Transcript / LoLT: An Absinthe Caper and Two New Books — 01 November 2024

This is a transcription of LoLT: An Absinthe Caper and Two New Books — 01 November 2024

[cheerful music]

Melissa: Coming up, a titillating tale of the green muse.

David: The creative power of notebooks.

Melissa: Plus, our distraction of the week. I’m Mel.

David: I’m Dave. This is the library of lost time.

Melissa: We’ve got a special guest today! His name is Evan Rail — and he’s one of our neighbors here in Prague. He also happens to be a fantastic travel writer and author of the new book ‘The Absinthe Forger: A True Story of Deception, Betrayal, and the World’s Most Dangerous Spirit.’

Melissa: I’m not much of a wine or beer drinker, but give me a tiny glass of something bitter — that’s maybe a vivid color — and I’m all about it. Bright red Campari. Neon orange Aperol. Lovely, lurid green absinthe.

Melissa: For the uninitiated, let’s talk about absinthe. It’s an herbal spirit that’s very anise-forward. In addition to that licorice flavor, it’s got sweet fennel, and sometimes, an herb named Melissa, which is also called lemon balm. But the ingredient that gives absinthe its slutty reputation is wormwood.

Melissa: Thanks to artists and writers drinking it — and maybe having hallucinations — it got the nickname the green muse or the green fairy. Nineteenth century bohemians like Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent Van Gogh, Edouard Manet, Oscar Wilde, and Ernest Hemingway cranked up their creativity by drinking absinthe.

Melissa: Modern science says wormwood will not cause hallucinations, but its notoriety persists — absinthe made with wormwood was banned for about 100 years, starting in the early 1900s.

Melissa: I think we all know that forbidding something fun only makes it more enticing. And that’s where Evan Rail’s new book comes in.

Melissa: His book ‘The Absinthe Forger’ is nonfiction that reads like a thriller. It’s a true crime story about a con artist who sold fake pre-1915 absinthe to fans in the absinthe underground.

Melissa: Absinthe underground — name of our new punk band. So… this book takes you into the absinthe underground and the quest for vintage bottles of the illicit green fairy. There’s forgery and chicanery and amateur sleuths. It’s the kind of reading experience that makes you want to use the word romp.

Melissa: It will also make you yearn to time travel back to belle epoque Paris or Prague to sip some absinthe yourself. Listen to this and tell me you don’t want a pretty little glass of it right now:

‘There was something different about historic absinthe, beyond its age, beyond the fact that you were aware, while drinking it, that this very spirit might have been drunk by Charles Baudelaire or Oscar Wilde, that this very bottle might have been held to the frilly breast of a can-can girl at the Moulin Rouge or touched by the hand of Gauguin. Beyond the frisson of their time-shifting possibilities, the old absinthes simply tasted different — oxidized a bit, of course, hinting of old cardboard or a hot, stuffy room, but shifted along the flavor spectrum in other ways, too. Even the best new absinthes seemed to be missing something at the center, an obvious hole where their hearts should be.’

Melissa: The narrative unravels mysteries within mysteries as Evan delves into the history of absinthe, the forger’s story and the absinthe connoisseurs who unmasked him. Along the way, Evan meets the new distillers around Europe who are making modern absinthe, and he’s a delightful traveling companion.

Melissa: Even though this story is about a con artist, it’s also about embracing the romantic and inviting a magic into our lives. That feeling of sitting in a dim bar, sipping something a little bit dangerous, and musing about the world. The book is ‘The Absinthe Forger’ by Evan Rail.

David: I’m a visual thinker. And I like writing things down. For me, that means that I have six different notebooks on my desk right now. I’ve got my journal, I’ve got a notebook for thinking about new things, I’ve got a sketchbook, I’ve got a notebook for a writing project that I’m doing, I’ve got a notebook for a game that I’m playing, I’ve got a notebook for keeping track of books I’ve read. I’ve probably got another twenty mostly full notebooks in the apartment – they’re a trail of thoughts and ideas that lead back over the last decade or so.

