Last November a small, brown, padded envelope with a tracking number showed up in my mailbox. It was from my dad. He hadn’t mentioned he would be sending me anything.

The package contained a single, stubby pencil, which he had attached to a piece of cardboard with two pieces of transparent tape. I’m looking at the pencil now, as I write this: The pencil is dark blue, with at least a third of its paint chipped off. The exposed wood is dark too, with age, or use, or both. The ferrule is missing, and the cylinder of bared wood normally hiding under the ferrule has been worn into a cone shape. And there’s a piece of masking tape wrapped around and covering the part of the pencil where the brand name and hardness are usually printed. The tape has faded and hardened with age. The point of the pencil is short, the lead tip mostly worn down.

This pencil looks like it has been through a lot, and it has. It’s a “toolbox pencil.”

One of the joys of collecting is discovering new categories of things to appreciate and to accumulate. So, voila! Another thing to collect: Toolbox Pencils! Collecting toolbox pencils may not be a very practical way to add to your pencil trove, but it will connect you with subtle nostalgic forces.

Toolbox pencils are generally in poor to awful condition. That’s just the way it is. They’re used to pry open paint cans. They roll around with sharp, heavy metal objects, sometimes for decades. They are used to spread glue. They fall off roofs. They’re subjected to endless abuse.

And a toolbox pencil is more expensive to acquire than the exact same pencil by itself, because toolbox pencils are priced along with all of the other odds and ends the seller has left in the toolbox–presumably to entice you into buying it (even though you have six toolboxes already).

It’s essentially a grab bag. You get some tools, maybe some screws and nails, a file, some band-aids, a protractor, half of a compass, a small container of Exact-o blades all fused together with rust, paper towels stained with motor oil, maybe a hammer, and a few dented, old pencils. In fact, make a list of all the things your significant other prohibits you from bringing home in a rusty metal carrying-case, and pick about a dozen of those things at random, and that’s what you’ll get with each little batch of toolbox pencils. (This is why garages were invented, folks.)

Occasionally, I’ve tried to “extract” the pencils for a lower price:

“How much for just the pencils?”

But, these days almost everyone thinks there’s a collector market for everything, and if you call attention to some beat up old pencils, the seller wonders if you know something they don’t, and the harder you try to convince them you “just like pencils,” and won’t be listing them on eBay, the less they’ll believe you. Even if a seller is unusually trusting and does believe you, they’re still trying to clean out their garage, so usually they’ll call your bluff.

“Those go with the toolbox.”

And this is how you end up with another two-, or five-, or maybe ten-dollar box of junk. Sometimes there happens to be a tool you want in the box anyway.

***

But, collecting toolbox pencils will get you wondering about things. Consider this nifty little grey toolbox I got for $2 at a tag sale in Durham, NH.

Here’s what I found inside:

• a single paper clip
• three small plastic faucet bibb washers (Pignose 3/8)
• a little cardboard box of staple gun staples, “No. 101-5, Sawtooth Point” with the price printed on the box, “59¢,” the box held shut with a wide, beige rubber band
• two pencils, an “amco ivan allen 2 3/8 F” , and a CHOICE by EMPIRE
• two chisels, one with part of its plastic handle broken off, the other—wood-handled–with “CRAFTSMAN, USA” etched on the blade
• slightly more than half of a wooden ruler (7 1/4”)
• a retractable ballpoint pen—PRIORITY TITLE SERVICES, with a phone number and a website address printed on the barrel.
• a 6” metal spike (measured with the aforementioned ruler) which looks handmade
• a light socket adapter which turns a light socket into two two-prong outlets and a light socket
• a stubby screwdriver with a wooden handle—red, white, blue-grey, green, and yellow paint on the handle

I can’t help but picture a calloused, paint-splotched hand picking up that little screwdriver. A tool like that comes in handy when, right in the middle of a painting project, you discover someone has forgotten to remove an outlet cover, or a light-switch plate.

It’s good to see wooden handles and “Made in the USA” printed on things. It reminds me of bygone days when things were built to last, not manufactured to obsolesce, like plastic handles. The pencils still write just fine. This toolbox must have still been in use when the wave of disposability started setting in.

