Elogium Stilophori. Part 1.

September 24, 2013

This elogium, or praise, has been written and illustrated in August and September 2013. I mainly used a Montblanc Hemingway fountain pen fitted with an EF nib and filled with Montblanc Racing Green. Fortunately, less than two fills were enough to do all the texts and the drawings, as this is my last bottle of Racing Green and I will miss it when the bottle will eventually become empty. I particularly like the "almost black", warm effect of this ink. The first words of each page were written with Montblanc Irish Green ink and a Montblanc Dumas (father signature) fountain pen, fitted with a medium nib transformed into a beautiful, slightly oblique formal italic by Michael Masuyama (Mike It Work).

Finally, the few notes in colour — the body of the Hemingway and the Golden Dragon — were done with Montblanc Ink of Joy (more red) and Montblanc Gandhi (a paler nuance of orange), dipping the EF nib of a Meisterstück 149, circa 1994.

The entire story has been composed on a handmade refill for the regular size Midori Traveler notebook, made with 90 gr m2 Kimberly Tradition vergata paper, in ivory color. The page layout is based on the golden proportion, the "sectio aurea" that represented the main canon of page construction for most of the books produced from the middle of the sixteenth century until the late eighteenth century. The "divina proportio" of the golden ratio is independent from the size and relative shape of the support, and can be adopted to define the margins and type areas of any leaf size, according to the following model:

And now, please move to part 2, where the story begins.