Vantablack absorbs 99.965% of incident light. We mention the figure not because it matters, but because the chase for it does. Every editorial ground that calls itself black is, in fact, an admission of how much light it returns. The admission is the only data point worth keeping.
From Mars to Outrenoir.
Outrenoir — Pierre Soulages’s term for the black that exceeds black — names not a pigment but a surface. Light catches the ridged impasto, breaks against the grain, and the eye reads the ridge as a second colour entirely. The pigment is unimportant. The decision to leave a furrow is everything. We mention this whenever we cut a plate.
Mars Black, the iron oxide that ships in every starter kit, is duller and more honest than its alternatives. It is opaque, it is forgiving, it is patient. We have never used it on a cover. We have used it on every proof.
A pigment is a promise to a surface. A surface is a promise to a hand. Editions are not made out of pigment. Editions are made out of the promises we keep when nobody is asked to inspect them.
The chemistry, briefly.
Carbon black is soot. Bone black is the burned residue of bone meal. Vantablack is an array of vertical carbon nanotubes that traps incoming light between its walls until the light is lost as heat. The nanotubes are not for sale. We mention them here so that no future reader believes we forgot.
On the press, every black is a different black. We pull a proof. We compare it to the last edition. We discard the proof. We pull again. The third pull is usually the keeper. We have never written that down until now.
A note on K100.
On screen, black is RGB 0, 0, 0. In a CMYK workflow, K100 is not black either — it is a single-channel proxy for it, and most presses overprint it with a 30% cyan rich-black plate to keep the surface from drifting toward grey under volume. Edition III is rich. Edition II was not. The difference is the press, not the paper.