For several months, whenever I’ve been too lazy to use my wall mounted sharpener, I’ve been sharpening my drawing and list-making pencils into a small glass on the coffee table. I’ve used grades from H to 9B, as well as Ebony, Layout, carpenter’s and water soluble pencils.

Over that time I developed a habit of rapping the glass against the table a time or two to send the graphite dust down through the shavings before leaving my sharpener and eraser on top. It started as a way to keep things clean, but as the layer of graphite grew at the bottom of the glass, I started thinking there had to be something I could do with it.

Eventually I scooped out the wood shavings and ended up with more than a 1/4″ layer of gritty black shards, fine dust and larger lead pieces. While pure graphite powder makes a great dry lubricant for things like sticky door locks, this was anything but pure. It contained all manner of fine wood shavings, paint chips, and who knows what else. I could have tried filtering it somehow, but it still would have enough clay, wax and other additives mixed in that I wouldn’t want to use it as a lubricant.

In the end I decided I would try reusing the mix for its original intended purpose, marking on paper. That translated into an experiment in graphite fingerpainting, the results of which you can see below.

Some tips if you try this yourself:

1 – Use loose leaf paper. I didn’t and it was very difficult to funnel the leftover graphite dust back into the cup without making a mess.

2 – Be sure there aren’t any unwanted indentations in the paper…because they’ll be highlighted by the graphite rub. I’d drawn a stick figure on the previous page of my sketchbook and its head was clearly visible on this page.

3 – Try making a shaded field and using an eraser to subtract an image from it. Tell people you did this on purpose, not that you made a big gray mess with an accidental circle in it and the eraser was the only way to make it look like anything recognizable.

4 – Think about how you’re going to clean your fingers off before you start. This way you won’t end up with black marks all over the bathroom door knob and light switch.

(Text and images, L.L.  Used with kind permission.)

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.]

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.]

“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.”

[Read the rest at Iowa Farmer Today.]

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.]

“I’ve become a big fan of jumbo pencils with triangular cross sections.  I’m not sure whether it’s because they remind me of wankel rotary engines, or because I have long fingers and do a lot of writing.  I’m particularly impressed with the Staedtler Norris Triplus Jumbo in bumblebee plumage.  It has great balance, nice grip, and best of all, the 4mm HB lead puts down a line as dark and dense as antimatter.”

Read more at Loose Arrows, “A blog about sharp things” that features a lot of good stuff about pencils.  Also, see previous mentions of the Ergosoft, from Scruss.

(Images, Loose Arrows.)

Robert Walser’s Microscripts. [New Directions, 2010. $24.95]

Robert Walser (1878-1956) was a German-speaking Swiss Writer.  His writing was admired by Kafka, and Hesse, to name a few names of notoriety.  I became acquainted with Walser through his short stories, as well as his acclaimed novel, Jakob Von Gunten, both published by NYRB books.  His writings are whimsical, quirky, and fanciful — showing an acute understanding of human nature through subversive, fairytale-like backgrounds.  In 1929, Walser admitted himself into a mental ward, and remained there for the rest of his life, essentially ending his professional writing endeavors, quipping to a friend that he was there to be mad, and not to write.  However, after Walser died–on one of his habitual walks, in the snow, (hotos of which exist for morbid perusal on the Internet) it was found that he actually continued writing while in the hospital, albeit, in as subtle a form as physically possible: that is, on fragments of paper, in the tiniest of handwriting.

At first, the executor of his estate thought that these tiny markings where evidence of Walser’s mental instability — an undecipherable loony/secret code — but, it was later discovered that Walser was writing in a miniaturized Kurrent script, stemming from the medieval ages, that he had learned as a schoolboy, as was the custom of the time. From there, it took some dedicated scholars, some magnification, and some linguistic guesswork and translation to yield us the English instalment of this endeavor: Microscripts.

