Get The Point? Pencils Are Great
By Michele Bazan Reed | bazanreed@hotmail.com
“I’ll pencil you in.” We say it constantly, casually. Even in this day and age, when it most likely means we’ll enter it in the calendar app on our phone or write in pen on a calendar or marker on a whiteboard, it’s the phrase we use for a tentative appointment. And it just goes to show how central the pencil is to our lives.
Since we’re approaching National Pencil Day on March 30 — pencil it in on your calendar! — I thought I’d take up my pencil and compose an ode to that most basic of writing utensils.
As a professional writer, I tend to collect and cherish all the tools of my trade. I’ve written in this space before of my own love for fountain pens, typewriters and school supplies in general.
They’re all important to the creative process — and daily life tasks like greeting cards, sticky notes and grocery lists — but the pencil holds a special place in my heart. Maybe yours, too.
The pencil is every child’s first tool on the road to reading and writing. Remember those big, fat pencils we had in kindergarten? Or the triangular-shaped ones so our stubby little fingers could grasp them more easily?
They were there for us as we made our first scribbles of “art” or traced our first letters tentatively on those notebooks with three lines (dotted line in the middle). I remember grasping that pencil so tightly my fingers ached, which probably didn’t help my atrocious penmanship. I made copious use of the eraser and chewed my pencil so thoroughly, that it looked like my old lawn full of mole holes.
For all I abused it, I loved the pencil. It was the tool that allowed me to put what was in my head on paper to share with others. By third grade, I made a little newspaper, complete with cartoons in my primitive style of two little elephants, Bimbo and Bimbi.
All through our school years we used the pencil to sketch our creations in art class, compose essays in English and figure out sums in math. And when the point wore down, there was the welcome distraction of getting up out of our chairs to walk over to the pencil sharpener on the wall and crank away until the point was sharp again. Although I think there was a lot of sharpening being done to avoid getting called on or to meet up with our current crush who needed to restore their point.
We didn’t think about it at the time but we all had something in common with the likes of Vincent Van Gogh and John Steinbeck.
Steinbeck, the author of “The Grapes of Wrath,” could go through as many as 60 pencils a day and famously sharpened 24 Blackwings to begin each writing session. Ernest Hemingway reported on the Spanish Civil War and wrote novels like “The Sun Also Rises” using cedar pencils.
It is said that Abraham Lincoln wrote part of the Gettysburg Address in pencil and Ulysses S. Grant drew up battle plans with the wood and graphite utensils in the Civil War, when every soldier was issued a pencil in his kit.
Artists including Vincent Van Gogh, Albrecht Durer and Picasso sketched their creations in pencil.
Inventor Thomas Edison had a special pencil made, three inches long and extra thick and soft, which he kept in his shirt pocket to make notes when inspiration struck.
Henry David Thoreau and his father, John, owned the Thoreau Pencil Company. We can assume he took some of its wares into the woods to write “Walden.”
The modern pencil as we know it had its origins in a 1564 discovery of a large graphite deposit in England. Thinking it was lead, they called it “plumbago” and it became the source for the lead used in pencils in many countries. At first the sticks of graphite were wrapped with string to limit the mess, but users’ hands still came away black.
It wasn’t long before someone got the idea to encase the graphite in wood and the pencil as we know it came to be.
At first, folks just used bits of bread to rub away their mistakes. When a clergyman named Priestly discovered a gum from South America could be used as a “rubber,” the modern eraser was born.
And on March 30, 1858, Hymen L. Lipman received a patent for a pencil with an eraser affixed to one end. It’s that occasion that we celebrate with National Pencil Day.
So take a moment this March 30 to celebrate the humble pencil. Draw a sketch or write a story or poem. Give a pencil to a child or, better yet, donate a boxful to a school.
Enjoy looking at art created by a famous pencil user or read a story by Faulkner, Hemingway or Thoreau or any of the myriad other writers who used pencils to create their work.
Or just learn some facts about the pencil and share them with people you meet.
Did You Know?
• The average pencil can be sharpened about 17 times before it’s too short to sharpen again.
• The word pencil comes from the Latin pencillus, which means “little tail.” It refers to a tiny brush used for writing with ink in the Middle Ages.
• A typical pencil can make a mark 35 miles long and be used to write 45,000 to 50,000 words.
• About 15 billion pencils are used in the US each year, enough to stretch around the globe 62 times if they were laid end to end.
• Pencils can write in zero gravity and under water.
•In the late 19th century, American pencil makers sourced high quality graphite from China. Because Chinese royalty wore yellow, the pencils were painted yellow to signify their superior quality.
• In World War II, pencils were hollowed out and some of the lead was replaced with tiny maps and compasses, then smuggled into prisoner of war camps to help the inmates escape.