Making the Ink

The ink used to print the Dunlap Broadside bore little resemblance to the thin, fast-drying inks of a modern press. Eighteenth-century printer's ink was a stiff, tar-like paste, mixed by hand from two basic components: a pigment, almost always lampblack collected from the soot of burning oils or resinous wood, and a varnish made by boiling linseed oil for hours — sometimes igniting it briefly — to drive off the lighter fractions and leave behind a thick, slow-drying binder. The two were then ground together on a stone slab until the pigment was fully dispersed and the resulting paste had the consistency of cold molasses. Other ingredients — rosin, turpentine, a touch of soap — were added in small amounts to adjust tack and flow, and most printers guarded their exact recipes as trade secrets. The thickness mattered: the ink had to be stiff enough to cling to the face of the type and resist running into the counters of the letters, yet tacky enough to release cleanly onto a sheet of damp handmade paper under the pressure of the press. To reproduce ink faithful to that used by Dunlap in 1776, we returned to the same materials and the same procedures — boiling linseed oil to a heavy varnish, blending it with hand-collected lampblack, and grinding the two by hand to the proper body. Because eighteenth-century ink was applied with leather ink balls rather than modern rollers, the finished ink is also tuned to that method of distribution, ensuring that every step from the inking of the type to the impression on the paper matches the practice of Dunlap's shop on the night of July 4, 1776.