You can’t help think about the owner of these objects, about the projects they were used for, about the times they lived in. Old things excite the historical imagination. I’m afraid to take these pencils out of their natural habitat, because then they’ll lose their associations with the past, even if it’s a past I’ve mostly imagined.

So, let’s go back to the pencil my dad sent me. Did you have any thoughts about it? Did you wonder why he sent me a beat up old pencil? It came with this note:

This pencil has been with me in my toolbox as long as you have been alive. I’m listing some of the many projects for which it was used: building the deck, helping your grandfather remodel his rental house, remodeling the garage into a family room, remodeling the house on Hammond St, making the go cart and airplane.

This little blue pencil worked on houses I’ve lived in and played a small part in many of my cherished memories. Right now the pencil is still taped to the piece of cardboard, but part of me is tempted to throw it into my own toolbox. Let it roll around in there, like it’s used to. Put it back to work! Someday maybe I’ll pass it on, and maybe someone will wonder what it’s been through, where it came from.

(This article originally appeared, in a slightly different form, in the September/October 2016 issue of “The Pencil Collector,” the Official Publication of the American Pencil Collectors Society.)

A long, long time ago–in the era of classy catalogs with lovely engraved drawings–they were called “pointers”!

Before single-blade and hand-crank “sharpeners” came to prominence, most pencil users “pointed” their pencils with a knife, carefully cutting away wood to expose a length of graphite, and then even-more-carefully whittling the newly exposed graphite into a point. Since early pencil lead was brittle, the points often broke off, and some pencil users “shaped” their pencil points instead by holding the pencil at an angle and rubbing the exposed graphite on a piece of scrap paper.

This last step, the deliberate erosion of the tip, could be sped up if one rubbed the point on a strip of sandpaper affixed to a sturdy backing. Some artists and draftsmen still use this type of “pointer,” and you can find them at well-stocked art-supply stores. The sanding method gives you greater control over the shape of the point, enabling you to create a needle-sharp point, or a chisel tip, and a few other special shapes with specific drawing or drafting applications.

***

Textbooks on mechanical drawing nearly always offer some advice on cleanliness:

“The sandpaper pencil pointer should be kept in a sheath and preferably off the desk top.”

One book went so far as to give instructions for folding a piece of drafting paper into a special envelope for one’s pencil pointer, an effort which would “save many a drawing from ruin.”

They weren’t kidding. Sandpaper pencil-pointing is vehehehry messy, producing fine, dark dust which gets on your work, your hands, your clothes, your floor, and your furniture. It gets on the pencil point too, from there sprinkling gently onto your drawing and smudging it before you notice. For this reason, some pointers featured velvet or rubber grooves for gently brushing the dust off of your newly formed pencil point.

And, in case you wanted twice as much graphite powder in your life, there was Cooper & Eckstein’s Pencil Pointer, called the Styloxynon, which featured two abrading surfaces, held at right angles to each other, housed in a piece of rosewood. “The mode of using it is merely to rub the pencil carefully backward and forward with the point slightly depressed in the angular groove, turning the pencil round at the same time between the finger and thumb.”

The Styloxynon

Sandpaper pointers are a thing of the past mostly, and maybe for good reason, but why did we ditch “pointer” and replace it with “sharpener”?

Consulting the Google ngram, we can see that the phrase “pencil pointer” peaked around nineteen twenty. By that time, “pencil sharpener” was already four times as popular, and grew in popularity over the ensuing eighty years, while “pencil pointer” dropped down almost to zero.

You might notice an uptick around 1995. Was there resurgence of interest in old fashioned pencil pointing methods? Sadly, no. The “pencil pointer” of the mid 1990s refers to the stylized cursor which started appearing in desktop publishing software and other computer programs of the time.

As I explored antique catalogs, I noticed that many, if not most, of the catalogs issued during and after the 1920s distinguish between pencil tools–using “pointer” for the sandpaper types and “sharpener” for the bladed types, as they do in the Eugene Dietzgen & Company catalog from 1921.

However, the United States Patent Office, in their official gazette, issued on November 1918, retained the older, more accurate term, as did the patent holder, in their company name, Boston Pencil Pointer Company.

