We quote from page 366;—“The ink which the ancients generally used, was composed of lamp-black mixed with gum, as we are informed by Dioscorides and others, who give the receipt [recipe?] for making it. Ink of this kind may be called carbonic: it possesses the advantages of extreme blackness and durability, the writing remaining fresh so long as the substance on which it is written exists; but as it does not sink into the paper, it is liable to the great inconvenience of being easily and entirely removed; for, if a wet sponge be applied to it, the writing may be washed away, and no traces of the characters will remain. The facility with which documents might be thus obliterated, gave occasion to fraud, as an artful forger was able to remove such portions of the original writing as he might desire to get rid of, and thus profit by the absence of material words, or insert in the blanks which he had made, such interpolations as might serve his turn. Many common accidents, by which books and writings were exposed to wet, or even to damp, were also fatal, or at least highly injurious, to compositions and muniments of great value. Various expedients were therefore attempted to remedy an imperfection from which many must have suffered severely. Pliny informs us that it was usual, in his time, to mix vinegar with the ink, to make it strike into the paper or parchment, and that it, in some degree, answered the purpose. It should seem that vitriolic ink, such as we use at present, was also adopted soon afterwards, which possesses, in perfection, the quality that was desired of sinking instantly into the paper, so as to make it far more difficult to discharge it without destroying the texture on which it is written, and of being perfectly secure against water, by which Indian and other carbonic Inks are so easily effaced. It is not, however, EQUALLY SECURE AGAINST THE EFFECTS OF TIME; for vitriolic ink gradually fades away, becomes paler by degrees, turns brown and yellow, and is scarcely legible; and sometimes, as the parchment grows yellow and brown with age, it disappears altogether. A compound kind of ink came next into use, which united the advantages and avoided the defects of the two simple sorts. Such a mixed ink was generally used for several centuries; and with this, the manuscripts that are now most fresh and legible appear to have been written. It is evident that the ink with which the original works contained in the Palimpsest manuscripts that have been deciphered were written, was at least in part vitriolic: for the letters which had been rubbed out were rendered legible by the application of the infusion of galls. In order to remove the original writing, the parchments on which the mixed ink had been used were, probably, first washed to take off the carbon, and thus partially to efface the characters, and were afterwards scraped or rubbed with pumice, or some other suitable substance, to complete the process of destruction, by taking away mechanically the color that the vitriolic portion of the ink still preserved. It is but too probable that many manuscripts, the characters of which were entirely formed of the more ancient carbonic ink, have been entirely destroyed, the letters having been washed off completely, and by the same simple means as the writing of a school-boy on a slate; whilst the parchment still remains in our libraries, and is covered with more modern compositions which have sacrilegiously and too successfully usurped the place of more ancient and more valuable matter. The tirades of Cyril or of Jerome, or the tawdry eloquence of Chrysostom, are perhaps firmly established in quarters from whence [?] the Margites of Homer, or the comedies of Menander, were miserably dislodged.
“A manuscript is called Palimpsest, from the adjective παλιμψαιστος or παλιμψηστος, signifying twice rubbed; NOT as the glossary of Du Cange (membrana iterum abrasa—charta deletilis) would seem to denote, because the parchment had twice undergone abrasure, or the writing been twice obliterated, but because it had been twice prepared for writing, which was principally effected by rubbing it with pumice, first in the course of manufacture, after the original skin had been cured, and again by the same process, after the original writing had been taken away by washing, or in any other manner. The strict and precise sense of Palimpsest is therefore ‘twice prepared for writing;’ the repetition of such preparation being the prevailing idea in the etymology, and not erasure, as some have erroneously supposed. It is said to be easy to remove from modern parchment, especially if what is written be of some standing, all traces of writing, by rubbing it with pumice, or similar substances; and if the surface be afterwards polished, no one, by merely looking on it, will ever suppose that it had ever been written upon; but, if it be washed by an infusion of galls, the letters will be so far restored, particularly if it be suffered to remain some time in the light, that it may be copied by a patient and practiced person, who is gifted with good eyes:—so deeply had the iron entered into the soul of the parchment! If the erased letters were written in a bold large hand, the task of deciphering them will of course be less troublesome, and the results more sure. And such are the characters of the more ancient manuscripts; for, the older the manuscript, the better and more legible is the writing, as approaching more nearly to the ages of civility and refinement. The method of writing in old times is also favorable, it is said, to the restoration of works apparently obliterated. The scribe did not use a flowing ink, nor a finely pointed pen, as modern writers are wont; nor was a small quantity applied so lightly and sparingly as to dry almost as fast as it touches the paper. The ancient ink was thick with gum, and was supplied copiously by a pen with a broad point, usually made of a reed; and the characters were painted rather than written, the ink rather resembling paint or varnish than our thin liquor. As they rarely wrote in books, it was not necessary that the page should dry speedily, or be dried by means of sand and blotting-paper, in order to prevent the loss of time, and that the penman might turn over the leaf immediately; the loose sheets or leaves, on the contrary, which were only to be bound up when the whole was completed, were left to dry slowly, so that the pools of ink which formed the letters, stood long on the surface of the parchment; and that part of the fluid which was of a penetrating nature was gradually absorbed, and sunk deeply into the substance of the skin, so as to preserve to us—if we be not wanting to ourselves in diligence—many precious relics of ancient lore. The restoration of the original writing in a palimpsest manuscript will be best explained by referring to one of the many kinds of sympathetic ink, which is in truth, making common ink ex post facto, or uniting the ingredients of which it is composed, after the fact of writing. If we write with water in which copperas has been dissolved, the letters will be invisible; but when the paper has been washed over with an infusion of galls, they will appear gradually, and will in time become tolerably legible; the ink being thus formed upon the paper, although much less perfectly, than in the ordinary maceration.”
