Why is it that the standard color of ink in printed materials, books, newspapers etc. is overwhelmingly black, whereas the color of ink used for pens is mostly blue (or at least has a very high proportion of blue)? Is this due to some difference in types of ink?
I can’t exactly answer your Q, but perhaps if a pen expert chimes in we can piece together a reasonable explanation.
As far as printing ink goes, black has been the color of choice since time immemorial. For two happy reasons, I suspect: 1. It provides high contrast (read: readability) on the page, and 2. It’s cheap to make – for centuries lamp black, plus a few other simple ingedients like linseed oil, was all you needed.
It’s only been a little over a century since multi-color printing became common/cost effective. It was even more recent that four-color (“process color”) printing was technologically possible.
HIJACK: BTW, what’s really remarkable is how effective two-color printing – using black + red (real red, not magenta) – was. It could create very convincing flesh tones. Some early Coca Cola ads and Norman Rockwell SEP covers, among other things, were printed this way, and you’d swear they were printed in four-color if you didn’t know better.
I posit that one of the reasons blue has become popular is to tell if handwriting is original or a photocopy. If you ever buy a house, with all its commensurate paper work, the mortgage people insist that you sign the originals with a blue pen.
The other theory is that blue is just so dang purty.
This doesn’t really answer the original post, but over the past few years I’ve noticed most ball-point pens (particularly the ones you get as premimums at PC expos, job fairs, etc.) now use black ink. It’s becoming harder to find blue pens (well, it’s not all that hard - there’s multitudes of blue pens around, but the ratio has lessened significantly). Personally this is one megatrend I endorse, as I prefer the way black ink looks.
Another advantage blue ink has for handwritten documents is that different pens have different colors of blue. So if you want to alter the document you not only have to forge the handwriting, you have to match the ink color as well.