It seems advertisers wanted to spotlight the new, cleaner pencil technology, and they did so by adopting a new word, “sharpener” over the old word, “pointer.”

Lately, I’ve been saying “point” instead of “sharpen.” I like the older word. I like the exactitude of it. And it’s fun to be pedantic about your special hobby.

But we must keep in mind that language is never going to be as exact as we want it to be. Words are constantly evolving, being stretched and smudged, sometimes even sharpened, to meet new needs, to describe new realities, and to make new points.

Here’s an ad from Geyer’s Stationer in 1921, describing a charmingly “meta” product, mixing up terms and meanings, and ending with a rather unbelievable typo.  I think this one sums it up.

C. edits a manuscript with his Col-Erase blue.

We met at a small vegetarian cafe in a New England town overrun by antique shops. By arrangement, he and I were the only two customers. “The owner and I go way back,” he told me. So we were allowed to chat inside for an hour before the place opened. He asked for a slice of strawberry rhubarb pie and ”a coffee, brown.” I got a coffee as well.

“You’ll be sorry you didn’t order the pie,” he said.

He wishes to remain anonymous, so, when I get tired of pronouns, I’ll call him C. He worked in various aspects of the publishing world for over two decades, and he agreed to talk with me about the pencils.

“Like most people in the publishing world, I just sort of fell into it. I had recently gotten out of the Navy, and I was looking for work. I had no idea what kind of job I might be qualified for. At the time I was reading A. Scott Berg’s biography of Max Perkins, Editor of Genius, and I thought it sounded like something I could do. And there was something romantic, something inviting, about the idea of reading through manuscripts and marking them up with a special blue pencil.”

“Perkins edited the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and a bunch of others. Some authors say Perkins’s pencil was “red” or “blue” but none of that ever had ‘the ring of definitiveness’ for me. It sounded like they were just tossing in a detail to make it more colorful, pun intended, like, ‘Perkins, the patron saint of the blue pencil blah blah blah’ or ‘Perkins wielded his red pencil with blah blah blah…’ Did they know for a fact that Perkins used this or that color pencil? Or were they just making assumptions about the kinds of pencils editors typically used? I suspect they were just making it up. Does it even matter?…Guess what? It does.”

“Do you know what color Perkins really used?” I asked him.

He thought for a minute, savoring a forkful of pie a little too demonstrably—teasing me, and then changed the subject. He told me that two weeks after coming ashore, he had spotted a classified ad in his local newspaper: PROOFREADER WANTED. C. was the only applicant for the position, and the day after his interview, he had a job proofreading for a small vanity press. He wouldn’t describe any of the books he worked on (except for a five-volume collection of stories told from the point of view of a duck, which I have not been able to find in my research). But he did tell me how he worked his way up in the company, later writing “jacket copy,” meeting with authors, and editing manuscripts.

At the small press, he recounted, regular graphite pencils were the rule. “Probably Dixon Ticonderogas. The office supply closet was full of them.” He found himself wondering when he was going to see, or maybe even get to use, one of the legendary blue pencils.

After a few years, he moved on to a university press, then later to a publication by a foreign policy think tank, and finally, a writing and editing position for an organization he would only refer to as, “the agency.”

As he worked his way up in the publishing world, he learned the real story about colored pencils. There were “editorial colors,” and manuscripts got more and more colorful as they got passed around. Different publishers used different schemes. For example

Design – violet
Production – green
Copy Editor – red
Proofreader – blue
Executive Editor – brown

Eventually C. became a freelance editor, and borrowed the color system for his own purposes. He used different colored pencils for different stages of his own editing process. He could tell when and why he had made certain notes, based on whether they were red, blue, green, or, in one case, brown. He told me that the colors were “100% pragmatic,” and said that using a different color never effected what he was writing. He only worked with Col-Erase pencils. After trying a few different brands, he refused to use anything else.

C. sharpened a dozen pencils—every pencil in the box—each time he sat down to work. He would set them down on one side of the desk. When a pencil needed sharpening, he put it on the other side. This way he wouldn’t have to interrupt himself during long sessions. Using the different colors allowed him to stay focused on particular goals, compartmentalizing and essentially color-coding his time.

