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I hate pencils.
That scritch on the paper grates on my nerves, and I loathe the forced humility of using one to do a crossword puzzle. A futile rebel, I do mine in ink and make a mess crossing out bad guesses, just to prove…something. No doubt this traces back to the trauma of grade school (what does not?), with that Iowa Basics exam for which we had to have two sharpened No.2 pencils or face the humiliation of a tsk-ing teacher handing us a spare from the jar she kept for the deplorables. I hated the specificity of that terror. And I hate the ick of erasure, with its crumbs and failures to complete. And I hate that garish yellow, and the shudder of biting on the metal ferrule when stuck, and the way the eraser gets mucky and makes a mistake even worse. Pencils remind me of rulebound reading rooms and archives whose curators clearly have not had sex in years. Or of scoring in competitive anything. And whose handwriting ever looked better in pencil? Who uses a pencil to write love notes (I suppose some should) or to sign interesting legal documents?
You cannot trust a pencil.
We think of Dickensian urchins selling them on streetcorners, yet they can cost more than couture. And though we call them lead, there is not a whiff of lead inside them. And while—I could go on. Yet I have to admit a grudging fascination when I read: “The pencil—an interior cylinder of baked graphite and clay, all housed in a wood case—creates as it is being destroyed.”
The observation is Carol Beggy’s in Pencil, part of the Object Lessons series curated by WashU’s Ian Bogost and Christopher Schaberg. Beggy collects pencils, and she works hard to convince haters like me. “The pencil works better than the pen,” she insists, “despite (or maybe because of) its impermanence.” Yes, yes, I know the talking points. A pencil can write upside down (though I have never needed to do so), and in cold, and the graphite does not bleed in rain, and if a pencil snaps in two, well look at that, you now have two pencils.
I will grant her a pencil’s practicality, and I do like its simplicity and, even if faux, its humility. Pencils lend themselves to wry observation. The genius physicist Richard Feynman found it amazing “how many people even today use a computer to do something you can do with a pencil and paper in less time.” And the inimitable Dorothy Parker weighed in: “There’s life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.”
Somehow I suspect Ms. Parker of preferring fountain pens, but I respect writers like Mary Oliver, who needed only “a place apart—to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.” Steinbeck guarded his pencils, too—his poodle probably stole them—and Hemingway was downright cultish about them, always keeping two sharpened to use in blue-backed notebooks while inhaling the fragrance of a café crème.
“I have always been a pencil,” Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec announced enigmatically. Tempted to ask AI what he meant, I imagine his response to such gaucherie and get hold of myself. But I suspect self-deprecation.
More fulsome praise came from William Ecenbarger in the Philadelphia Inquirer: he called the pencil “the most useful, least appreciated, most stolen article in the world.” It has certainly made its cultural mark: we “pencil” somebody in, wear “pencil skirts” if we dare, mock boring clerical workers as “pencil pushers.” We all know the crunchy grind of an old-fashioned sharpener, not to mention that scratchy friction I despise and Beggy calls “a subtle sound.” Maybe I need to fork over some cash for the famous Blackwing, said to be smooth as silk. “Half the Pressure, Twice the Speed.”
Eulogizing Stephen Sondheim, Lin-Manuel Miranda told us he used a Blackwing 602 to write his songs. Faber Eberhardt stopped making them but California Cedar Products has picked up the mantle. Blackwings have a flattened ferrule (that metal band) so they will not roll recklessly off a piano or music stand, and their eraser is rectangular and replaceable. The mystique is undeniable: their users have included Walt Disney, Motown founder Quincy Jones, Vladimir Nabokov, Truman Capote, Eugene O’Neill, E.B. White, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copeland, Oscar de la Renta, and animator Chuck Jones, creator of Looney Tunes, who once remarked, “An animator is an actor with”—wait for it—“a pencil.”
Where, and how, was the pencil born? “Most modern histories set the pencil’s birth to the early sixteenth century in Keswick, Cumbria, in the United Kingdom,” natch, “when a ‘violent storm’ knocked down a stand of trees and uprooted a deposit of pure graphite.” Beggy also tells us that in the latter part of the nineteenth century, quality pencils were unpainted. Then the Czech pencil maker Koh-i-Noor picked yellow to signal, unwoke, its use of Chinese graphite. In the twentieth century, though, yellow pencils were assumed to be made in the United States, and they nearly always had an eraser attached. I guess we know, deep down, how often we screw up.
Beggy has fun describing other collectors, especially the connoisseurs who shun an eraser because it will shift the weight, or who resent six-sided pencils whose facets have oversharp edges. Every once in a while, in the sea of interesting facts, she catches you off guard with something profound. “Once sharpened,” she writes, “a pencil is constantly changing.”
It is shorter now, yet its writing grows darker, clearer, and sharper, then begins to fade again…. Page by page, my sympathy grows. Beggy has brought me round. I am now willing to heed the advice of graphic artist Lou Brooks:
“Don’t underestimate the pencil.”
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
