This is only slightly pencil related, and I thought twice about posting it. Still:
1) Thoreau made pencils.
2) Some of these surveys still have pencil marks on them. And who doesn’t enjoy a good chart of a woodlot?
3) Why not?
[Image, P. Used with permission.]
(Continued from Part 1.)
4) I’ve read about your extensive bullet pencil collection, with considerable jealousy. What attracts you to this type of pencil, and how did you build your collection?
First off, it’s the compact quality. I love having a tight little drawing tool in the front pocket at all times, and I’m here to tell ya, these little sonofabitches have saved my butt many a time…on airplanes, in meetings, in a pinch, wherever. I always keep one in the front, left pocket of my 501s.
I’ve kind of given up on erasers of any sort in these little guys, as the kind you’d score from a junk store or estate sale are old, old relics and the erasers are dried way up and dead. Rock hard, usually. So, there’s this certain model that didn’t come with an eraser, and just had a plastic tipped end. I collect these ferociously, with a good 20 or so hoarded away. Now, the classic type with the erasers, shit, I’ve got a couple hundred of those bad boys.
What I love about them the most, is how banal they were back in the day. Simple, cheap advertising tools given away at local businesses. Feed-n-seed joints, car lots, insurance agents, what have you. Just crappy little promo items that packed a real wallop. I’ve got a couple old salesman sample sets. Old and beat up, and a look into what it was like to have a guy sit down and say, “Here’s what we can do for your company.” So good.
I’ve built my collection junkin’ across America—scouring the dirtiest of estate sales, garage sales, junk stores, antique malls and the occasional eBay lot. You can score them in the Midwest pretty regularly, across the rustbelt and great plains. Farmers used these things. I guess a lot of them are collector’s items. I could care less. I use the things, and never pay more than eight bucks or so for them.
5) Despite the return of the famous Blackwing, pencils in America seem to be on the decline today. Models are canceled, and most companies have moved their production out of the USA. Can you comment on the current pencil offerings available in the United States in 2011?
I’m no authority on this stuff, so I’ll tread lightly here. I know this much, it’s harder and harder to make an American Made promo pencil. And, with good imprint applications that aren’t stock type crap. I was lucky enough to get a monster order in just before Christmas and man, love these things. Hex pencils, people!
6) The Field Notes pencil is downright gorgeous. With its round shape, lack of paint and green eraser, it’s obvious that a lot of thought went into it. Can you tell us a little about the design process and what made you choose its current form?
Like all Field Notes products, we started with the direction that the thing had to be natural at all costs. Finding the source with the green eraser was a happy accident. Plus, the cedar wood just smells so nice. Those things take a beating, just like our memo books! I have a pile of them all beat to shit, still kickin’ after a couple years on the scene. Those pencils WILL NOT disappoint.
7) Are there any upcoming pencil accouterments from DDC and/or Field Notes to which Comrades might look forward? Pencil clips? Bullet pencils? Brown sharpeners with black Futura print on them?
After an exhaustive search for the perfect pencil sharpener from existing sources, we gave up on that shit and started drawing up plans with a couple Midwestern Tool & Die manufacturers to craft the ultimate hand held sharpener unit. We’re still at the point of initial CAD drawings, blade strength options and ballistic grade metal sourcing. If we can pull these little buggers off, man, they are going to rule. Just you wait. They’ll be something to marvel at. And, get the job done for the ages!
We’ve got some leather stuff coming down the pipe for Field Notes made right here in Portland by our friends at Tanner Goods. Very, very excited about this project. And yes, there’s Futura Bold on these new items. You can take that one to the bank.
MANY MANY thanks to Aaron for helping to spread writing/noting/drawing joy, the world over!
[Images, A.D. Used with permission.]
Mr. Aaron Draplin, of Field Notes and design fame, was kind enough to do an interview with Pencil Revolution. Below is Part 1 (of 2) of his answers to some very pencil-specific questions.
