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Herbin
is a French brand founded in Paris in 1670, originally
producing sealing wax. The founder M. Herbin traveled
around the world as a sailor, and started a business
using the formulas for sealing he gathered in India.
Thirty
years later the first inks were produced by Herbin in
their store, in the "Latin Quarter" of Paris,
being called the "the jewel of inks" ("Perle
des Encres" , which is still their current name
for their black fountain pen ink!).
Later
in the 19th century Herbin added stationary, both for
office and school to their product - line.
Herbin
is THE French ink brand, still today available in most
stationary stores around France.
Beside
many colorful fountain pen inks, Herbin offers a wide
variety of special inks as scented inks, India inks
and drawing inks, metal - flake inks (not suitable for
fountain pens).
Beside
inks Herbin today also produces a number of "traditional"
products as sealing wax, ink bottles, dipping pens and
nibs and even bamboo pens with matching papyrus sets.
The
fountain pen inks are said to be "vegetable"
based (which doesn't say anything about if those inks
are less harmful than others, in my opinion).
Most
inks are on the thinner side, appearing slightly washed
out in some cases. This problem is eliminated when using
the bottled ink, because they get thicker due to evaporation
faster than you might like! Thicker ink is prone to
dry very slow, so adding some distilled water will get
rid of this problem.
Herbin
inks are pretty expensive compared to other brands,
but I haven't had any serious problem with them in any
pens, they flow very well and the variety of different
colors is exceptional.
The
only let down might be the above mentioned washed out
look of some colors, but again, I don't want to argueabout
color itself, leaving this to the personal taste of
everybody for themselves.
This
is Part I of a chart of Herbin colors from cartridges,
produced by Michael Richter. The images were scanned
in at a resolution of 300dpi and have been reproduced
here as faithfully as possible to the original. The
chart has been broken into several separate images to
facilitate downloading, please be patient, images of
this size take time to load.
It
is very difficult to reproduce accurate colors on the
web; unless you have calibrated your monitor you will
only see a representation of the actual color.
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