But stay tuned. There aren’t enough Paperblanks reviews out there, and we’ve got a great one coming up.

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.)

With the Blackwing 602 out (thanks Charles and Andy for the dozen!), some cool samples arrived from Daycraft in Hong Kong, we’ll be back soon with more pencil adventures.

When I first saw the drill powered pencil sharpener on Notcot I was vaguely disturbed by it, but I wasn’t sure why.  On the practical side, if you regularly find yourself with an unsharpened round or hex pencil in one hand and a drill in the other, this gizmo will effectively sharpen your pencil in about 5 seconds.

Lets look at the pro’s and con’s:

Pro – low effort; makes big cool shavings; you get to use a drill; bright color so it won’t get lost easily; cheap ($4 for 1 sharpener & 15 pencils at Lowe’s); useable without the drill for resharpening; could sharpen a dozens of pencils in no time without the overheating problems most inexpensive electric sharpeners have.

Con – doesn’t work with carpenter’s pencils; round so it would roll off a table or roof easily; could be awkward to use with larger drills; construction site folks don’t usually need a finely pointed round pencil.

Upon further reflection, I think my issue with the drill sharpener is that I really enjoy using a hand crank sharpener for initial sharpening, and a blade sharpener for resharpening. But what do I know? I’m not the target market for the product.

That in mind, I asked two friends about it. One is a former construction worker; the other restores furniture professionally. Thumbs down from both. The construction worker only used carpenter’s pencils, and only sharpened with a utility knife: “I bought a square pencil sharpener once, used it one time and never bothered again. Finding it in my tool box and using it was slower than just carving a point with my utility knife, which I always had on me. It would take even longer to find this thing, take out the bit that was in the drill, put it in the chuck, use it, then replace the other bit. Besides, you don’t need a sharp pencil for marking boards.” The furniture restorer wasn’t any hotter on the idea. He uses finely pointed pencils for his detailed woodworking, but always works in a shop, so he has an electric sharpener on his workbench.

Not that it isn’t an interesting sharpener. In fact, I’d probably pick one up next time I was at Lowe’s if it didn’t come bundled with 15 generic HB pencils that would just take up space in my already overflowing pencil drawer. Hopefully there’s some other application it is perfect for that I haven’t thought of.

Suggestions?

[Text, L.L. Used with kind 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.]

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.]

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.]