David: Notebooks are a thing for me. I write bits down so I don’t have to think about them. When I think about them, I can see all the bits together on a page.

David: That is why when a new book came across my computer screen, I was delighted. The book is called ‘The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper’ by Roland Allen.

David: This is an exploration of notebooks. The introduction starts with the story behind the Moleskin. From there, we plunge back into history to 1000 BCE. Chapter 1 starts:

‘The oldest item that looks to modern eyes like a notebook sits in a display case in a castle in a Turkish city, thousands of years ago a thriving commercial and intellectul hub and now an equally busy holiday resort. In exemplary displays, the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology shows off items recovered from the bottom of the Mediterranean. The Ulu Burun shipwreck is one of its glories, and its gallery dedicates a display case to a small wood-and-ivory item: a hinged writing tablet which, when folded shut, would sit nicely on the palm of your hand.’

David: From there, we’re off on the history of notebooks and the people who’ve used them. We visit Leonardo, Chaucer, Magellan, and Darwin. Agatha Christie preferred school essay books for her notes. Allen writes about the rise of travel journals and author’s notebooks. We get into bullet journals and police notebooks. Most of this is talked about around a good story or two. There are tons of illustrations and photos.

David: If, like me, you’re fond of a nice notebook, and curious about what others have done with theirs, this is a great read. It’s ‘The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper’ by Roland Allen, and it’s out now.

David: And now, our Distraction of the Week.

David: We’re talking with Evan Rail Evans, the author of ‘The Absinthe Forger: A True Story of Deception, Betrayal, and the World’s Most Dangerous Spirit.’ It’s the book that Mel just told you all about. Evan, thanks so much for being here.

Evan: Oh, thanks for having me on.

David: So I understand you have a Distraction of the Week for us.

Evan: Yeah, it’s been my distraction of the year. I got into fountain pens originally accidentally. I was traveling across France, and I tried to. I needed to buy a pen and a postcard to mail a note to a friend back home. And the pen was a fountain pen, which I didn’t realize when I bought it. This is about 30 years ago, I guess, I was in college still, and I’ve had that fountain pen since then. And when I when I had a nice publication earlier in my career, a few years after that, a few years after college, I bought a fountain pen and then I just bought another one when I turned in the manuscript for ‘The Absinthe Forger.’

David: Right on. So this is sort of a gift you give yourself when a major milestone happens?

Evan: Yeah, it’s a gift I give myself. Or it’s an accident that happens when I don’t speak French well enough to ask for the correct type of pen in a stationery store in the town of Nancy in 1994. But yeah, no, I have a few of them. And I know that people really obsess about fountain pens, and they get really into the pens, but what’s been more interesting for me are the inks. So with fountain pens, you can select different types of ink to to fill each pen with. And you can have different colors, and they have different viscosity and other characteristics. And for me, the real fun this year has been discovering this world of fountain pen inks and getting into them and sort of realizing that each pen and each ink has a character of its own, a sort of personality of its own. And sometimes I reach for a certain pen, and I know what I’m about to write. And I say, no, actually, I want this other one. And it’s actually the words themselves that are coming out or the ideas or whatever it is I’m working on, have a character of their own that seems to match up with the writing utensil.

David: So let’s get into this. What kind of what kind of fountain pens do you own? What are the what are the brand names?

Evan: Oh, they’re they’re pretty modest. I mean, fountain pens are obviously often quite expensive, and I just have really cheap ones because I’m a not a collector so much as a writer. I use them to make notes and make lists and everything. All of the notes that I made for my book was all written out with fountain pens. But I have a few here and a few inks that really speak to me, and the inks that I’ve been focusing on are mostly produced in Europe. Interestingly, we live here in Central Europe. There are quite a few that come from Germany. There’s a famous brand Pelikan makes pens, Pelikan pens, but there are these really obscure ink makers and one is from effectively just up the road in Leipzig. It’s called Rohrer and Klingner. Rohrer and Klingner has been making inks for, I don’t know, 200 years or something. And their branding is, is as if they haven’t really updated them in the past 50 years. So they’re quite out of date, charmingly out of date. Charmingly not trendy, and they make wonderful inks with really good character. Right now I have a couple of pens that are filled with Rohrer and Klingner inks, and one of them is this this wonderful green that’s called Alt-Goldgrün — old gold green. And it’s an ink that goes between gold or yellow to a sort of deep forest green. Not, not not a bright green, but a really a deep one. And there’s kind of nice overtones of shading and little touches that when you when you write with it, you might get both tones in the same word or the same letter.