1) Pencils are strongly represented in the DDC “longhand” series, and the Field Notes pencil seems to follow the eponymous notebooks in adventures all over the planet. What do you like about pencils so much?
There’s just something simple and soothing about them. I mean, I don’t want to get too existential about bonded lead or anything, but, hell, there’s just so much possibility in each one! It freaks me out. That little pencil…the tool aspect…is this little gateway to a million ideas. I think about that kind of stuff with each one I crack into. In a world where things are more and more compacted, complicated, sped up and digitized, a regular old wood pencil is always there for you. Never needing to be recharged, you know?
The more I think about it, the more pencils—on some weird level—represent “complete freedom.” Freedom from digital ubiquity and predictability. There something cool about how you feel human when using a pencil. That feeling goes away the back to guys shaping rocks into cutting tools and stuff, I’d reckon. Or, maybe only in my head!
I like feeling one with the paper. Like this odd sense of “get it down now, or it’ll be forever gone” fills my head and hands, and I just go to work. Impermanent. Graphite can be erased. Imperfect. My hands screw up all the time. Interesting. The lines vary and never come out quite like you expected them to. I hope I’m making sense, readers!
2) What are some of your favorite pencils? Vintage, current, perhaps a great individual find? What do you look for in a pencil?
Basically, anything that’s natural wood, and, hexagonal! Now, for the readers, who are undoubtedly “masters of the genre,” this might sound a little vague. Basically, anything that feels good in the hand. I usually go after softer leads. Just so I can sketch and keep shit freed up. Also, if the thing is “Made in the U.S.A.” that always send a little jolt up the wrist. And finally, there’s just something incredible about an old pencil that’s seen 60 years whip by. Never, ever throw out an old pencil. Respect yer elders, citizens!
To try and get brand-specific, I had a good run with a pack of pencils by Papermate called “American Naturals.” Unfinished wood, made in the States and hexagonal. Good feel to those little guys. Still using the last one of the litter.
3) What is your preferred way to sharpen a pencil? Blade-type-manual-sharpener, crank model, Bowie knife?
Forever, I’ve simply used my pocket knife to keep things sharp. I like the little pile of shavings it makes! I grew up with a wall mount Berol that hung over the stairs down to our basement. So there was this sense of floating when you’d lean around the wall, and hang on the pencil sharpener while sharpening. I haven’t thought of that one in a long time. Awesome. That’s what I remember.
In my junkin’ over the years, I’ve amassed a healthy collection of vintage pencil sharpeners. In fact, that’s one of the first things I look for when I enter an estate sale garage or basement workshop. And shit, I just pry that thing right off the wall and put it in my pile. Rescued! Even if I don’t use it, it’ll go to a buddy who needs one. The idea of some half-ass estate sale worker tearing it off and throwing it out just makes me sick to my stomach. So I always grab them!
Stay tuned this week for the second half of the interview, and MEGA thanks to Aaron for agreeing to do this!
[Images, A.D. Used with permission.]
This was in my bookmarks (for, ahem, lunchtime reading) on my office computer. As my contract is up at the end of the month, I’m cleaning it all out. This is an interesting article, though I can’t remember where/how I found it. If you sent it to me and I’ve forgotten, thank you!
“Who would have guessed the huge old stockyards that once dotted the Midwest would best be remembered in something as small and simple as a pencil?…
….Twedt also collects the bullet pencils, so-named because of their shape. Each came with a metal cover over the leaded end of the pencil, making the pencil look a bit like a bullet.
Most bullet pencils, like most other stockyard memorabilia, were handed out by consigners at the stockyards. The consigners would contract with the farmer to sell the livestock to one of the various area packers around the stockyards.”
Two weeks ago, Dan, Mr. PJ and I made pencil boxes. Which is to say, I gave dimensional suggestions, handed stuff to Dan while he worked the table saw, and then I helped glue. Awesome fun. These are sized for eraser-topped, American-style pencils. In my experience, most boxes are too short. The wood is reclaimed oak, and it’s beautiful. Mine has rusty nail holes in one side, and I think that I got the best one because of that.
