Blotting Time, Soaking History

Nothing evokes the gaslit era more readily than a fountain pen and an ink-well. But while these more celebrated denizens of the Victorian office desk are today well-remembered icons of the past, their humbler accessories have not been as well remembered. Indeed, tapping away on our keyboards and staring into the fluorescent glare of a screen, today’s desk worker hardly recognizes the sheer array of smaller objects and instruments that the era of fountain pens and ink-wells needed. Be it the grand mahogany desk of a Victorian or Edwardian bara-sahib or the humble mango-wood table of a pen-pushing clerk, office desks in the era of gaslights were accoutered with paper-weights, a variety of different writing and letter-papers (the brooding black-bordered paper for condolence notes for instance), desk calendars, pin-cushions, ink stands which often included little bottles to hold different types of pins and of course blotters.

The word blotter referred to two different types of objects. One was a boat-shaped instrument made of wood or metal with a knob on top. One had to fit a blotting paper on it and roll it gently upon freshly written letters or signatures to soak up the extra ink and prevent smudging. The other was a free-size piece of blotting paper laid upon the desk on which the paper rested while being written upon. This too soaked up excess ink and helped the desk itself remain unstained. Both types of blotters ruled Victorian and Edwardian desks as absolutely essential equipment. Their death was ushered in by the invention of the ballpoint pen in the 1940s. Yet, for another twenty to thirty years, these heroes of the gaslight era fought a losing battle until almost the 1970s. In some cases, like on my father’s desk, they remained well into the 1990s as redundant relics too familiar to dispose of and yet increasingly obscure in their functions.

The second type of blotter, that is the square paper laid upon the desk, had over time developed a second function. Around the 1900s as printing became cheaper and a commodity culture flourished, advertisers had also come to recognize the potential of blotters as media for advertising. They were ideal for advertising as they lay right under the potential consumer’s nose and they had to see the piece of advertising every single working day. It was like a trade card, but with the additional advantages through its placement and its incorporation into daily routines of individuals.

Until the 1930s every type of business ranging from jewelers to hairdressers and even electricity companies advertised on blotters. By the 1940s as the ballpoint pen began to dry out the fountain flowing into the fountain pen, blotter advertisements seemed to narrow. Medical advertising, handed out to doctors mostly by those furtive salesmen called ‘detail men’ in north America and ‘medical representative’ in India, grew into the main industry to use blotters for advertising. A handful of local insurance companies also carried on for a while, but in the last decades of the blotter’s existence it was clearly medicine that kept is alive as an advertising medium.

Advertising, in turn, opened up the blotter’s surface to experimentation in new forms of commercial art and graphics. As advertisers vied to make their blotters with each other to occupy the coveted place on every desk, they turned to a new breed of artists. These artists are obscure and long-forgotten, but their art—or whatever little that has survived of it, demonstrates that many of them were not only inspired and influenced by the dominant stylistic trends in the art of their era but were also inveterate innovators.

Interestingly in north America, and California in particular, blotters were reinvented in the 1970s as a vehicle for delivering LSD. Soon the art on these LSD blotters began a medium for a kind of underground psychedelic art. These psychedelic blotters are today highly collectible and have crystalized a sort of counter-culture nostalgia.

Indian blotter art flourished from the closing decades of the nineteenth century to until the 1960s or so. In this period, it cycled through at least four major stylistic eras. One can clearly see the ornate Victorian style in some, these are followed by the sleek art deco forms of the interwar years, an Indianized graphic art of the 1940s and 50s and finally, the use of cartoons in the 1960s and 70s. Yet, unlike the hallowed world of rich frames, lavish galleries and cheese-and-wine exhibitions, the styles of blotter did not evolve by exiling earlier ones. They coexisted and intermingled. Creating stylistic layers, like a rich, creamy pastry.

Tracking these elusive palimpsests today is difficult. Though there are some museums and collections that have begun to systematically collect, if not yet study, these forgotten and occasionally ink-stained testaments of everyday art, to the best of my knowledge there are no such collections in India. Wherever they survive today by anything more than an accident, they survive in private collections often jealously guarded and away from the public eye.

Yet, even the stray ones we find here and there: rediscovered in a box of old stationaries in a forgotten attic or thrown out in the clearance sale of a long-redundant corner-shop, attest to the vibrancy and richness of this ephemeral form. Having soaked up the art and commerce of their era today these little pieces of paper bear the stains of a world at once at-hand and lost to us. The world of commodity advertising looks all too familiar, while the art only occasionally looks familiar to us. Like the ink-stains these blotters might once have absorbed, these blotters are surface upon which different eras, styles and commodities bleed into one another.