“I’ve never read anything about this system in any of the books I’ve read about publishing,” he told me. “No one gets into these kinds of details.”

“So you don’t know what color pencil Max Perkins really used?” I asked.

“They don’t say so in the biography.”

I waited for him to say more.

“But I had to know, so I visited an archive and I looked at some of the manuscripts he edited.”

“That doesn’t sound 100% pragmatic,” I said.

He smiled, “It wasn’t. Neither is strawberry rhubarb pie.”

(This article originally appeared, in a slightly different form, in the September/October 2015 issue of “The Pencil Collector,” the Official Publication of the American Pencil Collectors Society.)

During his career, Holmes privately published about twenty different monographs, including

The Typewriter and its Relation to Crime
On the Polyphonic Motets of Lassus
On the Surface Anatomy of the Human Ear

His intimate knowledge of these kinds of trifles enabled Holmes to crack dozens of “unsolvable” cases. As you can imagine, the monographs were issued in very small numbers, and they almost never appear on the collectors’ market. A fire-damaged copy of Upon the Uses of Dogs in the Work of the Detective was auctioned by Ancient & Modern in 1973 for $ 22.1 million. No other sales of Holmes’s work have been recorded since 1918.

In one of his most monomaniacal studies, Holmes focuses on “cone patina,” his term for the discoloration of the exposed wood on a pencil. To be precise, “patina” refers to the tarnishing of metal surfaces due to oxidation, but the word is often used loosely–to describe wear, fading, staining, anything that makes an item other than brand new.

I have been looking for The Uses of Cone Patina in the Forensic Arts for over a decade, and nearly wept with joy when I was recently contacted by an individual who has access to one of the three known copies. Though I was not allowed to photograph or quote from the work, I did have a few precious hours to look it over.

As a result, I can now inspect the exposed cedar on a pencil and tell you the age and occupation of its owner, what kind of coffee they prefer, and how they murdered Colonel Mustard.

Visible seam and even darkening to the cone. Owner worked in clean, high temperature environment. Meth lab chemist or Shrinky Dink artist.

Small depressions and fingernail-gouges to lead end of cone. Graphite ground in. Some perspiration stains to the hind-cone. Nervous owner. Gambler?

Bands of graphite dusting to the cone. Owner was a frequent sharpener and “twirler.” Also note: Two small, clean impressions to the hind-cone. Architecture student.

Earring designer.

Hieroglyphics expert.

Former dentist.

Imagine if, next time you had a checkup, your doctor came into the examining room with a pencil tucked behind her ear? Or what if your lawyer defended you with a pencil propped behind his ear? Or how about if the President of the United States delivered the State of the Union address with a pencil behind his or her ear?

Clearly, there are times when it’s appropriate to have a pencil behind your ear, and then there are, well, other times. Our specialized sense for this particular appropriateness is based on things like the profession of the pencil-wearer, what else the pencil-wearer is wearing besides a pencil, and the situation in which the pencil is worn. We make lightening-fast assessments in this regard. Plumber with pencil behind ear? Fine. Same plumber, same pencil, at a wedding? Not so fine.

Generally speaking, the pencil behind the ear is an appropriate accessory for men and women who work with their hands, and also for folks who need to jot things down now and then, like reporters, detectives, and police officers. It’s also appropriate if, for any reason, you happen to be wearing an outfit made entirely by Dickies or Carhartt.

*

For a nice span of decades, my dad enjoyed work situations where he could have a pencil propped behind his ear. He was a high school shop teacher. He taught woodworking, drafting, math, and computers. On weekends, he built cabinets and bookshelves and go-karts and performed other minor feats of carpentry. For much of my young life, I saw him with a pencil behind his ear. He favored blue Berol drafting pencils, the kind with the silver ferrule and no eraser, usually in a 4 hardness. He still likes them, and I feel a special nostalgic thrill when I use one.

After he retired from teaching, my dad got a job designing cabinets, and kept on building sheds and shelves too, and wearing a pencils behind his ear for many more years.

