The Higgins

In fact, not all ink smells funky. I was astonished to discover that the ink in this old bottle of Higgins reminds me of the ethereal vanilla milkshake breath of a breastfed infant. Our bottle probably was inherited from Ruthie Ginsberg, my husband's grandmother, an artist who taught children in her DC basement, who died of a heart attack far too young.

Maybe you too read that Charles M. Higgins himself bought the big blue house on 9th Street that now houses the family that runs Slope Music. I can't say I've ever been in, beyond the virtual plan the couple has loaded on their website. Higgins also brought Brooklyn the dark Minerva of Battle Hill, on whose shoulder I hope we are all lucky enough to see an owl perch someday. Even the Goddess, sightless in her left eye, needs a little help seeing in the dark.

So maybe the owl can tell us Higgin's formula for ink so as to determine the strange sweetness. I wonder if he added vanilla. From what I read India/Chinese ink may contain bone char, lampblack, hide glue, pitch, or petroleum products, as this excerpt from the wikipedia article mentions.

The Chinese had used India ink derived from pine soot prior to the 11th century AD, when the polymath official Shen Kuo (1031–1095) of the mid Song Dynasty became troubled by deforestation (due to the demands of charcoal for the iron industry) and desired making ink from a source other than pine soot. He believed that petroleum (which the Chinese called 'rock oil') was produced inexhaustibly within the earth and so decided to make an ink from the soot of burning petroleum, which the later pharmacologist Li Shizhen (1518–1593) wrote was as lustrous as lacquer and was superior to pine soot ink.