Pre-Industrial Western Printing Inks, c.1450-1850

It is often assumed that all printing inks are the same: black, inert, and stable over centuries. However, the ingredients in their recipes (or, as measurements were standardised in the 18th century, the components in their formulation) have varied enormously since their invention in the mid-1400s. This chapter offers a starting point for understanding the kind of pre-industrial oil-based printing inks that were commonly used for printing texts, images, music, and other kinds of content, mainly on paper and parchment supports, in a printing press, first in Western Europe and Central and Eastern Europe, areas under European colonial control, and other areas as the printing press spread. (Block-printing in Europe and relief printing in Asia conventionally uses a water-based ink.) This study begins with the invention of printing ink c.1450, when Johannes Gutenberg (d. 1468) created black printing ink for his first publications, and red printing ink c.1455 for the Gutenberg Bible. It ends with transformation of its production due to industrialisation and the development of synthetic constituents around1850. Relief, intaglio, and planographic (i.e. lithographic) printing inks had different pathways to industrialisation, but 1850 is a broadly indicative turning point because this timespan largely overlaps with the handpress period, c.1450–1830. Given the paucity of literature on this topic, it is believed that this chapter is the most substantial survey of the materiality of pre-industrial printing inks to date.