# The Bluestocking

> The Bluestocking is the signature stocking of Seamiotics, a sheer fountain-pen blue that evokes writing without ever depicting it.

**Canon.** This entry is written from inside the CharliVerse, so its people and companies are fictional. Behind the scenes says what is real.

**The Bluestocking** is the signature of [Seamiotics](https://charli.info/charlipedia/seamiotics/), every seam means something, and the proof of its method: here the colour is the concept.

A sheer fountain-pen blue, with the back seam, heel and reinforced toe in a richer ink blue, the colour ink becomes where it pools and dries. A stocking that evokes writing without ever depicting it: literate, composed, unmistakable to those who notice the ink. In Plain, the fountain-pen blue leg keeps its ink-blue heel and toe, and loses only the seam.

## Where the word came from

The Blue Stockings Society met in London from the 1750s, around Elizabeth Montagu and Elizabeth Vesey, and took its name from a garment. Benjamin Stillingfleet came in everyday blue worsted rather than formal black silk, and the informality became the badge. The word that would later mean an unfeminine woman began as a man's cheap wool stocking.

Within a century it had curdled. A bluestocking was no longer good company but a woman whose cleverness had cost her something. The house returns the word to the object.

The Bluestocking is the seed the rest of the imprint grew from. [The Signatures](https://charli.info/charlipedia/the-signatures/) are its descendants, and [The Black Silk](https://charli.info/charlipedia/the-black-silk/) is the garment it was defined against.

## Behind the scenes

The Bluestocking is described in the Seamiotics Bible, version 1.4. The Blue Stockings Society, Montagu, Vesey and Stillingfleet are real history.