Melissa: That sounds so cool.

Evan: Yeah.

David: What kind of things do you use the gold green ink for?

Evan: Oh, I use that for journaling lately. Okay. Yeah. So I write a journal, uh, to keep myself honest, to keep to to touch base with myself. So to, to sort of keep track of the people I used to be keeping. Stay in touch with them.

David: That’s a really nice way to put that.

Evan: Yeah, it keeps me. I feel like it keeps me on track and keeps me honest about what my goals are for the year, and it’s really easy to forget if I don’t write them down. And where I’m going and how I’m going through my life, interacting with the people who matter most to me, my family and my friends. So I keep a journal and that gold green ink is in a really nice little pen, a German pen, a Kaweco Sport. And it’s a pen I bought even recently. I was in France, I was back in Paris and I went to a little pen shop and I bought this little pen, this Kaweco Sport, and I have that ink in there. So that’s an ink I’m going to keep in that pen, I think, forever. Yeah. As my daily writer.

David: What other colors do you do you keep?

Evan: Well, one of the things that got me really interested in ink was that I accidentally bought some brown ink in a cartridge format 20 years ago, and they discontinued it. It was Parker Quink, which is Parker’s ink cartridge format or ink brand, and it was in a cartridge. Then they stopped making this brown ink in cartridges. So I’ve started — I’ve been searching like someone trying to recover past pleasures or past memories. I’ve been looking for a brown ink. The one brown ink that speaks to me. That seems like the right brown ink for this specific Parker pen that I have that I bought 25 years ago.

David: You’ve got ink nostalgia.

Evan: I have an ink nostalgia. Yeah. And I really wanted to find a brown ink, and I didn’t find an exact match. But there’s a wonderful ink from a French producer called Herbin. Been making ink for another 250 years or so, and it’s called Lyddite. It means literally, tea dregs or dregs from the T, like the the stuff that’s in the bottom of the teacup when you finish your glass.

Melissa: The names are so cool. I had no idea.

Evan: They are poetic, aren’t they? Yeah. The names are very poetic. Yeah, they sometimes I don’t even know what they mean. There’s an ink here. A really wonderful deep purple called Solferino, which I will have to look up what that means. And, and then, of course, the one that gets used the most in this house is probably Writer’s Blood.

Melissa: Oh, nice. So I have a final question for you. Will you be signing your absinthe book with the green ink?

Evan: Yes. Um, but it’s actually a different green ink that I plan to use now. Oh, there was an ink that came out a couple of years ago, and I’ve been able I’ve been lucky enough to use it. It’s called Bloody Absinthe. But it’s not the right. It’s a lovely name. And again, that poetry of the name, and it is a green ink with red overtones and it’s neat, but it’s not quite the ink that I wanted. And I’ll be using a similar ink, but a different one, I think, which is called Aurora Borealis. And it’s also by Diamine. It’s an English producer. It’s a greenish reddish ink that has overtones and just weird highlights that come through. And I’ll be using that ink to sign books when I’m lucky enough to do that.

Melissa: Visit strongsenseofplace.com/library for more on the books we talked about today and links to fuel your own pen and ink obsession.

David: Thanks for joining us on the library of last time. Remember to visit your local library and your independent bookstore to lose some time yourself.

Melissa: Stay curious. We’ll talk to you soon.

[cheerful music]

Top image courtesy of Timon Studler/Unsplash.