(The pencils fit; they’re just propped up for the photo.)
We’re trying to convince Mr. PJ to make them and sell them on Etsy, since such a pencil box is not only rustically attractive, but will also last one’s natural life! If these make a debut, you’ll certainly hear it here first!
More photos to come. Mine’s full of carpenter’s pencils and assorted pencil gear.
I hope that Lauren doesn’t mind us stealing her photo, but I have to share this really cool website, wherein Lauren writes a letter a day in 2011. I was lucky enough to be on the receiving end last week, and, well, it’s just nice to get a letter in the mail these days — written in pencil, no less — addressed to you as a person and not a prospective client/customer.
What’s more, Lauren features lovely photos and letters on her blog, which we can all enjoy. Thanks very much to Lauren, who shares my affection for the USA version of the Dixon Ticonderoga “Black”!
[Image, LfL.]
Maybe. Dan and I were at a, ahem, local watering hole in December for his birthday. At the rooftop bar overlooking Baltimore (literally the highest spot in Charm City) on a snowy night, Dan wondering if the magnesium of a KUM wedge was soft enough to cut. Yes, it is, he found. But we dared not light a fire on the newly polished wood on which our dripping Buds rested at the bar. We drank coffee in the snow and forgot about it.
Last week, Dan shaved one down, lit it, and the flame bore straight through the work table. In addition to giving a pencil fine points, a magnesium sharpener, it seems, can work as a fire starter. What’s more: if you have no knife but do (for whatever reason) have a screwdriver, you can shave the magnesium with the sharpener’s own blade, in a bizarre act of pencil-gear-self-destruction.
We need to do a more thorough How-To about pencil sharpener fire starting, and soon. Maybe our first video?
Needless to say, don’t try this at home. Dan and are both old Eagle Scouts with fire experience and, hell, he’s a professional fireman!
Last week, Mr. PJ gave me a lovely orange carpenter pencil, seen here with Dan’s broken-in yellow model. I have to admit that I had to bum a knife to sharpen mine (I didn’t have one on me) and that the square point you see is the best that I could do. (And please pardon the bad photos — my hands were a little shaky.)
While there are certainly Comrades for whom getting to use a carpenter pencil in its proper context is nothing new or exciting, that’s not the case for me. I seldom ever get to work with my hands, personally, that this exercise was a lovely foray into an activity to which I’d certainly like to devote more time, if possible.
My friend Dan and I made a trip through the ice to visit his Dad one evening last week. Mr. PJ is a contractor who owns his own business, and he really likes pencils. There’s a cup full of carpenter pencils in the back of the photo below.
This sharpener was quickly spotted by me in his kitchen, where I’d been a hundred times before. I believe he said that it belonged to his grandfather. Mr. PJ is my own father’s age (born in 1949); so that sharpener must be pretty old.
The top has a hinge, and the shavings are collected in a drawer at the bottom. All metal. The knob that would, today, be plastic is wooden.
We actually had a very fantastically pencilicious evening, complete with woodworking, fire and beer buried in snow. We made pencil boxes from reclaimed oak and discovered a survivalist aspect of KUM wedge sharpeners. More posts to come!
Edit: Mr. PJ tells me this:
Hey, John, glad your evening like mine was fun. The photo’s of my grandparents’ hand-cranked, which I first saw in my grandparents’ home in the old sun parlour. It had several bookcases my granddad had built. The sharpener was secured to the top of one case — which sadly fell apart during a move for my grandmother years ago. So I salvaged the sharpener with my grandmother’s permission. Thus the old sharpener enjoys its high place on the files. This oldie was also used by my granddad in his studies while attending drawing classes. I am sure it sharpened many a pencil used in his architectural drawings. I still use it, though it’s not secured. I enjoy the fact that it still works so well. pjkelley
There are packs [and pencils] from recent Dixon purchases all over my table. I need to write about the contemporary (i.e., non-USA) Dixons. Definitely. Stayed tuned in the next week or two for a review of the new EnviroStiks.