His streak finally ended when he got a job as a gentleman host on a cruise ship. He travelled the world for a several years on giant luxury ocean liners, seeing every continent but one. Onboard, he danced in the ship’s ballroom, entertaining lonely ladies after dinner. His new profession required him to wear a tuxedo. Had he worn a pencil behind his ear, he would have been called into the office of the supervisor and been told to please keep his ears free of writing implements while on duty.

Then, after a while, my dad got tired of the seafaring life and returned to dry land. He found a job at a living history museum—one of those places where employees or sometimes volunteers—called heritage interpreters or players—dress in period garb and loaf around historically accurate reconstructions of, or sometimes restored original, buildings, and act like they would if it was 1815, or some other time of interest. The players spin wool, build canoes, churn butter, forge horseshoes, that type of thing. Tourists walk around and ask the players lots of questions. It’s especially fun when the players take their roles seriously, if, when you ask them about their iPhone or their TV set, they pretend they’ve never heard of such things.

At the living museum where my dad works, he’s a carpenter, and the year is roughly 1875. He fixes boats, carves wooden toys, and builds farm tables, all with hand tools, and as far as pencils behind the ears go, he’s back in business.

*

I need to interrupt here for a moment and tell you about something much closer to the present time. Last Christmas I gave my dad a copy of The Pencil, by Henry Petroski. Since then, he and I have coordinated reading it “together” at a very leisurely pace. Every few weeks, or months, I call him and we gab on and on excitedly about the high points of the latest chapter: Thoreau! Koh-I-Noor! Lothar Faber! You get the idea.

*

Ok, back to the past. Recently, a group of tourists from France was visiting, asking my dad about his work, when a middle-aged man with a thick French accent suddenly said,

“You know…you really shouldn’t have that pencil behind your ear. It’s not appropriate for the time period!”

Well, my dad didn’t just have a pencil propped next to his brain; thanks to our little nerd club, he also had a nest full of pencil facts inside his brain. And so, he replied,

“Actually, pencils were available in the colonies in the early 1800s. In fact, it was during the late 1700s that a process for mixing clay with powdered graphite was developed. I think it was a Frenchman who patented it…”

An elderly woman in the tour group spoke up. She said one word,

“Conté.”

Conté indeed. In 1795 Nicolas-Jaques Conté was granted a patent for inventing the process of making pencil lead by mixing graphite, clay, and water, and pressing it into long molds, which were then dried and baked. Everyone knows that, right? The sharpshooter kept his mouth shut for the rest of the tour.

He looks like a mild-mannered carpenter from the 1800s, doesn’t he?

My dad has worn a pencil behind his ear for about fifty years—because it was useful. Now there’s another reason. He’s hoping another unsuspecting person will challenge him about its inappropriateness. The pencil behind his ear is now “bait.”

(This article originally appeared, in a slightly different form, in the May/June 2015 issue of “The Pencil Collector,” the Official Publication of the American Pencil Collectors Society.)

Go then and act your tragedy, but I will not do so. You ask me, ‘Why?’ I answer, ‘Because you count yourself to be but an ordinary thread in the tunic.’ What follows then? You ought to think how you can be like other men, just as one thread does not wish to have something special to distinguish it from the rest: but I want to be the purple, that touch of brilliance which gives distinction and beauty to the rest. Why then do you say to me, ‘Make yourself like unto the many?’ If I do that, I shall no longer be the purple.

The Discourses of Epictetus
(translated by P.E. Matheson, 1916)
Chapter II, “How One May Be True to One’s Character in Everything”

When you use a hand-held pencil sharpener, you get these nice little wafer-thin wood cones:

Lately, I’ve been calling them “hula skirts.”

If I had gobs of free time, maybe I’d sit on a park bench in the town square and whittle tiny dolls, and I could use these little shavings as realistic-looking skirts for the dolls. And I’d only use twigs that fell off the tree on their own. And I would make glue and varnish from ingredients I foraged locally. But time is moving way too fast for all of that.

The Staedtler Noris’s hula skirt has a stylish multicolored fringe.

