These eager pencils
come to a stop
... only ... when the stars high over
come to a stop.
Carl Sandburg, Pencils
Happy birthday Henry David Thoreau! As the author of two books featuring the Concord naturalist born on July 12, 1817, I intend to celebrate. But I won’t be baking a cake or lighting candles, gestures unlikely to be appreciated by the sometimes prickly Thoreau. Instead, I intend to go out and buy a pack of my favorite pencils, sharpen them, and write a couple poems. A good pencil was something the birthday boy would no doubt rejoice in and relish.
Famous as a writer, social critic, apostle of wildness, and for the hut he built and lived in on Walden Pond, few know Thoreau as a pencil maker. Yet to one degree or another he was involved in his father’s small pencil factory behind the family’s Concord home for most of his adult life. As a result of Thoreau’s efforts, by the 1840s the company’s pencils were the best America had to offer and rivaled those from Germany and elsewhere.
Considered a technophobe or even a Luddite by many, Thoreau actually had an inventive engineering mind, was comfortable with mechanics, and enjoyed puzzling over technical innovations. A good researcher, he investigated European methods of making superior pencils with less than ideal graphite and devised a formula for using just the right amount of clay as a binder. By trial and error he found that by adjusting the amount of clay he could make pencils that varied in their hardness and the blackness of their mark.
Thoreau invented and built a mill for grinding graphite exceedingly fine. His invention would grow in importance when later the company would focus on the more lucrative business of supplying graphite for the newly discovered electrotyping process. It’s often repeated that Thoreau also developed a machine for drilling holes into pieces of wood so as to insert the graphite and create a seamless pencil. This may be apocryphal, but there is some evidence that he may have given the idea at least
Of course, it’s logical for a writer to want a superior writing tool, so maybe pencil-making was the perfect way for Thoreau to express his practical talents. Composed of natural materials, something about a pencil feels right in the hand. Like life itself, it is paradoxically created to be destroyed, eventually ground down to a worthless nub with use. A worn pencil is a visible measure of the effort its owner has committed to paper, since on average they write roughly 45,000 words or draw a line 35 miles long. While pens generally work in a definitive black or blue, writing pencils mark in the soft flannel gray of a stratus clouded sky. They have a hushed, throaty sound as they move across the page.
Pencils are the perfect implement for rumination, doodling, and the idle ideas and designs that are the wellspring of spontaneous creativity. A pen is an indelible commitment, but an erasable pencil mark allows for ephemeral and moody thoughts that grow and change as they swirl about the mind. Though every home has pencils, most often they are found blunt and tossed in drawers, fallen behind furniture, or stuffed in out-of-the-way holders made by children in art classes. Most people associate pencils with grammar school and seldom use them. Nevertheless, many of the most creative among us are enthralled with pencils including architects, engineers, artists, carpenters, writers, and children.
Thoreau used his own pencils to take notes, draw plans, and make property surveys. When deep in the woods he would pluck one out of his pocket or pack, often recording his thoughts on the back of company stationary whose front had been used and was no longer needed for business. “Abroad he used his pencil,” wrote Thoreau’s friend William Ellery Channing, “writing but a few moments at a time, during the walk . . . . To memory he never trusted for a fact, but to the page and pencil, and the abstract in his pocket.” Even today, many backcountry travelers prefer pencils because they do not freeze, you can readily see how much is left, and they are easily sharpened with a knife.
Pencils are my favorite among the simple and useful tools of daily life. In this age of word processing and an astounding array of pens from cheap plastic models to those costing hundreds of dollars, there remains no substitute for the wooden pencil. Unlike other modern writing tools, pencils would seem
Like Thoreau, I have a favorite pencil. Manufactured by a company that made pencils back when the Thoreaus did, I delight in the Dixon Tri-Conderoga . The barrel is slightly larger than typical pencils and has a matte finish which makes it less likely to slip out of my arthritic hands. Its distinctive triangular shape keeps it from rolling off my writing table as easily as most. The black barrel and eraser with a green and yellow ferule has a classic look.
So, happy birthday Henry David Thoreau! The product you worked so hard to perfect is still in use much as you remember despite radical changes in other forms of recording words from pens to computers to printing presses. Pencils remain an important means of creative expression, as vibrant as many of the words you wrote with them so long ago.
Thoreau and Walden images courtesy of the Walden Woods Project. Pencil image below courtesy of the Concord Museum. This essay originally appeared in somewhat different form in the spring 2017 issue of "The Wayfarer."