Join us now on Facebook! This is different than the “group.” We’re moving on up to a page, wherein Comrades can receive updates, and there will be a “wall” on which anyone can post.
After the discussion of graphite dust in pencil boxes from earlier this week, we are happy to present Logan’s pencil box.
“It measures approx 4.25 x 5 x 0.5 inches. The pencils are Prismacolor Turquoise H, B and 6B, and general 6B charcoal, cut in half to fit.”
I really like this set-up. I have a few pencil extenders sitting around, but it never occurred to me to use them to carry shortened pencils in a box. Usually, there’s just a very short Palomino in my Kutsuwa pencil holder, turned around backward to protect the point — and my leg. Keeping an extender in a small sketch or writing kit can allow Comrades to carry really short pencils and even use them comfortably, no matter how big one’s hands are.
Thanks to Logan for sending us these images and sharing! See more of Logan’s images on Flickr.
Being of the last generation to need to visit a library while in school in order to get information and to do research, I have a serious soft-spot for libraries. I retain very fine memories of studying Edmund Husserl, Thomistic metaphysics and William James during December 2002 (when I probably no longer needed to actually be in the library) in Bapst Library at Boston College and truly being invigorated as much by the stacks and smells and architecture of the large study hall as I was by the copious amounts of coffee I’d been consuming. Not to mention that the public nature of the library and the enforced silence was very good for keeping me undistracted. I took notes in a Space Pen, in hardcover notebooks, using paper books written by and about what I was studying. I didn’t think that such a method of work would be so seriously endangered only 8 years later. I can’t decide if physical libraries are a case of holding fast to something we know and love for it’s own sake or if there’s really something about them that can justify us keeping them around longer. For what it’s worth, my local library just received an expensive and extensive remodeling, in a city that’s so strapped for cash that fire houses close on a rolling basis.
Best-selling author Philip Pullman spoke to a packed meeting on 20 January 2011, called to defend Oxfordshire libraries. He gave this inspirational speech…
“In the world I know about, the world of books and publishing and bookselling, it used to be the case that a publisher would read a book and like it and publish it. They’d back their judgement on the quality of the book and their feeling about whether the author had more books in him or in her, and sometimes the book would sell lots of copies and sometimes it wouldn’t, but that didn’t much matter because they knew it took three or four books before an author really found his or her voice and got the attention of the public…
Not any more, because the greedy ghost of market madness has got into the controlling heights of publishing. Publishers are run by money people now, not book people. The greedy ghost whispers into their ears: Why are you publishing that man? He doesn’t sell enough. Stop publishing him…
So decisions are made for the wrong reasons. The human joy and pleasure goes out of it; books are published not because they’re good books but because they’re just like the books that are in the bestseller lists now, because the only measure is profit…The greedy ghost understands profit all right. But that’s all he understands. What he doesn’t understand is enterprises that don’t make a profit, because they’re not set up to do that but to do something different. He doesn’t understand libraries at all, for instance. That branch – how much money did it make last year? Why aren’t you charging higher fines? Why don’t you charge for library cards? Why don’t you charge for every catalogue search? Reserving books – you should charge a lot more for that. Those bookshelves over there – what’s on them? Philosophy? And how many people looked at them last week? Three? Empty those shelves and fill them up with celebrity memoirs…
That’s all the greedy ghost thinks libraries are for.” (More.)
There are some interesting comments on Boing Boing, where I found this link, including the suggestion (for better or worse) that libraries get replaced by something else or nothing.
[Image of Morris Library at SIUC, summer 2005, before complete renovations.]
A month or so ago, we received a package of books from Whitelines (see also the US site), a Swedish company who makes very fine books with a unique feature: WHITE LINES. That’s right. The lines are white, while the paper is a very light grey. Does it make a difference to this pencil user? Read on!