As pencils approach midlife, sharpeners will start digging into their foil-print. On the Faber-Castell Dessin (shown below), the tiny scale will get shaved off first. On a Palomino Blackwing, the little horsey is the first thing to go. If you have any empathy at all, you cringe a little bit when this happens–like when you take that first bite of your chocolate Easter bunny.

A bittersweet moment, for sure…but it gives the shavings that “touch of brilliance which gives distinction and beauty to the rest.”

(Note the touch of brilliance.)

Perhaps, instead of “hula skirts,” they should be “tunics.”

[Editor's Note: Please, no jokes about pencil skirts.]

This post was going to be about “Eraser Shims.” You know those cap erasers–the ones you buy in packs of 12 and put on your pencils like little mushroom-shaped hats? Wouldn’t you know it? The act of erasing wriggles the pencil around inside these erasers, slowly stretching the rubber, loosening the eraser’s grip on your pencil. You have to fix that, or else it falls off. Or else you lose your eraser.

So you get the brilliant idea of making a shim. Robert Pirsig talks about shims in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. You never did get through that one, but he created an association in your mind between shims and some sort of minor genius.

You can make a shim for your eraser by ripping a small strip of paper and wrapping it around the non-business end of the pencil, making the pencil slightly wider, so the eraser will grip more tightly. You can do this, but don’t. It stretches the eraser even more. And if you stubbornly make an even thicker shim out of a strip of index card, you’ll tear the eraser.

So you change the paradigm. You get a rubber band and wrap it around the eraser, “around stem of the mushroom,” as they say, but it looks awful. And the rubber band catches on your hair when you put the pencil behind your ear. You mutter to yourself, Hmmm…how about those tiny orthodontic rubber bands? There’s something wrong with this idea, though. You shouldn’t have to go to a medical supply store to fix a pencil. You should be able to do it with regular household supplies. You start daydreaming about a twist-tie, but you suspect the little wire will concentrate the hugging force too much, and you’ll end up tearing the eraser. Of course you could glue the eraser on, but let’s be serious.

Meanwhile the eraser keeps falling off. You take pictures of it sitting on the floor of the office, on the stairs after you sit there reading Pnin, in the grass, et cetera. You keep almost losing it. You’re getting more and more stories.

But then it’s too late. How did the dog get a piece of chewing gum? Oh, that was your eraser.

Let’s dozen-source! Ideas?

It’s pronounced KLOOdj. A “kluge” is a quick and dirty, often clumsy, sometimes hard-to-maintain, solution to a problem. Kluges are cobbled together, but do the trick. They are improvised, using whatever is at hand.

On a recent trip to the library, I noticed this little guy in the pen and pencil container, next to the computer at the circulation desk. I was borrowing some books, so I borrowed this too.

That’s two cable-ties and a bobby pin–for keeping a pencil clipped to your pocket!

What sort of mad genius put this thing together? How old is “The Kluginator”? What are his or her hobbies? How many of these homemade pocket-pencils do they make per year, on average? I must find out more…Do you think I can…?

Yup. Amazing.

So, popes.

I don’t know much about them.

We had Pope John Paul the somethingth for a long time. Once, I tried to read a comic book about him, at my desk at work. It was a slow day at the autograph auction company, and we’d gotten a comic book signed by him. (Jeez, people will collect anything!)

Moving on, I’m not sure if there was another pontiff between John and Benedict. All I remember about Benedict is that he quit. To whom did he submit his two weeks notice?

And now, we have Pope Francis, and even though I avoid the news, I’ve still know a few things about him:

• Everybody loves the guy. Described as “rock star”. Unusual for popes!
  
• Okay with gay people. Also unusual for popes!
• Stole a cross out of a dead priest’s hand. Admits it publicly. Wait, what?

My brother-in-law told me about the last thing. He was impressed by the Pope’s confession, and by how humanizing it was for Pope Francis to say such a thing openly.

Francis had admired the cross for a long time. And when its owner died, and Francis was paying his last respects, he noticed the cross in the deceased’s hand, in the casket. No one else was in the room, and Francis took it.

And now he keeps it in the pocket of his robes, and he touches the cross now and then, and it reminds him that we are all sinners.

The first pope to ever have fun.
That looks like an A.W. Faber-Castell Dessin 1386 B.

