All About Pencils

And I make national news with the story

One of the more exciting days of the year will soon be upon us: March 30th. I'd ask you to guess, but I am sure you know the answer. Yes, you are correct. It is National Pencil Day, and it arrives not too soon.

I learned about the day through my writing. Read along first, and then I’ll tell you how.

I enjoyed sharpening pencils in elementary school. No, it wasn’t because I liked cranking the hand-powered pencil sharpener. No, it wasn’t because I wanted a break from the monotony of schoolwork. No, it wasn’t because I was the teacher's pet, though I liked that part. Simply put, I loved using a sharp pencil.

I emptied the shavings into the trash bucket at the teacher’s desk. She looked and smiled. That’s a good thing. Ahhhh . . .

I love the smell of a pencil. I hold it to my nose when I break from writing. Its woody scent of cedar and varnish marries sweetly with the sooty smell of lead and paint. You can move along the length of the pencil to the ferrule, that crimped metal ring that holds the eraser, to capture the familiar, clean smell of rubber.

Sharpening a pencil nowadays? I like the whirl of the automatic sharpener as I twirl the pencil to even the cut. My grandchildren were so fascinated with the automatic that they honed my pencils to the nib. “Stop that! It’s sharp enough. And be careful of the point.”

When I’m in a sharpening pinch, I use a miniature handheld device like the one in my old pencil box.

I love to hold a pencil. No matter how I grasp it, my fingers rest predictably in the perfect place on the hexagonally ribbed surfaces.

You can do stuff with a pencil, like tap it on the desk when you’re looking for the right word. Two are perfect drumsticks for tapping out rhythms Basie like . . . rattly tap, tap. You can use the point or the eraser to scratch your itchy head (it’s hard to stop), run it along the radiator, or chew on it.

And then there is always the writing. I love the number two pencil; its lead is just soft enough for carving clear, crisp, legible words.

The modern pencil was invented in 1795 by Nicholas-Jacques Conte, a scientist in Napoleon Bonaparte’s army. The material he used was a form of pure carbon called graphite, discovered in Bavaria at the start of the fifteenth century.

Initially, the black lead was called plumbago (hence ‘plumbers’ who repair lead water pipes). The word graphite is from the Greek graphein, meaning to write. The word pencil is from the Latin pencillus, little tail, to describe the small ink brushes used for writing in the Middle Ages.

Check the pencil’s marking: H stands for hard; B stands for black; HB hard black. I like soft lead. The hardness of the graphite core is marked with a number. The higher the number, the harder the core and the lighter the mark left on the paper. I love a dark mark when I write, so I use a number 2 pencil.

The Ticonderoga brand is the Dixon Ticonderoga Company, named after Joseph Dixon, who experimented with various uses for graphite found on his father’s sailing vessels. He mixed the mineral with clay and water, rolled it into strips, and baked it in his mother’s oven. He then pressed the mixture into grooved cedar wood, and the first Dixon pencil was created.

And my pencils must have an eraser that does not dry out.

The call came out of the blue from Newsy, the newsgroup that describes itself as a popular source for “concise, unbiased video news and analysis covering the top stories from around the world.”

I was surprised to learn of its substantial number of subscribers. Well, it turns out that meaningful, uncontroversial, human-interest conversations are part of the mix. I liked that since I would be involved in something uncontroversial.

When the call came, I hesitated, irritated that this might be another annoying, unwelcome, unsolicited crank-spammer.

Well, I was wrong. This seemed genuine. “We would like you to be on our news fun spot.”

“News spot? Really? Which and why?”

“Tomorrow is National Pencil Day, and we read your column about pencils in GoLocalProv.” That did it. I was hooked, but I needed more preparation because it had been a while since I had written the piece and done the homework. I made an online tune-up, finding some stuff that I had not found earlier or did not have enough room for in the column.

For example:

Did you know that you can buy a pre-chewed pencil? Or that people use the eraser on the pencil to stick sewing needles? That the ‘lead’ is a mixture of graphite and clay, not lead? And, on average, a pencil can be sharpened seventeen times, draw a line 35 miles long, and write approximately 45,000 words. Wow! No wonder Hemingway and Steinbeck used pencils to draft their novels.

Over fourteen billion pencils are manufactured worldwide annually, enough to circle the earth more than forty times.

Pencils can write in zero gravity and are used on space missions by astronauts. They can also write underwater!

More fun chatting with the newscasters. We talked about how the return-to-school energy seemed to skyrocket at the end of summer when we had enough vacation. It was time to get our pencil box restocked. With what? Why pencils, a few crayons, erasers, a hand-held sharpener, a small ruler, all fitting neatly in a firm cardboard box that folded over twice and snapped shut with a pop.

And we laughed over the story of how, on occasion, we were the teacher’s pet and allowed to sharpen pencils for the class.

I recently bought ten boxes of pencils with twelve in each box. The newsies laughed. “Well, I use them every day to write in my journals. I keep them sharp. They feel good. They also make a great gift.

Here is my National TV Debut

Ahhh, wooden pencils. Painted in gold, they look regal.

There are a few pencil songs and cartoons, none of which I will visit.

The biggest virtue of a wooden pencil is that, well, it's not made out of plastic. It takes less energy to produce the raw pencil material, and over time, it will become a pile of shavings that will, hopefully, be composted.

The best pencils are made from genuine Incense Cedar, while quality budget pencils are made of Basswood or Poplar. Cedar is the most used.

2,000,000,000 is the estimated number of pencils used in the U.S. each year. This represents about 82,000 trees.

Graphite is expensive, but pencils are inexpensive because the graphite core called lead, though it contains no lead at all, is not high-grade pure graphite but a mixture of graphite powder with a clay binder. The wood encloses the graphite, and the yellow paint serves as the casing.

Pencils create marks by physical abrasion, leaving a trail of solid core material that adheres to a sheet of paper or another surface. Its grey or black marks, though easily erased, are resistant to moisture, most chemicals, ultraviolet radiation, and natural aging. Other types of pencil cores, such as charcoal, are primarily used for drawing and sketching.

The highest-priced pencil is the Limited Edition of the Graf von Faber-Castell Perfect Pencil, offered at $12,800. Only ten of these classic pencils were crafted with 240-year-old olive wood and 18-carat white gold and included a built-in eraser and sharpener. There are approximately five remaining in the world.

The Perfect Pencil Limited Edition White Gold Pencil, crafted of cedar and featuring diamonds and white gold, is the world’s most expensive today.

That’s quite enough, albeit only a modest amount of the considerable information about the pencil.

How about using the word pencil in some phrases?

For example . . . not the sharpest pencil in the box, pencil me in, pencil pusher, pencil whipped, pencil-necked. I’ll leave you to figure out the meanings of these phrases. I’ll also leave you to figure out the most commonly used pencil phrase not mentioned here.

Pencils are nearly perfect as they combine three essential functions in a single object, writing and correcting in a timeless design.

Ya gotta love ‘em.

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