Vitals:
Cover Material: Coated cardstock.
Paper: 80 g acid-free; grey-tinted paper with white lines.
Binding: Sewn.
Size: Assorted; A5 and “pocket” as tested.
Page Count: 48/36 sheets (96/72 pages).
Unique Characteristics: White lines on grey paper.
Origin: Sweden.
Availability: Online, even on Amazon.
We were sent two of the Hard Bound books and two of the Perfect Bound books, one each in black and white. What’s immediately striking about Whitelines books is both the color scheme and the construction. Covers are strong. Corners are rounded precisely (even more than Moleskines and Field Notes, to tell the truth). The bindings are tight. The package containing our four review samples was actually pretty badly damaged by the mail service; the stuffing was everywhere from a large hole, etc. The A5 Hard Bound book suffered minor damage, but the A4 Hard Bound book had two corners badly crushed. I know this was not Whitelines’ fault at all. I mention it because, although the package went through hell, the large book’s binding was completely intact. Intact enough that we’ll do a second review of the Hard Bound Whitelines in the near future, featuring more of the company’s history. These books merit it, for sure.
What I’ll mention in this review of the Perfect Bound books is a little about the concept behind Whitelines.
“Whitelines® is the new generation of writing paper. The concept is patented and yet very simple: Since markings from pens are dark they interfere with the traditional dark lines of ordinary paper. On Whitelines® there is no visual interference between the lines and the pen colour. Whitelines® makes your writing and sketches stand out.” (More.)
The lines also disappear under copymachines, and the paper comes lined or with a graph print. We tried both. The graph spacing is just right, and the lines are also very well-spaced for graphite writing.
I have to admit that I was skeptical of two things. First, I didn’t think that slightly grey paper and white lines would really be easier on my eyes. On the contrary, I assumed that they would be more difficult to see (especially since my daughter broke my unbreakable titanium glasses, and I haven’t had time to go to the eye doctor yet). I was also nervous that graphite (which is grey-to-black) would not show up on grey paper very well.
I was wrong on both counts. The lines are not difficult at all to see, and the paper just seems, for lack of a better word, mellow. Rather than shining up at you, begging you to write on it, it’s just grey and relaxed. And, while I was afraid that graphite marks would be more difficult to see, the opposite was somehow true. I checked with my wife, and we both agreed that writing stood out at least as well as on white unlined paper – perhaps more. (If more, don’t ask me how that works. My degrees are in philosophy, not physics or physiology.) In my own experience, the claims of the benefits of Whitelines’ paper prove wonderfully true.
But how does the paper handle graphite? Ghosting is not perfect, but it’s on the better side of standard, that is, very good. Graphite ghosts less than Field Notes (way less than Moleskines) and us up there with much thicker paper like EcoJot‘s recycled paper. To be clear, I’ve never found anything (even cardstock) that doesn’t ghost at least a little with some of my favorite softer pencils. The texture of the paper is similar to a Field Notes book, which is to say smooth, but with a nice tooth. Writing in a Whitelines book is as easy on one’s hands as on the eyes. Aside from Whitelines’ own special features, where this paper really shines is its smearability, which is on par with Rhodia paper – paper that lots of us know is very very smear-proof. It took some very soft leads and hard rubbing to product any smearing at all. In short, Whitelines books have nice paper that resists ghosting and smearing much better than most papers, with gentle white lines and grey paper to boot. You can’t lose.
Add to this the tight and durable binding of the Perfect Bound book (which spent no less than two weeks in my backpack) and the thoughtful sizing, and you’ve got a very nice book. The A5 we tested fits well for meeting and reading notes; that’s what I used it for during the test period. The “pocket” size is similar to a Moleskine or Field Notes, only thicker. The pocket version is no less durable than the A5 version. As we promised Whitelines, I beat them up quite a bit. And they survived, looking pretty new, too. And stylish.
In our up-coming review of the Hard Bound books, we’ll talk about Whitelines’ environmental commitment also. Stay tuned.