I have been fascinated with Walser’s story of late, and have been looking forward to getting my hands on this book.  For the most part, the writings are small sketches and musings, sometimes unfinished, but this is understandable since Walser most likely never meant for them to be “read” (deciphered) by us, which makes them feel even more intimate to read.  Although they are brief (sometimes not exceeding 5-6 pages in length) Walser’s wit and style are still evident in these works–whether he is writing of marriage proposals, or the experience of listening to the radio, or putting characters at play in their settings, Walser’s humane style abounds in these small scripts.   I find that the real treasure of Microscripts, however, are the sporadic color facsimiles of the microscripts themselves included throughout the book.  These examples of Walsers diminutive sketches not only show how impossibly tiny his writing was (1-2 millimeters in height), but also conveys how visually stunning they are.  Whether written on the back of a business card, or on a letter, they are a fine of example of visual art rendered through small script.  (It is also worth mentioning that there are plenty of footnotes throughout this book, giving more detail behind Walser and the individual microscripts; and for those of you who can read German, the original, enlarged German renderings are also included in the back of the book.)

(Mr. Manning's Microscript -- Click for full-sized image.)

But, you may be asking, why should readers of Pencil Revolution care about Walser and his tiny writing habits?  For that matter, why did Walser even start writing in this fashion?  I was surprised to find that the answer to this, as given in the intro of Microscripts, lay in the formative power of yielding a pencil.  According to Walser, he found that using a pen became a physical & mental stumbling block, one that he could only overcome by using a pencil, as wrote to a friend:

With the aid of my pencil I was better able to play, to write; it seemed this revived my writerly enthusiasm.  I can assure you I suffered a real breakdown in my hand on account of the pen, a sort of cramp from whose clutches I slowly, laboriously freed myself by means of the pencil. [Microscripts, pg 13.]

Although this does not necessarily explain why Walser started shrinking his script, he definitely found his voice again through using a pencil; this is of such critical importance that the original six-volume German edition of the microscripts is entitled Aus dem Bleistiftgebiet, or “From the Pencil Zone.”  In Walser’s Microscripts, then, we find a man whose salvation was imparted through this modest writing utensil.  I can’t help wondering, however, how often he would have to sharpen his pencil in order to write such tiny script…?

[Photo, C. Rondo; Microscript, B. Manning.  Used with kind permission.]

J: R, do you like pencils?

R: What?  Oh, yes.

J: Me, too (in a whisper).

R: I don’t trust pens.  They never work when you need them to.

J: I’m taking some boys camping this weekend, and I told them to bring a notebook and pencil because it’s likely to be too cold for ink to flow where we’re going…

And I went back to my office glad that I’m not quite the only pencil at work.

“I have a mild obsession with pencils, especially the General Pencil Semi-Hex 498 2 2/4. Mmm, ceder. Some years ago, I needed a pencil to mark up a book I was reading for seminary, and went looking for one. I did not find one pencil. I found fourteen scattered through the house. I would have stopped at one, but my curiosity was piqued to see all the different brands and styles that we’d accumulated. I decided that I couldn’t just pick one at random, I would pick the best one. So I sharpened them all and put them to the test. Of course I had to smell each one before writing, just to take note of the “nose” (the winner had that powerful ceder aroma that true pencil aficionados prefer. I think.)….

….Low-tech wonders stand out when compared to their replacements, the products that are manufactured to improve and supplant them. I think of all the ergonomic mechanical pencils and gel-grip disposable pens, none of which impress me or replace my pencil. The pencil has a beautiful simplicity to it, and an efficiency, and 95 percent of it is compostable (versus the landfill that is the fate of plastic writing tools). And there is some mystery to the pencil too. How does rubber (named for it’s ability to “rub” pencil marks away) erase the marks of the graphite without causing it to smudge? It’s the original word processor, complete with backspace.”

Stay tuned for the Pencil Revolution review of General’s Semi-Hex pencils, which we’re hard at work testing and enjoying!

[Image, LTW.]