Dr. Abraham Jobe’s medical report is a book of stories and encounters he had while practicing medicine and living on the Cherokee reserve. This record book is composed of a pressboard cover made from fiber, a charcoal colored cloth shellacked to the board, three hundred pages of linen paper that have since yellowed, and is held together with Coptic binding. He wrote this memoir with a dip pen from 1840 using alizarine ink. Although the book its self would’ve been mass produced as a blank ledger it is classified as an original item and has many unique pieces making up its content.

The first step to making a ledger such as Dr. Jobe’s is the paper. In the mid-1800th century paper was made in a mill and was constructed out of recycled linen …show more content…
Jobe. He used a dip pen with alizarine ink to transcribe his medical experiences. In 1822 an English inventor by the name of John Mitchell created the steel tip dip pens. A dip pen is a writing tool that consists of 2 parts: a metal point or “nib” and a handle that hold the nib. This type of pen doesn’t hold ink within the handle, but the slits in the nib hold small amounts of ink for witting. Since the pen doesn’t hold ink inside itself, one must dip the pen ink in an inkwell every so often to gather more ink. An inkwell is a small jar or container often made of glass, porcelain, silver, brass, or pewter, and used for holding ink. The ink most commonly used around this time period was called alizarine ink which come in both black and blue, Dr. Jobe used this ink in its black form. A few years later an English inventor named James Perry copied Mitchells idea and sought to make it better, Perry thought he could make a more flexible steel point by cutting a center hole at the top as well as two flits on the left and right side of the nib. This allowed the pen to be used longer in writing but it also caused some issues with ink stains on papers if the writer used too much pressure when writing causing the ink to spill out onto the page, Dr. Jobe has some of these stains on his book from using Perry’s style of dip