“Have you ever tried a mechanical pencil?” my colleague asked. She gave me a mechanical pencil, fixed under rigid plastic to a piece of plasticated cardboard, and a tiny cylinder of replacement lead. I tried—God knows I tried—but I just couldn’t do it. I could not master the single click that advances the lead just the right amount (for whom?). I would overclick and the lead would be overlong and it would break. I shook the mechanical pencil, unable to believe that the lead would fall into the right slot without my assistance. I hated having to take it apart to put fresh lead in. I felt as if I were writing with a prosthetic hand. For those of us who like to make marks on paper with graphite mined from the earth, there is no satisfaction in an office-supply catalogue.
Finally, it came to this: I had to buy my own pencils. But it got harder and harder to track down the softest lead. I found a small cache of No. 1 pencils at Rogoff’s, a stationery store in Rockaway. Rogoff’s is an institution in Rockaway—there is a dentist of the same name. It’s the kind of place that a kid looks forward to stopping in on the way to the beach and being allowed to pick out one thing from the aisles and aisles of cheap toys, beach junk, and party goods. The store has a very satisfying stationery aisle, and I feel like a kid in there myself, drooling over the blank books and the party invitations and the different-colored index cards and the pastel legal pads. The shelf with the boxes of pencils was especially alluring, but once I had cleaned out its supply of No. 1s, Rogoff’s did not restock.1
So one Christmas I went public with my pencil needs: I posted a Wish List online. Items included an iPhone, a Smart Car, hair insurance, a ciborium, and No. 1 pencils. (Small wonder that people were willing to spring for the pencils.) Someone actually asked, “Are you sure you don’t mean No. 2 pencils?” Why would I make a special plea for something as readily available as a No. 2 pencil? Just the other day I found one lying in the gutter on Park Avenue South. I picked it up, of course—I may be a prima donna where pencils are concerned, but you never know when you are going to be grateful for even a pencil stub. It still astonishes me that some people claim to prefer No. 2s. They say that, because the lead is hard, you don’t have to sharpen them as often. I say it’s worth the trouble. That December, I received in the mail a full gross of Dixon Ticonderoga No. 1 pencils as a gift from a secret admirer. I thought I was set for life.
Thus began years of frustration and abuse. I’d gotten bad pencils before, but never a whole gross. When I tried to write, the lead would break; I would sharpen the pencil, and the lead would break again. As I was sharpening, I could see that the next segment of lead was not cinched in the wood securely and was about to break off. I would try to sharpen past it—the way I used to fast-forward a cassette tape past the part that was mangled—and discover that the lead was shattered for the entire length of the pencil. And if it happened with one pencil, it happened with the whole box.
It was getting embarrassing at the office. I would arrive at a closing meeting with a handful of pencils and a Magic Rub eraser. As the points wore down, I would toss them aside; when the points broke, I felt like an idiot. A writer brandished his mechanical pencil at me, then opened his suit jacket to reveal a half-dozen more that he had secreted in his inside breast pocket. He had a source in the checking department, he explained devilishly.
I determined to send these pencils back to the dealer. All I knew about them, from the packaging, was that they came from a warehouse in New Jersey. I pictured the pencils being thrown off the truck at a loading dock in the Meadowlands. On the company’s Web site I learned that the corporate headquarters of Dixon Ticonderoga was in Florida, and its pencils were made in Mexico. The founder, Joseph Dixon (1799–1869), first opened for business in Salem, Massachusetts. “One of Joseph Dixon’s inventions was a heat-resistant graphite crucible widely used in the production of iron and steel during the Mexican-American War. This invention was so successful that Joseph Dixon built a crucible factory in New Jersey, in 1847.”
The Web site also provided a little pencil history: “During the 1860’s, people still wrote with quill pens and ink, even though Joseph Dixon introduced the first graphite pencil in 1829. It wasn’t until the Civil War that the demand for a dry, clean, portable writing instrument became popular and led to the mass production of pencils. Joseph Dixon was the first to develop pencil automation. In 1872, the company was making 86,000 pencils a day.”
One of Mr. Dixon’s attributes was “an enquiring mind . . . ever alert to seize ‘the opportunity offered by the suggestion of the moment.’ ” This would account for the modern company’s various opportunistic lines of pencils, including Ticonderoga Breast Cancer Awareness Pencils, Ticonderoga Pencils with Microban Protection (for writing during flu season?), Ticonderoga EnviroStiks (The Environmentally Friendly Pencil), made from “reforested natural wood.” I didn’t see any No. 1 pencils. Maybe they had stopped producing them because there was no demand for them anymore.