Desk note
A damp sheet in March.
· the counter
March in Iowa City is not one weather. It freezes overnight, the brick goes wet by noon, and fog off the Iowa River hangs on Clinton until the wind picks up. Paper notices before people do. So does gum. So does ink, a few minutes later, when someone tries a familiar bottle on a sheet that spent the morning too near the door.
The sheet in question was 104 gsm, 100% cotton, letter, from a quire we had pulled for a count and then not wrapped because the count was interrupted. It sat on the desk through a wet lunch hour. Coats came in. The door stood open longer than it should have. By two o’clock the sheet was not cockled the way a July sheet cockles in the sun. It was limp, cooler than the stack in the drawer, and slightly larger across the grain if you bothered to lay a dry sheet on top of it. We bothered. The difference was small and obvious.
The customer wanted the blue-black dye she has bought before. On a dry sheet from the drawer the line was the line she knows: a clean edge on the internal sizing, no halo. On the limp sheet the same fill, same nib, same hand, grew a soft fringe. She said the bottle had turned. The bottle had been in the cupboard since January, cap tight, never frozen, never watered. We dipped the shop’s glass pen in a fresh drop and wrote on a sheet that had not seen the door. The fringe was gone. The damp sheet was the variable. Dye ink is mostly water. Cotton that has already taken up water from fog has less room to keep the stroke where the nib put it. Gelatin-sized 118 gsm resists this longer than the 104 gsm. It does not resist it forever. A sheet left in a puddle of wet air will feather iron gall too, and the feather then darkens as the gall oxidizes, which looks like a worse fault than it is.
We wrapped her quire from the dry drawer and set the limp sheet aside to go under a board, not into a sale. She took the bottle she already trusted. That was the correct sale.
The envelopes failed on the same week, for the same water, in a different place. Dextrin gum on a flap is glue that stays quiet until it meets moisture. We had a box of #10, 100% cotton, count of 25, open so a flap could be shown. By Saturday twelve flaps had tacked onto the envelope beneath. Separating them scuffed the gum. The box was sold as a short count at the reduced ticket, and the rule since then is dull and firm: the lid goes back on. One envelope may come out. The rest stay in the dark of the box. A self-seal flap has its own version of this. The strips grab each other in a coat pocket when the day warms after a cold start. We keep one such box, and we say what it will do.
If a flap welds itself in your desk during a week like this, slide a thin bone folder under it. Do not steam the pile. Steam swells every sheet and wakes every flap you had hoped to save. If a letter feathers and you are sure the nib is the same nib, put the sheet against your cheek. Damp cotton feels cool and a little slack. Dry cotton from a heated room ticks. The bottle is the last thing to blame, not the first.
Square envelopes are a postage question we are not interested in adding to a wet week. We do not stock them. Sizes we do stock, and which sheet they belong to, are on the envelope page. The July version of too much water in the fiber, driven by sun rather than fog, is west light and a cockled quire.