Little or nothing can be added to the full and elaborate history of ancient and modern inks which is contained in this extract,—so thorough and complete in its analysis of the subject, and so clear in its distinct statements of the results of investigations in which some of the most acute minds of Europe have long been successfully employed, that we will not linger upon it with mere verbal criticism.
We can not present a more striking illustration of the change in the composition of inks about the time of the invention of the art of printing, than is furnished by the annexed fac-simile of a page in the Biblia Pauperum, (“Bible for poor folks,”) the oldest printed book in the world. This extraordinary book is of uncertain date. (No printed book has a date prior to 1457.) There are, as we believe, only two copies of it in America, one in the possession of James Lenox, of New-York,—the other in the Astor Library.
The maker of this book was the unconscious inventor of the art of printing. Wood-engraving was in use for ages before it occurred to the mind of man that a letter might be as easily reproduced in that way as a picture or figure. To convey scriptural history to the minds of the common people, the wood-engravers (whose art was invented to multiply and cheapen the production of PLAYING-CARDS) made little pictures representing scenes described, and events narrated, in the Bible. For the benefit of the few who could read, it was customary to write on the margin, or at the foot, of the page on which the woodcut was printed, a few words descriptive of the subject or object delineated. This was always done with a pen, by a regular scribe, until, one day, it occurred to the wood-engraver employed on the Biblia Pauperum, that these words might be as easily engraved as the figures to which they referred, and of which they were the explanation. He put that idea in practice: and in an instant the sublime ART OF PRINTING was an “accomplished fact.”
The advocates of the claims of Koster, Gansefleisch, (or Gutenberg,) Faust (or Fust,) and Schoeffer, to this invention, have wasted much labor in bringing forth conflicting testimony about them. The long-forgotten and now wholly unknown wood-engraver of the Biblia Pauperum had preceded them by half of a generation. Such books were in existence before A.D. 1420; and the earliest date which the Haarlaem Dutchmen set up for the first printing of their fellow-townsman, Lawrence Koster, is 1428. And his pretensions are after all very dubious. Indeed they have been generally condemned as utterly fabulous by bibliographical critics and typographical historians.
We introduce it here to show the color and the (thereby indicated) composition of the INK employed. It was writing-ink. It contained sulphate of iron (copperas), in combination with vegetable astringent matter, and with very little carbon. The vegetable substance, imperfectly united to the mineral ingredient, has (in obedience to the laws of organic matter) been decomposed and “resolved into its original elements.” It has disappeared; but the IRON remains with its yellow stain, an imperishable memorial of that humble, nameless workman, more enduring than that which the plaintive man of Uz desired; for if those words had been “graven with an IRON PEN and lead in the rock forever,” that anticipated eternity might have faded of realization by the action of the rain, the frost, the dust, and innumerable imaginable atmospheric vicissitudes, or, (what is worse,) “the wrath of man.”—Some Cambyses might have demolished the rock itself, and left no more of the inscription than can now be read of those once carved on the cliffs of Edom, the God-created walls of Petra in the valley of El Ghor.
This pale rusty WORD-STAMPING on the fragile and easily combustible paper, has outlasted the inscriptions once visible in gigantic characters on the four sides of the Memphitic pyramids; and it is only an incidental result of the intelligence diffused and the learning promoted by the invention thus begun, that we can now read the long-buried records of Nineveh, the epitaphs of the Thebaic kings, and the gravings on the precipitous fronts of the mountains which surround the ruins of Persepolis.
All writers upon this subject have strangely overlooked the fact that the art of impressing or printing letters with a metallic stamp or type on parchment, as a substitute for pen-work, is about a thousand years older than the period above specified as the date of the invention of the modern art of printing. The Codex Argenteus, (the oldest translation of the entire Bible into any European language,) is a famous book, in the Library of the University of Upsala in Sweden.
(We give the particulars of its history in our Appendix.)