, these animals frequently carry microbes associated with disease in humans, and this should be borne in mind.

Some say that quills should either be baked in sand or left to dry out for a year or so before preparation, but I have found that this makes them too brittle and hard to handle.  The shaft of a feather is made of keratin, the same protein as finger and toe nails, and making a quill is similar to cutting your nails.  Therefore, it helps to soak them in warm water before preparation.

This is what you do:

1. Soak the feather in warm water.  People disagree with this bit a lot, incidentally.
2. Strip all the barbs off the sides, taking care not to pull the shaft apart in the process.
3. Using a penknife (hence the name), cut the end off the shaft of the feather diagonally where it was attached to the bird.
4. Stick the blade of the same knife gently into the longer side of the end of the feather, creating a crack.  This is to pull the ink up into the shaft.
5. Scoop out the sides of the point to make a fountain pen nib style shape.

Reed pens are made by applying steps 3-5 to a reed.  This suggests to me that quills are sort of "descended" from reed pens.  The main difference between writing with a reed pen and a quill pen is that characters formed with the former are larger than those written with the latter, because it's bigger.

Like a fountain pen without a bladder or cartridge, a quill and a reed pen are all used the same way:  they are dipped constantly into an ink horn and capillary action draws up the fluid, which is then used to make marks on paper.  Again like fountain pens, they tend to adapt to the writing habits of their users.  Feathers should be taken from the opposite wing of the bird to the handedness of the writer.

Ink

As mentioned above, the coming of metal nibs influenced the nature of ink quite strongly, because the delicacy of metal nibs made them susceptible to corrosion and more liable to blockage. Industrial age fountain pen ink is made with synthetic dyes and is very fluid.

Ink has been made in various ways historically, and there is generally a difference between eastern and western approaches.  Chinese stick ink is quite simple.  It consists of soot in water with vegetable oil and gelatine.  In the West, the Romans used a substance called atramentum, which consisted of linseed oil containing tannin and copperas.  Around the time of the fall of Rome, a particular recipe for ink was developed which remained more or less the same for many centuries, although there were others.  Unfortunately, it is quite poisonous because of the copperas.  Copperas is nothing to do with copper, but is iron (II) sulphate in contemporary jargon.   It's called copperas because it's bright green like verdigris, which is copper "rust", and somewhat poisonous.

Iron Gall Ink

This was used in the West from the 12th to the 19th century.

Ingredients:

• Galls.  These are growths produced by oak and some other trees in response to parasitic wasps.  They're quite easy to spot if you look on many oak trees.  These are used for their tannin content.
• Rainwater or wine.  Rainwater is of course particularly pure in a mediaeval context, but wine, being high in alcohol, acted as a preservative and was less likely to freeze in the winter.
• Gum Arabic (or other gum).  This keeps the pigment suspended in the liquid, helps it to flow by making it thicker and holds it on the surface of the paper.
• Some kind of iron solution (does not have to be copperas).

Take small pieces of iron such as nails or iron filings and leave them in vinegar for a while.  Grate the galls and leave them to ferment in the water, then the gum and the iron solution is added.

The result is some kind of ink, but of a peculiar kind because it is pale at first and darkens over several days on exposure to the air.  Consequently, dyes tended to be added to it, such as logwood, indigo or woad.  To be honest, I find this ink quite unsatisfactory:  presumably there's an art to making it which I lack.  Part of the problem may be the lack of quantities in the recipe.

This ink is quite complicated to make and also quite acidic.  It would tend to be made up as required rather than in large quantities.  Two quantities of the acidity were that it tended to eat holes in the paper it was used on, which can be seen in old documents, and it corroded steel nibs, hence the change in the nineteenth century.

Chinese Stick Ink

This is much simpler stuff, also known as Indian ink.  It's just soot mixed with glue and formed into a block.  However, like old European ink, it will clog a fountain pen.