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In Search of the Perfect Writing Surface

By The Reverend Christopher Calderhead

"I’ve thought of all the possibilities. I considered setting the whole thing in type, and letting the hard, metal letters press sculpturally into soft paper. Or writing on mylar plastic--I’ve done it: it takes writing beautifully."

Donald was exploring with me the basic question: why write on vellum? What material will let him achieve the look he’s after? If this means a return to the most traditional of writing surfaces, he needs to know it is because that surface can do things no other surface can do.

Vellum responds beautifully to the ministrations of the pen. It is enormously strong and able to withstand the work of many hands. What sheet of paper could take the kind of labor expended on a single page of The St John’s Bible?

Vellum is made of the skins of calves. Any animal skin may be used--I have seen examples made of kangaroo and even ostrich. Some very fine small Books of Hours in the Middle Ages may even have been produced with squirrel skins, which could be why they are so thin and fine in texture. In contemporary practice, the most common animal skins are calf, goat, and sheep. Most calligraphers today reserve the term vellum (related to the word veal) for calf skins, using the word parchment for other skins, especially those of sheep. In common practice, the words vellum and parchment are often interchangeable, as a quick peek in the Oxford English Dictionary will demonstrate.

Vellum is also beautiful. Its soft, variable surface is to paper as alabaster is to frosted glass. Donald says, "I’ve been there. I know all the disadvantages. But just like a cabinet-maker who chooses to work in elm--and the grain goes crazy, and it’s hard to work, but he does it anyway--I choose to work in vellum. I do it for the way it responds to the work of my hands. That’s it. That’s why I do it." But where to find a reliable supply? "It’s like looking for the Holy Grail," Donald says.

The task of finding the right skin is simple. Going through the available skins, the calligrapher usually only needs to find a single sheet which meets the needs of the task. But this job was different. Donald needed to supply his scriptorium with a huge number of skins, all of which had to be of a matching standard. There were to be no markings on the hair side. All the skins had to be even in texture, thickness, and color. There could be no holes in the skins. In addition, Donald had decided on a huge page size--fifteen and seven-eighths inches wide by twenty four and a half inches tall. This large measurement put Donald’s requirements right at the outer limit of available skins. But it was not simply a question of finding the right number of skins, or of finding skins of the right size. More pressing was to find a supplier who was still making skins which were acceptable for writing at all.

Having explored suppliers in Canada and Ireland, Donald went to Israel. Israeli Jews produce huge amounts of vellum to satisfy the religious market.

In Jerusalem, he went with an Israeli scribe to the neighborhood of Mea Shearim, located within walking distance of the Old City. The men of Mea Shearim sport long beards and wide-brimmed black hats. Curly forelocks dance at their temples as they rush down the streets. If you are man without a yalmulke, and you enter one of the small religious goods shops, children may come and stare.

They went into one of the parchment outlets. "Here was a living tradition," Donald said. "Shelves were covered with turkey quills, and there were rolls and rolls of vellum around. It fitted. I felt like I was at home. Calligraphers were scurrying in and out. Unlike going to western art shops or vellum suppliers, here I felt there was a real understanding of what I, as a scribe, was looking for."

Skins were pulled from the shelves. They were very fine. Yet, as wonderful as the skins were, they weren’t quite what Donald needed.

"Though I liked the skins, I couldn’t use them," Donald said to me months later. "They are culturally specific. They don’t give me the qualities I need in a skin."

"There is a relationship between quill, ink, and vellum. These three elements have to work together. The Israeli skins were designed to work with Israeli ink. Working on the flesh side of the skin, with its heavy nap, they use an ink with a high gum content." The shiny, raised surface of the Israeli ink didn’t work within Donald’s cultural tradition. It was not without regret that he decided he was going to have to forego the Jerusalem suppliers.

His quest for the right vellum eventually took him to Cowley’s, a supplier outside London. Their skins fit his needs best.

Having found the right vellum, Donald set his assistant Sally to the task of preparing them for writing. Working in her scrutching shed, Sally’s first step in preparation is to look carefully at each skin to see how she needs to prepare it.

She then uses a relatively heavy grade of sand paper, rubbing it back and forth, using a good deal of elbow grease. She runs her thumb along the surface, and bends down repeatedly to see how the finish is developing. With a finer grade of sandpaper, she gently rubs the skin down again using a circular motion. Slowly, the skin takes on a soft, velvety finish. It is laborious, careful work, and has to be done by a trained and sensitive person before any writing can be done.

The search for the perfect writing surface is perhaps less like looking for the Holy Grail than it is an attempt to find a series of balances. Looking for skins of the right size and weight, finding suppliers who can produce enormous quantities of uniform quality, and exploring the best ways of preparing skins, Donald and his team of scribes are trying to realize an ideal. But it is only when the pen begins its slow dance across the page that human skill is united to its chosen tools and materials in a way which produces something truly splendid, wondrous, and yes, even holy.

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