Vermilion?

I believe you kind of answered your own question. The printer’s who were able to afford, whether by their own means or a patron’s, a deeper, purer vermilion used it. Those who could not afford the deeper pigment had to settle for a fainter red.

Yeah, I’d concur. It’s similar to what James Elkins writes about painters and their pigments in “What Painting Is”. He has a whole passage about alchemy in which he discusses the science of pigment production (in a rather flighty poetic way), and in it he addresses that at certain times painters couldn’t use certain colors (obviously) due to lack of availability. It had to be the same for printers, especially those who sourced ink from others. I don’t know when printing ink started being “Manufactured” (maybe someone else has a little bit of insight into this from a historical perspective), but when they had to grind the ink and mull it into burned plate oil in their own shops, printers surely had to source pigments from mines or processors.
This is what makes me think that Mocha has a good point- those who were geographically located closer to a mine and could not import their own pigment/source ink from another printer were constrained to use what was available. Probably even more so true for those who only had Black and Vermillion as choices.

I guess the question more clearly woud be:

if you have examples of early printing in your collection (pre 1900 or even pre 1800) that are printed in red and black, what is the pantone equivalent of the reds used?

I realize there will be variance in the vermilion tones, but i suspect it won’t look like rubine red…

Best,

Alan

My advice? Go buy some oil paint and compare, or take a pantone book to an art supply store that has high quality oil paint and compare.
I suspect historical vermillion swatches will look like modern day Vermillion oil paint swatches.

Besides the actual hue, other differences between the historical printer’s red and PMS inks are permanence and opacity. Most PMS colors using red and yellow are fugitive and will fade with exposure to light, but the base colors starting with zero are more fade resistant. A vermilion using 032 red and 021 orange or 012 yellow will last longer on the wall; in a closed book, it is less of an issue.

Well,

Not finding the short answer here, after returning home from my business trip last night, I went back through my rare books, printed letterpress, going back as far as 1800 (none earlier, yet…) and took my Pantone swatches and did some comparisons. I figured books were the best choice as they were the least likely to experience light fade due to being closed most of the time.

Accounting for the color of the paper, in most instances the color comes up between Pantone Warm Red and Pantone 179 which is one shade darker.

I suspect that by the 1800’s most knowledge about inks was widely disseminated and scientific methods were being applied to ink manufacture (consistent weights and measures of pigments, and common ink formulations based on burnt linseed oil carriers) and this accounts for the high degree of standardization among the printing samples I have from several different printers.

Parallel, thanks for the pointer on the books, it put me on the right path.

FWIW,

Alan

A web search shows that vermilion was originally made from cinnabar which contains mercury, and that a lower quality vermilion might be adulterated with red lead. Today cadmium red is used instead.

As well as mercury and lead, cadmium is also toxic.

Yes, quite true, but at some point these can also become descriptive rather than factual labels; that is, this is a red that looks like cadmium rather than one made from cadmium, or a red that looks like Chinese red (another name for vermilion) rather a red actually from China.
I have cans of old Cal-Ink chrome yellow, but also a can of VanSon Chrome Yellow. Is there chrome in the VanSon? Not likely, it is just PMS 109, the closest they can come to the real chrome yellow, also toxic, but more opaque than any PMS mix.

Hello. The correct historical name for the color/tint printing ink for which you are searching is “Venetian Red.” It had a lot of mercury in it. The German firm of Janecke-Schneimann (sp?) was still making it in the late 1980s and sold it as “Antique Red.” Please let me know the results of your search & your findings. Good luck!

Well,

I ordered Organic Vermilion (“now, with ORGANIC vermillion!”) from Daniel Smith, and Venetian Red (“now, made from REAL Venetians!” ok, just kidding about that part…) from Daniel Smith. I tapped them out today against Pantone Warm Red (gans polyacrylic) and took a photo.

Some thoughts:

At $44/lb for real vermilion ink, the pantone warm red is such a close match that it is difficult to see a reason to buy vermilion.

The vermilion is one shade more orange, almost imperceptible, but there. I guess if you really wanted to split hairs, Pantone 172 would be the nearest match to true vermilion if you want to pay for custom mix.

Venetian red is very brick red/brown. Pretty, but doesn’t look like anything in the old printing samples that I have. I can see uses for it though, and it is about half the price of Vermilion.

A picture is attached. Tapped out on natural white paper, taken in the afternoon sunlight.

Best,

Alan

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