Leonardo da Vinci, JS Bach and the US constitution all owe a considerable debt to the tiny wasp I accidentally entombed behind glass. I found the unlucky creature at the bottom of a sweetie jar that I had filled with cocoa-coloured balls that looked like Maltesers but were as hard as walnut shells.
I began picking the oak marble galls out, rolling each smooth sphere in the palm of my hand. Some had been punctured by a single hole, others riddled like a pepperpot, a sign of multiple occupancy. Their inhabitants had survived an infancy in darkness to drill their way out, making a round window into the autumn light long before I plucked these strange fruits towards the end of winter. All except this single shrivelled wasp that had waited too late and emerged only to be trapped under a glass sky.
I sawed one of the single-tenancy galls in half through its exit hole. Though the wasp larva had eaten away a tunnel of fibrous innards, the cut cross-section showed it had consumed less than a fifth of the contents. Then I ground the rest of the galls to dust and began to follow a process of human alchemy that is more than 1,300 years old.
Our ancestors understood the properties of oak tannins when they stained their hands felling and shaping wood. But what made them learn that such dyes became concentrated in galls, the wound-like tissue that the tree produces to envelop an invading organism and isolate it from its host? What possessed our ancestors to pound marble galls into powder, steep them in water as a brown soupy sludge, then add rusty iron and gum arabic from acacia trees, to turn the liquid so black it was almost blue?
For more than a thousand years, gall ink was the go-to permanent marker for every document of note – Leonardo’s sketches, the Brandenburg Concertos and America’s founding fathers promising “the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”. I dipped my nib in and wrote using a product that mixed nature’s ingenuity with the human capacity for invention.
• Derek Niemann used the ink recipe on the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies website.
