A number of years ago, we were staying at the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, MA when I saw a custom made pencil holder hanging on the wall.  It was filled with pencils advertising businesses, inns, etc.  I tried to buy it but when they refused to sell, I started my own collection.  I found a seamstress in the Berkshires who created two hanging pieces of fabric with narrow pencil width holding spaces (see above), and I began my collection.  As of today, I have 298 pencils from museums, universities, libraries, hotels, businesses, and random locations in my study in Cambridge.

For a pencil afficianado, Beggy’s book is a treasure.  It is part of a series called Object Lessons whose goal is to “achieve something very close to magic: the books take ordinary—even banal—objects and animate them with a rich history of invention, political struggle, science, and popular mythology. Filled with fascinating details and conveyed in sharp, accessible prose, the books make the everyday world come to life.”  This book is the 99th in the series which has featured slim volumes about nearly everything from A (Alarm) to W (Whale and Wine), and it’s a fun read.

Carol Beggy who worked as a journalist with the Boston Globe for 15 years and is the author of 10 books, has gathered more information about pencils than one would have guessed exists.  First used in the 12th C, the pencil has existed in its current form (a graphite column encased in a wooden holder topped with a metal ferrule and in many cases, an eraser) since the 1700’s.  The world turns out about 2 billion pencils/year, mostly cheap ones made in China though the quality pencils are made in the US, Germany, Czech Republic, Japan, India and Portugal. Pencils are ‘graded’ according to the hardness of the graphite from B (soft) to H (hard) and F(fine).

My favorite chapter of the book addresses those writers and artists who worked primarily with pencils, a list that includes Stephen Sondheim (Blackwings with their flat ferule and eraser are popular with songwriters and musicians because they don’t roll off the piano!), Vladimir Nabokov, Quincy Jones, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Eugene O’Neill, E. B. White, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland and on and on.

Beggy provides a rich bibliography as well as references to a 2015 documentary ‘No. 2, The Story of the Pencil’, Henry Petroski’s classic volume, “The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance” Knopf 1990, and web sites for the American Pencil Collectors Society (I’m not joking!) as well as 9 blogs which have pencils as their focus.  Go figure.

There’s a bit too much of ‘inside baseball’ with long discourses on Eberhard Faber vs Blackwing trivia, but overall, this is a delightful romp through pencil land.  I even have a lead on a terrific pencil and stationer in London called Present & Correct which I hope to visit in March.

Call me a nerd (and many do!), but I loved this book.  Check out the series Object Lessons.  If the volume on Pencils doesn’t do it for you, perhaps the ones on glitter, hyphens, or shipping containers will.