Years ago I began asking letterpress printers what brand of ink they used to do their work. People who work in commercial printing, fine art, artists books, engraving and lino cuts all have very clear views of what ink works best for them.
When pressed about why they use the ink that they swear by, it almost always comes down to the fact that the ink they use is the ink that they learned with.
It is easy to understand why printers stick with what is familiar. A great deal of time and effort can be put into any printing project, and who wants to make things more difficult by introducing a unknown variable into the works.
Even if the ink they usually use has its drawbacks, as the old saying goes . . . “better the evil you know than the evil you don’t know”.
I have always worked with Van Son rubber based inks. Why? Because that is what I learned with. It is a fairly short ink and it stays live on the press for quite a while. As a rubber based ink, it dries half by absorption and half by evaporation, which serves me well because I use a lot of thick, fibrous papers.
At the same time, I have used offset inks, provided to me by offset printers. Those have worked fine, and have even had their own advantages.
So, play around a bit, borrow a couple of tablespoons of ink from a friend. Keep an open mind.
I love the Van Sons for the same reasons you mention, plus they come in Pantone colors and the mixing guide can get you very close to thousands of colors with just the basics. I also love using the transparent white to get tints. Recently I’ve been teaching some workshops on how to mix color on the Vandercook with these inks, that was devised and taught by Jim Trissel at the Press at Colorado College before his untimely passing. He printed a beautiful letterpress guide and proof book (out of print and very expensive if you can locate one) but I was able to read it while it was on loan at MCBA for an exhibit. He was a great printing ink experimenter with beautiful results. Very inspiring. (Even for an artist who works primarily in B/W.)
Many years ago as I wandered the Renaissance festival I came across the ‘Ye Old Print Shop’. Being a letterpress printer since 4th grade I was immediatly drawn to the booth. Inside was a very young, long-haired, Kent Aldrich. Dressed in midevil costume, he had two handheld leather ink mixing balls. they looked like oversized boxing gloves without the thumb. he was rolling them together with a full load of black ink, swish, swish,swish, his technique was seemed perfect and it sounded great. I had often wondered what the recipe for printers’ ink was a few hundred years ago. I had thought that it must be some great combination of thick grease, stove black and pine varnish. In great anticipation of finding this age old secret formula I almost trembeled as I ask him how he made it….He stepped aside and motioned to a 5 # can of …what else…Van Son….BANG went my baloon. Now I don’t care who you are, thats funny. TMF
Turtleman – For a long time I dreamed of making my own letterpress ink in the style of Gutenberg. As I read up on the process of producing and gathering the lamp-black and boiling down the linseed oil, I kept coming across 500 year old laws that banned ink production inside the walls of city after city. Apparently, putting a vat of combustible oil over an open flame and stirring it until it is reduced to a thick paste is explosively dangerous. So I wimped out. I cut my hair short and left the ink manufacture to people outside of the city walls. Like VanSon. But a man can still dream.