*

I haven’t been inside churches much since I was a kid. My brother and sister and I went through C.C.D, and all of us had First Communion, but around the time the youngest of us got there, my parents divorced and we were no longer required to attend mass, so we all stopped. I hated wearing dress pants. And they said the same thing every week. And I was afraid of Hell, and they talked about that a lot.

These days I only step inside churches for weddings or funerals. Or, praise the Lord!, flea markets. Multi-family tag sales and flea markets are often held in churches.

When I heard about Francis and the stolen cross, we were on a family vacation in coastal Massachusetts. Walking around a few days later, we saw a big indoor tag sale in a steepled building. My girlfriend and I went in. We got a few books, and then we checked out the art sale, or maybe it was a bake sale.

And of course, in one of the rooms, there was a little podium with pencils and pens in it. And, as you probably can guess, one of those pencils caught my eye, an Eberhard Faber Mongol number 3. Not rare, just a lovely old thing. It had probably been for a while, and the story of Francis was bouncing around in my head, and I thought to myself,

“Well, If I’m ever going to steal a pencil, this is the place to do it.”

I walked by the front desk for the third or fourth time. I was trying to be casual about it, but the librarian kept looking up at me. I smiled at her and pretended everything was normal–pretended I wasn’t staring at the desk organizer.

Don’t stare, folks.

Because right there in that little organizer was a single, amazing, dark green pencil. I couldn’t make out the brand name. It had gold lettering and a brassy cap with no eraser. I’d never seen anything like it.

I passed by a few more times, and at one point, the librarian had left her post. So I stopped abruptly, right in front of the desk, pretending I’d suddenly thought of something important; I held up my index finger and nodded, and I scratched my chin, as if thinking, Yes, I will definitely need to write this amazing insight down somehow if only I… and then I pretended to  notice the pencil, and to think, Hey look! A pencil! I’ll borrow that boring old thing for a few minutes to write down this incredible, world-changing idea.

Then I casually took the pencil and walked away.

*

The “Engineering, Mathematics, & Computer Science Library” at UNH is a great place to grab  an armload of books and feel like a big genius. E.g., Hey, look at me, I’m gonna read “Topological Vector Spaces” and “Singularities of Differentiable Maps!” Yeah! Everything’s peach fuzz! Then you sit down and open one of the books, and you remember, Oh right, hundreds of pages of symbols you’ll never understand, even if you devote the rest of your life to them.

So instead, you admire the loot.

Exhibit A

Wow! The KIMBERLY! You’ve never seen one before. You wonder if they’re still made. You weren’t familiar with the General Pencil Company. You were so young and naive then.

In any case, you’re going to have to keep it.

Nabokov says “Theft is the greatest compliment one can pay a thing.” In other words, stealing this pencil is just fine with Vladimir Nabokov. And Nietzsche says, “Life is justified aesthetically.” So stealing a pencil, as long as it’s done artfully, is fine with him too. You’re filling your head with quotes, building a little nest of justifications, in order to bolster your resolve. Your rational mind gets into that when you do something your wiser, intuitive self knows you shouldn’t.

Because this is a heist. The library has free pencils for the taking, in a dedicated spot, and you know it. They’re boring blue pencils with white erasers and they have the library’s URL on them. Sure, pencils with URLs on them are depressing, but does that give you the right to reach over the desk and take the one pencil in the little desk organizer?

Click. Whirr. Then empathy kicks in. What if the librarian looks forward to using that pencil every day on her way to work?

That’s all it takes. You’d be a sad sack if your Kimberly disappeared. Of course you would. So you wait until the coast is clear again, and you walk by the front desk, and you put the pencil back.

You think to yourself, I’ll never be a pencil thief at this rate. I’m just too darned sensitive.

*

Later that week I was wandering around near the University, and I went in Town & Campus, a sort of general store for college students.

These kinds of places are going the way of the dodo. I think some of the products they sell are no longer made. The factories are gone, so this is probably the last shop on Earth where you can still buy, say, this particular brand of spiral notebooks.

You can even buy a single miniature golf pencil.

Or, if you’re lucky…