Inks for vintage pens

As more fountain pen enthusiasts venture into the world of vintage pens, the question often arises -- what inks are safe? We've had a discussion of this posted for some time in our website FAQ, and I'd encourage readers to click through to read it. What I'd like to emphasize here is that vintage pens are not all alike. 

Older pens can differ radically in both materials and construction. Hard rubber pens that are filled manually with a dropper -- mostly dating to the 1920s and earlier -- can handle any ink around. Hard rubber is extremely resistant to chemicals of all sorts, more so in fact that any modern pen plastic. Hard rubber retracting-nib safety pens can even be used with India inks. 

Pens with a built-in filling mechanism which have hard rubber sections and feeds and which hold their ink in a rubber ink sac fall into a different category. No harm is going to be done to the hard rubber section assembly, and since the ink isn't in contact with other parts such as the cap or the barrel, they don't have to be worried about. The concern with this class of pens is pretty much exclusively the ink sac -- a relatively cheap and usually easily-replaced part. The standard material for sacs is latex rubber, and some inks are known to play badly with latex. In some cases this can be gotten around by using a sac made from a more resistant material such as silicone or PVC. For more information on this, see our FAQ discussion linked above and our Pen Sacs Primer.

Those vintage pens for which ink selection is most important are the ones which hold their ink directly in contact with celluloid or cellulose acetate parts. These materials are more permeable than hard plastics such as acrylics, and are thus vulnerable to staining. Examples of such pens are Parker Vacumatics, Sheaffer plunger-fillers, and older German piston-fillers, as well as a multitude of pens that use ink sacs but which have celluloid sections with transparent ink windows. In such pens you will especially want to avoid alkaline inks, which can attack both celluloid and latex rubber sacs. Many popular Japanese inks are strongly alkaline. 

Finally, it should be noted that it can be a real pain to change inks with certain older pens. Perhaps the most extreme example would be the capillary-filling Parker 61, but earlier pump-filling Parker 51s and to a lesser extent Vacumatics also take a lot of work to empty and rinse. These pens were not designed for regular ink-switching, so best to select another model if you plan to change inks frequently -- or just buy more of them!

Setting things straight about Parker Quink

It seems the battle against misinformation is never-ending. Once one old collectors' myth is put to rest, new ones arise to take its place. I've recently noticed a sudden upsurge of confused factoids about Parker inks in the fountain pen groups on Facebook. Inks are rather outside my main areas of research interest, but I know enough to be able to see a problem in the making -- so let's set things straight before they get totally out of hand.

First, when we're looking at Parker ink production from the 1930s through the 1950s, we're talking about three product lines: Quink, "51" ink, and Superchrome. Quink is the oldest of the three, and the only one still in production (with minor reformulations). Quink was introduced in 1931; despite what the confused Wikipedia article states (at least, until I can get a chance to correct it [now corrected; let's hope no one changes it back -- D.]), Quink was a mild ink that would not harm pens such as Parker's top-line Vacumatics which held their ink directly within celluloid barrels, as well as models such as the Challenger whose sections featured transparent celluloid ink windows. 

The strongly alkaline pH balance and isopropyl alcohol content that distinguished "51" ink were NEVER features of Quink. The Parker 51 and "51" ink were developed in tandem, the pen designed specifically so it would be able to hold up to its special caustic ink. The ink was explicitly promoted and sold as suitable only for the Parker 51. Parker openly stated that it would clog and damage pens not specifically made to use it. "51" ink was introduced in 1941, and was replaced in 1947 by Superchrome -- a somewhat milder but still corrosive reformulation, similarly marketed for use exclusively in pens made to use it: the Parker 51 and its budget offspring, the Parker 21. 

It does appear that there was an initial release of "51" ink as "Double Quink" (discussion here), but I very much suspect that this took place only as unadvertised market trials done as part of the well-documented market trials of preproduction Parker 51 pens from 1939 on. It is telling that I have yet to see a photo of an actual surviving Double Quink bottle, and that David Shepherd was unable to come up with one for his Parker 51 monograph despite years of diligent focused collecting and free access to Parker's own archives.

ADDENDUM: While rewriting the Wikipedia article on Quink, I took a closer look at the apocryphal story that Quink had been invented by and named for a Filipino chemist, Francisco Quisumbing. While clearly false -- the details of the development and naming of Quink have been thoroughly documented -- it was puzzling how such a story could have arisen in the first place. As it turned out, a Francisco A. Quisumbing had in fact founded a successful ink company in the Philippines in 1923, a few years after completing his Ph.D. at Columbia University. The basic biographical details appear in the 1937 volume of Who's Who in the Philippines, pp. 128-29. Quisumbing contributed the preface to a 1960 book, Forensic Chemistry of Ink in Documentary Investigation, by Paul R. Verzosa, in which it is mentioned that the Quisumbing Ink Products company supplied all agencies of the Philippine government under an exclusive contract (p. 22).
I was also able to find mention (and dismissal) of the Quisumbing/Quink myth in a book published in 1999, so the story has been around for a good long time (Virgilio L. Malang, Inventions & Innovations: A Glimpse of the Filipino Legacy, p. xiv).

Quink Concentrate

At just two inches (5 cm) high, this is one of Parker's smallest Quink ink bottles. The instructions on the side of the box state:

Pour the contents of the phial into a 4-OZ. bottle and fill with CLEAN COLD WATER.
In doing this BE SURE TO RINSE out the phial several times to make certain that ALL the content is used.

Quink Concentrate was a WW2-era product, marketed in the UK. The ad below explains more, noting that "the bottle shortage is greater than ever". The need to economize on shipping was a major concern during wartime; another response to this need was "V-mail", in which letters were copied to microfilm and re-printed at the letter's destination. Unused WW2-era V-mail ink is still commonly found in the USA.